Last week: 384 lbs.

Start (Dec. 17): 470 lbs.

Total lost: 83 lbs.

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Many times, the devil on my shoulder gets the best of me during the holiday season, and the angel on my other shoulder is left wringing her hands and praying for me to get back on track.

The holidays began in earnest on Halloween and won’t let up until the Fourth of July. Really. Between now and summer, there are numerous official holidays, several adopted ones and countless impromptu ones. And, no matter the original intent of the holiday, they all come down to one thing: food.

It’s our society, man. There’s no use fighting it.

That is, unless you are Chris Kammer, a dentist from Wisconsin who founded the Halloween Candy Buyback Program (www.halloweencandybuyback.com). In 2005, Kammer started buying Halloween candy from kids at $1 per pound to get candy off the streets and promote healthy teeth. He sends the candy to Operation Gratitude in California, which mails it along with toothbrushes in care packages to U.S. troops serving overseas. The program has now been adopted by dental offices nationwide, and more than 130 tons of candy had been shipped before this year’s Halloween.

When thinking about my overeating through the years, I’ve found there are a number of factors involved. The holidays are only one trigger for emotional eating. There are others, yet they all lead to obesity and related health problems.

This is the kind of story in which I hope you find some humor, find yourself and do the opposite. Learn from my mistakes. This was my life before the Lake Placid Diet, and I have to fight it every day, which is extremely difficult because American society teaches us to celebrate everything with food. The more celebrations, the better — for the people making and selling the food, not necessarily the people eating it.

We can only hope there are more Chris Kammers out there to buy back the holiday food.

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Holiday Eating 101

If you can’t pack on the pounds during the holidays, you have a problem, and if you didn’t start with Halloween, don’t worry. You have plenty of time to catch up. We have three weeks to get primed for Thanksgiving, another four weeks of Christmas parties before the big day and one extra week of partying through New Year’s Day.

After the new year, there are three more holidays to enjoy food: Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day and Easter. In early summer, we have two barbecue holidays: Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. In between, we can find excuses to celebrate other non-food holidays with food. Try a Presidents’ Day Pig Roast or a Secretary’s Day Seafood Fest. Let your imagination and your appetite go wild.

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Food at work

If you think you can get away with eating healthy at work during the holidays, think again. For the most part, workplaces are breeding grounds for obesity.

Thank God for free food at work. For those who are too busy to bring snacks to the office, working with people who enjoy cooking and giving it away in the lunch room is like being surrounded by guardian angels. You never know what they’ll bring, but you know it will taste good and fill up the empty void in your otherwise unfulfilling day.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s when I was writing and editing at the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in Saranac Lake, I sat at my desk from the time I arrived at 6 or 7 a.m. until the time I left at 5 p.m. or later (sometimes as late as midnight), so being fed by angels was necessary.

Christmastime was the best because there was always food available, and not a lick of it was good for you. There was a paper sheet on the kitchen door where people signed up to bring in baked goods for the rest of the gang. From Thanksgiving until Christmas week, the kitchen table was continuously filled with cakes, cookies, fudge and other sweet treats. If it was filled with sugar and fat, it was on the table.

Now that I’m working at the ADE office again on my Lake Placid News deadline days, Tuesday and Wednesday, I’ve noticed that this tradition has not changed, but I have. It doesn’t get the best of me anymore.

When I began working for the New York State Adirondack Park Agency Visitor Interpretive Center at Paul Smiths from 2001 to 2009, sweets were still around but not in abundance. There were, however, angels at the VIC.

There were leftovers from conferences, workshops and special events. Volunteer potluck dinners had the best goodies. Then there was the birthday cake. We had about 10 people working at the Paul Smiths VIC, and we always celebrated the birthdays with cake, cooked right there in the staff kitchen.

If you are surrounded by food angels at work, you’ve got it made. If not, try to make some friends who like to cook.

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Food and sports

Professional sports addiction = weight gain.

In August 2011, I was faced with the difficult decision whether to participate in the North Creek News Enterprise NFL picks competition while working at Denton Publications. When Tom Henecker — a co-worker at Denton Publications, former owner of the News Enterprise and former co-worker at the Adirondack Daily Enterprise — asked me to join in the fun, I immediately refused. I didn’t want to get addicted to the football games like I did when we worked together and played in a similar competition at the ADE in Saranac Lake. In the end, I did take part in the News Enterprise competition because I wanted to be “one of the guys,” but I promised myself that I’d make my picks and ignore the games.

