Let's look back at my November and May weight maintenance posts over the years.
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November 2008: I reach my goal weight, according to the five-day rolling average that I decided would be the criterion
The stomach/intestinal bug hit us around 3 AM, the morning after Thanksgiving.
By seven or so, I lay in bed sipping weakly from a glass of diluted Gatorade that Mark had just brought me.
"You're probably dehydrated. You should weigh yourself!" he said cheerfully (considering the circumstances) as he went out the door to tend to the boys. Sickness makes them noisy squabblers, and Grandma was laid low too behind the bedroom door a few feet where they were playing.
I grunted and rolled over, but a few minutes later staggered into the bathroom to step on the scale.
106.4, huh. Well, that makes my 5-day average. With room to spare.
The next time Mark came up to see how I was feeling, I told him the number. He grinned. "Congratulations, hon." We both twirled our index fingers in the air and muttered, "whoo."
Party today. In my in-law's bathroom, next to the toilet bowl. Today, I am so totally going to eat all the saltine crackers that I want.
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In May 2009 (six months post weight loss) I do a series about habits.
- Part 1: My failure-free, real-life habit constellation
- Part 2: Why I call it failure-free
- Part 3: Why unplanned eating isn't failure anymore
- Part 4: Seven well-established features
- Part 5: Habits for getting back on track
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In November 2009 I was heavily pregnant, so I didn't write about weight loss.
But in May 2010 I was writing about maintenance again.
You have to understand, if you are where I was, and if you are hoping that someday the impulses will just disappear, or that you can kill them... that they may never disappear, and yet even though they persist, it is possible to learn to ignore them. You see, I still have them. I still think about secret cheeseburgers. I still remember the prolonged pleasure of six slices of pizza. I still pause to study the contents of vending machines. I still get an urge to pile on the seconds after my plate is empty, every time. The impulses are not gone, they are not less frequent. If they seem weaker now (even though occasionally I do give in -- I am not perfect, after all), I believe it is only because I am stronger now, after close to two years of resistance training. In the beginning they were just as strong as ever.
I didn't gain willpower overnight. But I did, it seems, gain a will. And the will to live differently was enough to drive me to find a way around the obstacles, the impulses. It was suddenly so obvious to me that to follow these urges would still feel good, but would be the opposite of what I desired -- those paths would not just take me the opposite direction from what I desired, they would BE the opposite of what I desired. I wanted to feel the steeper trail beneath my feet, not just the smooth downward grade. I wanted more than the view from the top. Though the effort would hurt, I wanted to climb.
That desire is something that seems to have come out of nowhere, a pure gift; the closest thing I have ever come to understanding what grace is. I believe there is more yet I can learn from it. I believe I know what I am to do with it next.
Will I?
(Lots more related posts in May 2010, so if you want more, read the whole month. It's a few pages long so you'll have to click through.)
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Mid-October 2010: I am still weighing daily and get seven "high" readings in a row.
This morning I'm going back into "weight loss mode" for, I think, the first time since I got back down to my postpartum goal weight. I've been within bounds for close to three months -- not a bad run, considering I'm dealing with the ups and downs of breastfeeding.
(A note on that -- When I was heavy, I didn't even notice that breastfeeding made me need more food. I figure I was already eating so much and throwing off the excess in heat, that my body just threw off less heat and fed the baby from that. Now it's very, very obvious that feeding the baby means I have to eat more, though the exact quantity is difficult to hit.)
I weigh daily. One way I make this work for me -- one rule -- is that I return to stricter habits when I have seven readings in a row that are above my target weight of 112. It goes very nicely with daily weighings (seven days = one week) and it's not hard to remember. Seven is enough data points that a trend can be visible among the random ups-and-downs.
I still have a hard time understanding why people say "Oh, I can't weigh daily." Data from the National Weight Control Registry has me convinced that daily weighing is not harmful (even though you will frequently see that advice on dieting sites and in books as if there was evidence that daily weighing stalls weight loss all by itself).
