(Image courtesy of SparkPeople.com)
This morning I weighed in 2.4 pounds higher than goal, a couple of days after a big nibbling day (and takeout Chinese---read, "lots of salt"---the night before).
It seemed as good a day as any to put things in context.
Is it harder to be maintaining than it was to be losing the weight? I have been considering that question for a few weeks now, and I am not at all sure of the answer. For one thing, the time of weight loss (May 13--November 15) is receding further and further into the past, and I am having a hard time remembering how it felt. For another thing, I am not sure that I have been maintaining for long enough to get an accurate picture of the difficulty. It has only been a bit more than 2 months---a third as long as I spent losing.
Don't forget, too, that there were two other ways of being (leaving aside pregnancies for now). There was also maintaining my high, unhealthy weight (a.k.a. "not trying to lose right now") and there was trying to lose and failing. I spent an awful lot of time doing those. Trying to lose and failing was hardest of all.
Some things are easier and some things are harder. When I was losing the weight and succeeding, it was easy to know what I should do. Every morning I woke up and I had a goal that, while it took effort to achieve, was at least easy to understand and fairly straightforward to plan. Maintaining has been a little harder to figure out, but it has pleasures that are still new and exciting.
While I was losing, I knew that to succeed I would have to plan very carefully, to try new things slowly and to pay attention to how my body responded, so that I could find out what would work and what would not. Truly, I know that my maintenance will be more successful if I continue that careful planning and charting, trying new things slowly and paying attention to how my body responds; but I've really slacked off on the careful experimentation. I have been reactive rather than proactive. I guess it's been kind of exhiliarating to eat toast for breakfast pretty much whenever I feel like it. I'm kind of giddy. It's the honeymoon phase, I suppose. Sooner or later I do plan to start systematically adjusting my diet, to try to bring it under tighter control all the time, rather than letting the weight spike up and then controlling closely for a few days until it comes back within limits. (Notice the spike right at Christmas!)
The one thing that deep down worries me: I have said before, it was almost as if the serenity towards calorie restriction, and the "easy" weight loss, came out of nowhere, a gift from above. The thing is, I don't really think I can count on being able to repeat the performance.
I am also aware that someday my semblances of self-control might evaporate as mysteriously as it appeared, and I'll start gaining weight and eating too much again. Truly the best guesses I can make as to the source of the sudden apparent willpower are (a) divine favor and (b) my insulin level dropping slowly over a couple of years past a certain threshold, triggering rapid weight loss and suppression of cravings.
If it's (a), well, you've read the book of Job, right?
And if it's (b), that means that I ought to continue being vigilant against carbohydrates and especially refined carbohydrates and sugars. I've already experienced a few times since I have been maintaining that, once I start in on the "white" carbs or on sweets, there is a temptation to keep going, much stronger than the temptation to have that first bite. I have noticed, for example, that my after-dinner chocolate-bar fragment has been getting bigger! What if increasing my carbohydrate intake is slowly bringing my blood insulin level back up towards that invisible threshold? If I cross it again, will I begin suddenly to gain weight as rapidly and as effortlessly as I lost it?
There's been a lot of "Well, my weight is in range, so it's okay if I have some of this." Fudging, if you will. Sloppy thinking.
I don't really want to fudge. I want to be in control of myself, and in touch with reality. I look like a normal person (well, except for the extra skin!), but I am not a normal person. I am a formerly obese person.
I have the disease of obesity, but I control it with diet and exercise.
This is the way I must think of it. It has to be the same as if I were a diabetic, a diabetic who manages without injectable insulin only because she carefully controls her diet and maintains an active lifestyle. The diabetic will not be "cured" and cannot let her life go "back to normal," because her symptoms will reappear. No matter how long her string of successful days, days in which she functions near-identically to a normal person, she is still a diabetic and still must keep a diabetic's eye on her diet and her physical activity. It is the same for me. I have a disease, but I can control it. If I don't choose to control it, it will control me, and might even kill me in the end.
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