This fall, I was asked to participate in the NFL picks competition at the ADE as the Lake Placid News editor, but I declined. I didn’t want to relive the past.

During the heat of the NFL picks competition at the ADE in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I became obsessed with football Sundays. It was clearly less about football and more about the food. Throughout the entire football season, I planned my Sundays around food, and lots of it. Would it be chili or wings, pizza or calzones? It all depended on my mood, and there were no limits.

I think this is the reason I stay away from following professional sports. Separating food and alcohol from sports is difficult for me, so I don’t go there anymore.

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Go to bed full

The alternate title of this subchapter is “Start your day right with dry heaves” because that’s what you’ll be doing if you go to bed with a full belly.

Our terrier Minnie gets scared when she hears me dry heaving in the morning in the bathroom. That was my life for decades. Since starting the Lake Placid Diet, however, I haven’t had dry heaves more than a handful of times. I’d say that’s progress. A year ago, I was still out of control.

Early in my journalism career, I was a part-time morning news announcer for North Country Public Radio in Canton (1992-1993). When I say morning, I mean getting up in time for a 15-minute commute from Potsdam to be at work for 6 a.m. That kind of morning. There was no time for breakfast, not even coffee. I used to get sick to my stomach before I went on the air, and I thought it was butterflies. I couldn’t shake the stigma of “stage fright” in front of the microphone, with short breath and a churning stomach. I did this for 10 months.

Then, as I moved on to other jobs and got older, the morning sickness got better, then worse, better, then worse. After a while, I started to notice a pattern of dry heaves in the early morning, an ebb and flow of sickness depending on my level of activity, my job, the time I awoke and, more importantly, the amount of food I consumed just before I went to bed the night before.

When I was a radio announcer in 1994 for WNBZ-AM in Saranac Lake, I finished my shift at 11 p.m. and drove the 30-minute commute home to Tupper Lake, where I had dinner sometime around midnight. It was the usual fare of hot dogs, cheap beer, chips and ice cream, or something like that, while I either watched “Beauty and the Beast” on the VCR over and over or listened to WBZ-AM out of Boston. (I was too poor to have cable.) Once the meal was done, I went to bed. Once I got up, I was sick.

I endured this lifestyle through most of 1994 until I landed my first full-time journalism job as the Saranac Lake reporter for the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in November of that year. When you’re a rookie reporter, there are many night meetings — village board, town board, school board, etc. — and that means late-night eating. Even though I ate dinner at a normal time, I was always hungry when I got home after a meeting. To unwind or de-stress, I ate and drank beer. And when I got up for a 7 a.m. shift, my morning sickness sometimes returned, even though I was nowhere near a microphone.

How could this be happening? It’s simple. When I overeat before I go to bed, there’s a very good chance I will be afflicted with dry heaves in the morning. The smell of wood smoke from the neighbor’s house, garbage in the kitchen, or the smell of coffee or hairspray will likely set it off.

When the dry heaves stop and the “all clear” is announced, I go about my day as if nothing happened, and my two dogs stop shivering. While I’m wiping my eyes, I think to myself, “This is preventable, you fool.” Yet, when it comes to eating at night, I have a horrible short-term memory. As the day progresses, I forget about the morning’s event at the sink, and the vicious cycle of eating at night and dry heaving in the morning starts all over again when I get home from work.

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Celebrate everything

Throughout the year, holidays or not, don’t let the calendar dictate when to feel good and throw a party. This is your life. Every day can be a holiday.

Did you get a promotion or a raise at work? Celebrate. Did you have a baby or bring home a new pet? Celebrate. Did you pay off your student loan or vehicle? Celebrate! Go out to dinner, go to a movie, go to Happy Hour, get your favorite Ben and Jerry’s ice cream for dessert, a top-shelf beer or a bottle of fine wine or whiskey. Sure, when your gut is bursting with pain, you’ll feel guilty after spending all that cash and filling your stomach with empty calories. But in the moment, it felt so right to celebrate, didn’t it? It was a rush, a high. You got your fix of food, and although you’ll promise not to repeat yourself the next day, you always do.

Instead of moping around, feeling sorry for yourself, feeling bad about being a food addict, just go with it, surf those waves of emotion and have a good time. Sing a food jingle and get in the mood for another food-filled holiday.

(Author’s note: This story was written on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 4, when many nonprofit organizations across the nation hold special dinners for voters, proving that Americans will celebrate anything.)