I guess I can understand it depending on the personality. I have to hold myself back from restricting my habits too soon -- like, oh no, I had a bad food day and the next day the scale reads 2 lbs higher, I better act NOW. Well, I hadn't thought of this possibility, but it can act the other way too -- a friend of mine told me she doesn't weigh daily because, when she happens to have a lower reading, it's easy to convince herself she "has room" to go off habits that day.
(Which is a normal part of maintenance -- but is an act of pure self-sabotage in attempts to reduce weight. "The data shows that what I've been doing is working! I should do the opposite today!")
Anyway. Seven "high" days in a row, and it's time to check my habits. I consider myself back in maintenance after I bring my five-day running average under the target. That can take a few weeks.
Habit number one: tomato juice and boiled egg for breakfast...
Ten days later I feel like I've re-established habits.
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.
Okay, so in this post long ago I explained some me-specific context, a few habits I have all the time that set me apart from the average person. I don't drink a lot of caloric beverages, I eat a lot of vegetables, I use small plates at home, I'm habitually wary of sugar and white flour, I don't buy much snack food (lately this has slipped -- I can at least say, "not for me"), I keep almonds in my car, and I chart my weight daily.
That's pretty much the extent of my self-control as long as my weight stays within range. I would like to say I don't eat kids' PB&J crusts, or that I don't take seconds unless I'm actually still hungry, but it's not true. I don't eat like I used to, but that's largely because I'm used to a different level of eating, not because it requires a lot of self-denial. The small plates are a big help.
So, if I get seven measurements in a row above my target weight, that's what triggers my "oops, I need to lose weight." And then I don't get to go back to maintenance until I bring the five-day average down at or below the target.
So while I'm in that "oops" mode I am mainly working on reining in the sloppiness that may have developed since the last time, a surprising amount of which consists of "eating things I don't even want to eat." Often, getting rid of that is all it takes, and I'm back to my usual weight in a week or two.
January 2011 (still in resolution season): I come up with the metaphor of the Akron U-Turn:
If you have ever tried to lose weight on purpose, think back. After dropping a couple of pounds, and still wanting to lose more, did you ever find yourself thinking, "I'm down a couple of pounds. I can afford to splurge at this meal/have this extra snack/eat the whole thing." I am sure it is really common; I have done this myself, lots of times.
Step back and look at how loony it is from a loss standpoint. "I'm down a couple of pounds; I can eat more" is correct if your goal is to remain the same. Because eating more will fix the problem of having lost weight. This is what your body has tricked you into thinking with that supposedly smart brain of yours!
It is as if you have started driving from New York to L. A., and after a while you realize you've gotten all the way to Akron, so you decide you can afford to turn around and go east for a while, which feels better because now the sun isn't in your eyes so much, and then after a while you're like: What the hell? Why am I seeing these signs for Scranton? This isn't working!
No, the proper response is: I want to go past Akron. I got to Akron by traveling west. Therefore, I can keep going west and that will get me past Akron.
...It isn't terribly important to me to drop one pound right now, so I haven't resisted the corrections my body keeps applying every time I start. But having made a few attempts and watching what happens, I think I understand those corrections a little bit more.
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May 2011: Maintenance Blues and Acceptance.
- What do you mean, acceptance?
- Accepting the facts.
- Propositions to accept.
- What's wrong with me? Why is this so hard?
- Will making a change now help me?
- Is rooting out bad habits even possible?
- Just doing it.
When I was 45 pounds heavier it used to make me feel bad to spend a lot of time in the car, because after an hour or two my jeans started to pull at my hips and thigh and butt uncomfortably. Making creases in the flesh: not painful or anything, just tight here and pinched there. I would shift my body, push my feet against the floor and straighten up, in the guise of stretching my back, and it would stop feeling tight in one place but it would start feeling tight another. All those hours of driving, and it was a constant and niggling reminder that I was a fat person. After a while I would start to wonder: Does this feel worse than last time? Maybe I'm gaining weight, even.
