Ten days.

About ten days ago I mentioned that I was having to go into "weight loss mode" for the first time since returning to my postpartum goal weight.   You know what?  It's still not easy, getting back into gear.  Yesterday was the first of those ten days that I really hit most of the habits I was shooting for.  

Ever since the baby was born (he's almost 9 months old), I've been struggling a little bit with how much I need to eat while breastfeeding.  As I wrote in the linked post, this baby's newbornhood was the first time I've noticed that nursing gives me a bigger appetite -- since I wasn't used to eating too much all the time, I noticed needing more food.  And I had to ditch some of my trustworthy habits, like "never eat a bedtime snack."  

All of that kind of worried me.  Here I had spent two-some years carefully cultivating all these habits that were going to keep me from gaining the weight back, and now I was having to eat whenever I needed food? I'm going to have to start eating in response to hunger signals? Disaster.  This hasn't worked for me before, you understand.  And yet, my postpartum weight did come off pretty steadily and I got to maintain for about three months.

Lo and behold, the baby started eating solids and bing!  my weight jumped up a couple of pounds.

But this post isn't about weight gain; it's about habit mentality.  Ten days is how long it took for me to go from "okay, my weight is out of bounds" to "today I behaved in a way consistent with weight reduction."  Now that the baby is eating solids (though still nursing heavily) I will have to find a new balance of habits for maintenance; but as always, I will look for that maintenance by first practicing habits strict enough that my weight starts to decrease.  

Ten days!  This is why it's so important to focus on habits instead of scale numbers (even though I weigh daily as a measure of whether the habits are working).  In ten days I could see a blip on the scale that might convince me the problem isn't that big of a deal and I could "afford" to indulge in a destructive habit.  But in that same ten days, it is keeping the habits before my mind that gets the rusty gears grinding again and reminds me how to live in this slightly more austere mode.  There are so many little things I learned to do to serve the less-eating habits that I haven't had to do for a long time.  Wash the spoon so I don't lick it.   Deliberately make not-quite-enough rice.  Brew coffee for after dinner.  It's not second nature anymore and it takes me a good ten days to get there.  

 

Comments

[Rebekka]

I would love to hear more about your maintenance algorithm (although I am so far from maintenance it's not funny).

[bearing]

I thought I'd written too much about that before... but I can go into it again. Briefly, there's two parts to it:

(1) how I, literally, watch my weight and decide when it's time to intervene

(2) what I do when I make that decision.

And the reality, of course, is that I move more slowly than I ought to. It surprises me how difficult it is just to remember to make the changes back to strictness. Ordinary maintenance (as opposed to trying-to-take-off-a-couple-pounds-maintenance) is not really all that different from weight loss, but there are enough slight differences that it takes a bit of an effort.

(Both are very, very different from the old way of eating...)