Gains. A multi-part post.

The last few weeks:

(The graph was generated by SparkPeople.com)

(ADDED:  A useful piece of context:  I am about 4 feet 11 inches tall.)

The last time I successfully lost weight this fast -- 2 lb/week -- and kept it off until the start of my next pregnancy, I was doing hard-core low-carb.  By the end of that, I'd convinced myself that LC was the weight-control style that worked for me, and it was going to be the only way I could keep the extra pounds off for the rest of my life.

I was wrong.  This has been different.  I'm still using some of the helpful tricks I learned while I was low-carbing, but I've not been following a low-carb diet (and it hasn't been low-fat either, by the way). 

 I tried to gear up for LC life again several times after post-pregnancy weight loss stopped, and I just couldn't get into it and wasn't enjoying it very much.  I don't mean to diss real-food LC living, which is basically lots of fresh vegetables, moderate amounts of meat, and small amounts of fruit and whole grains; it's a fine way to solve the "What should I eat?" problem, and as I've said, I had success with it before.  But not this time -- maybe it's because I'm busier now; maybe it's because I'm trying to plan meals for a larger family; maybe I just got bored with the good food/bad food dichotomy.  

So I decided to try, um, eating less.  Ha!  You've heard, perhaps, that keeping a food diary is one of the few habits that's proven to assist weight loss, almost universally?   I know from experience that I eat better if I keep a detailed record.  So I started one up again, sort of; what I kept was more like a feed-forward record, or a plan -- I used an online nutrition tracker to make the "diary" a day in advance, hung a printout on the wall, tried to stick to it, and at the end of the day made adjustments to reflect reality.  I carried planned, premeasured snacks with me when I went out, so I wouldn't be forced to improvise if I got hungry.  And I gave my electronic kitchen scale a prominent place on the counter.  I did some other stuff too, which I'll post on later.

I found out some stuff about myself in the process.  In retrospect, I believe that this time my habits have been addressing the underlying mental defect that's been causing my lifelong weight dysfunction.  (Whereas the LC lifestyle worked more by counteracting some of its effects, and previous fruitless attempts to do the low-fat thing tended to exacerbate them.  Again, more on that later.)

More later.  I will say that the graph plotted above literally begins on the day that something seemed to click in my head, and I thought to myself, "I'm ready to try being okay with being hungry."

(Part 2)

Comments

[Christy P]

What's old is new again - I remember your measured cucumber and italian dressing salads in the high school cafeteria.

[bearing]

Hah! That was the low fat time. You will recall that it got me nowhere. :-)

[mrsdarwin]

I find portion control very hard, which is probably why I've always struggled with losing the last five or ten pounds... I think you're right on target with accepting being hungry. I have a hard time not only with that, but with not taking a second helping of good food even if I'm reasonably satisfied.

[Christy P]

I do recall that low fat got you nowhere, but it made me feel like your lunch was very exotic compared to my peanut butter and honey sandwich that I ate ninety nine and forty four one hundredths of days from 1st through 12th grade.

Note to all - my lunch choice was my own, not forced upon me by an external decision-maker. I didn't like how meat sandwiches got warm or sandwiches with jelly or jam got wet. I didn't like how cheese got sweaty. Hence PB&H. Crunchy PB, of course. Now that I work in climate-controlled offices, I have cheese and crackers or bread for lunch nearly every day and only rarely do I have PB&H, although I do still like them.

[Monica]

Hello! I found you yesterday via The Conversion Diary and I'm reading through your posts contained in "The Master Chronological Index..." In this post, you've hit close to home for me - I'm afraid of being hungry too. (And I comfort/soothe/relieve stress by eating.) Yet every now and then when I do "embrace" hunger, I find that - ironically - I feel more in control of my food portions and also more in control of my life in general. I don't feel like I'm living life on a runaway train, barreling away more and more quickly, more and more out-of-control.

I just had to stop and say that. Thanks for these posts and for compiling them in a central location - I'm going to continue reading through them.

[bearing]

Thank you Monica! I'm glad to see that this old post is still getting some views :-)