I suppose I could have stopped wearing jeans and switched to flowy loose skirts or something. I didn't want to. Part of me believed that the constant pinching, pulling, tight-across-the-thigh feeling was something that kept me from getting even fatter, because it kept me miserably reminded of how fat I was already.
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And then I lost weight and I discovered something:
Jeans don't pull and pinch slightly and make creases in the flesh and get uncomfortable on long car trips because you're fat.
Jeans pull and pinch slightly and get uncomfortable on long car trips because they are jeans.
A habit is not like a toggle switch; it is more like a houseplant or a tropical fish or a puppy. It requires care. Yes-no choices do go into it, though. Choose often enough to feed it and it thrives; choose often enough to neglect it and it withers. Useful habits are habits to live with: not necessarily permanently, but for long periods. They can be tried for a while to see if they are pleasant to live with and if they have desirable effects, but this is not the same as toggling them on and off; it is more like a temporary adoption, to see if an attachment will deepen.
Compensatory deprivations are less like a companion pet and more like a spare folding table or a turkey roaster: an unwieldy, occasionally used piece of furniture or appliance that you get out of the basement from time to time when necessary. (e.g., at the holidays.)
We all know some person (a lot of us seem to be married to one) who decides he needs to take off a few pounds, gives up ice cream for a couple weeks and bam, problem solved,the lucky bastard. That is the idea we are going for. A useful compensatory deprivation is something that's at least a little painful, but is temporary and effective. If it works but hurts, the working should be enough motivation to keep going just until it isn't needed anymore. If it works and doesn't hurt (or you find you get used to it eventually), maybe it should be nurtured as a long-term habit after all. If it hurts and doesn't help, then there's no point, now, is there?
It is resolution season, folks, and this is post two in a series...
Yesterday I wrote a post about distinguishing desirable habits from interventions, that is, from temporary deprivations. Habits are like puppies: if you like them and can live with them, you adopt them for the long haul. "Compensatory deprivations" are like spare furniture you get out only when necessary. They can be useful temporary fixes, but they are not something you want to live with permanently.
I think a lot of people slip up by resolving to deprive themselves permanently or indefinitely of something they really enjoy that is ordinarily harmless, or at least it is harmless in moderation. It would be better to identify habits that are really desirable, and try to set yourself up to fall into them, so to speak.
As for me, my biggest problem right now is that I have slipped into an indulge-gain-deprive-lose cycle, and I really need to get out of it and into a more balanced pattern. That calls for a look at habits I would like to re-establish for the new year: permanent changes that I really want to have.
So I made a long list of potential behaviors, and then I carefully considered each one. If I found it appealing, I put it on my list of "habits to try." If I didn't, I put it on the list of "compensatory deprivations" -- and I don't intend to touch those except on rare occasions, such as the morning after a day full of bad food, or as a needed kick start.
As I have been struggling with weight maintenance more than usual this month, I have found myself contemplating the two dominant narratives about weight loss and weight gain, and why neither of them ultimately satisfies.
Here they are, in brief:
"A calorie is a calorie." Weight gain is caused by eating more calories than you burn, and storing the extra as fat; to lose weight, burn all the calories that you eat, plus extra that come out of your fat stores. In this narrative, the amount of calories is far more important than the type of food the calories come from. People who cannot lose weight are people who have a gluttony problem.
"Insulin resistance and glycemic load." Gluttony does not cause people to gain weight. Excess adiposity -- fatness -- is a symptom of metabolic syndrome, an endocrine disease. The disease comes from a diet that has more sugar and refined carbohydrate than the body can handle, because of an environment that constantly pushes such foods. The only cure for the endocrine system is to cut back on carbohydrate load, and some people have to cut back drastically for a long time to see results. People who cannot lose weight are people who have not tried the right cure, who have not tried a drastic enough cure, or who have not yet given it enough time to work.
I think the insulin-resistance theory has the chemistry right, but it gets gluttony wrong. It is enormously comforting for a heavy person to hear that gluttony is not the cause of his fatness, and it is even more comforting to hear that it is unnecessary to beat gluttony in order to get better. The message from the insulin-resistance crowd is "You are not bad or weak; you are just sick. Take the cure and you will get better."
The calorie-is-a-calorie theory has the chemistry wrong, but it doesn't have the gluttony part entirely right either. It persists, by the way, because it is so comforting to the not-fat people. The people who can control their weight get to go on, like Job's friends, believing in the essential justice of the universe: that person can't get thinner because she is weak-willed and lazy. The laws of thermodynamics make it so. Perversely, there is some comfort for heavy people: I am this way because I deserve it and because the universe is just; but there is hope for me, because if only I can become a better person, I will surely lose the weight and become beautiful and accepted. Someday I will.
Back when my oldest was three and my second was a baby, we had a family membership at the YMCA. I was sporadically lifting weights and using an exercise bike, Mark was running, and we were putting the three-year-old in swimming lessons for the first time. As I brought him to the pool and picked him up afterward, I would watch swimmers swimming laps, literally something I had never done for fun or exercise.
Swimming seemed to me a magical, mythical exercise. It seems so difficult to arrange, all that changing and showering. And there is the mysterious lap etiquette by which three or more swimmers can share a lane without hating each other, despite not being able to rely on eye contact because of their otherworldly goggles. And I heard that it requires inhuman acts, like getting up early in the morning (isn't that what swimmers do? swim early in the morning?) and possibly going outside with your hair wet in January. Also, I didn't know any swimmers. I just saw them in the locker room, peeling off their caps and heading for the shower as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
I found myself, though, saying to people over and over again: "Oh, I lifted weights during my pregnancies... as long as I could... but I kind of wish I could swim better, so I could try swimming during my next one. I can't really swim though." I said it to H. often enough that one day she said to me, "Well, why don't you just take lessons then?"
And after a while I thought: Indeed -- why not?
I have played around with hand paddles, with lap counters. I have been through at least half a dozen swimsuits. These days I follow a minimalist, 1650-yard workout that requires little thought and takes a bit more than 45 minutes:
- 300 yard warmup: 2 laps pulling, 2 laps kicking, 2 laps backstroke
- 400 yards freestyle, 100 yards breaststroke
- 300 yards freestyle, 50 yards breaststroke
- 200 yards freestyle, 50 yards breaststroke
- 100 yards freestyle
- 150 yard cooldown: 1 lap backstroke, 1 lap kicking, 1 lap pulling
I am too busy right now to think about improving, so this is my holding pattern. I only have one goal, which is to get it reliably below 45 minutes -- an average of 1 minute 22 seconds per lap. The warmup and breaststroke are much slower than that, so I need to speed my freestyle up considerably to break that.
One of my greatest pleasures comes weekly when I bring my now-six-year-old daughter to her swim lesson. Her lesson is 40 minutes, so I can almost get my whole workout in while she swims. When she is done, she patters over to the end of the lane where I am finishing up, sits down and dangles her feet in the water, and taps me on the hand when I arrive at the wall. "Can I swim with you?" she asks, and if the pool is not too crowded and no one is sharing the lane, I say "Yes" and she hops in with me. I tow her to the midline and back, nodding approvingly at her paddling form, grinning and clapping when she shows me how she has learned to dive to the bottom or to float on her back.
She cannot remember a time when I wasn't a swimmer, every week stuffing my hair under a cap and jumping right into the cold pool without hesitation or shudder. Every one of her lessons have been, for her, learning to do something she sees me do all the time.
Let's talk first about whether maintenance is getting "easier" as time goes on.
The challenges change, that's for sure. My mental health has improved. When I first changed my way of eating (WOE as they call it on the various boards -- not my favorite acronym the Internet has produced), I had done little but exchange one kind of disordered eating and disordered movement for another: I'd gone from slothful gluttony to hyper-control-freaky rigidity.
I'm not saying I regret that, because the second set of disorders got me where I wanted to be. But they took a while to fade.
The improvement is here: When my weight is within limits, well under control, I can just... live. No counting, no stressing. Eat when I am hungry, etcetera. I do normal things like occasionally nibble on the kids' leftovers, but I don't feel compelled to clean their plates for them. I sometimes have seconds of something tasty, without guilt, but I don't eat six helpings. I might eat that extra slice of pizza now and then. Sometimes, when I'm busy, I skip going to the gym and I don't worry that it means I will never go again.
Nowadays, I only get that panicky must-count-all-my-calories, guilt-over-the-sensation-of-fullness, must-get-to-the-gym-before-all-else, lie-awake-fretting-about-whether-I-can-still-control-myself-sufficiently feeling when my weight goes up to 115 or if I wear a pair of pants that feels tight as I go about my day.
I am unsure as to whether I should consider its persistence a feature or a bug.
So I haven't been doing that "weight control chart" for a long time now. I still weigh myself most mornings, and every few days I write it down because I want to keep a long-term record (and if nothing else, there's a height and weight check-in on the NFP charts, so I will at least have one data point per month). I stopped doing that thing where I would start following more rules when I had so many data points (weight readings) that were in such-and-such a range, etc. It was worth a try, but it was really too involved to keep up with.
I have been thinking more and more about the most useful attitude to have toward the numbers: the weight on the scale, the dress size, and even the calorie count (or WW points or carb grams---whatever countable food metric you might be considering).
Coming into the start of my fifth year of weight control, I am even more strongly convinced of a particular way of thinking about these numbers. I have pointed out before that "the numbers" are not under your direct control. Behavior and habit development are under your direct control; the numbers aren't. If weight/size control for health is your desire. the numbers are useful -- not as goals or targets, because you cannot really aim at them -- but as diagnostics to evaluate existing habits and behaviors.
I think it's common to use "hey, I'm doing pretty well!" as an excuse to undermine ourselves by going back to undesirable behaviors.
Some good habits have persisted in the face of my okayness, and some have drifted away. What's the difference? I think a lot of it has to do with having created "bright lines" around some behaviors: some rule I've stated to myself, even gone public with here on the blog or in my family. Something that It's not okay to eat a whole pizza. A normal breakfast can contain one egg, but not two. The right dessert size for me is about as big as two Oreos. I don't go through a drive-through to get a snack. I go to the gym at least twice a week.
You have to strike the right balance when it comes to these:
- they have to be something that you really want to adopt permanently, with few exceptions.
- They have to be something where it doesn't matter if you're doing "okay" -- for the rest of your life you want to live with these bright-line boundaries, no matter what your dress size.
- And you have to know when to define your bright line around a "never" (in my case, "never eat a whole pizza") and when to define it around a "normal" that can be excepted on special occasions (like the two-egg thing; if I'm starving, I'll order a big fat omelette at a restaurant, but I think of it as a splurge, a deviation).
The hard part is creating the bright line in the first place. I may think I want to stop doing a certain behavior, but often I find that I don't really want to. I've tried to establish "I never nibble off the kids' plates after lunch" and it hasn't worked very well. On the other hand I might well be able to establish "I make the kids scrape their own plates into the trash after lunch," now that I think about it. So maybe part of it is carefully choosing which behavior to enclose in those bright lines.
Right now the "okayness" I struggle with is in the physical activity.
One thing that is definitely getting better is the long-term view. I keep coming back to that. Because this is a rest-of-my-life thing, it is okay if the trends are really, really slow and slight. I don't really care about getting quickly back to my target. I only care about not getting farther away and making course corrections that nudge me back to where I am going.
Sometimes I start worrying, "What if I gain weight and I need to lose it again? Will I ever be able to do what I did then? Maybe I'll never recapture it, if I ever need it."
And I say to myself, "I know how I can make myself feel better. I'll prove I can still do it. I'll lose 1 pound, starting right now. Even though I don't objectively need to lose any pounds, I'll just lose 1. If I still have what it takes, it won't take long, just a couple of weeks, a month at most once I get back in the groove again. I'll crack down really hard on myself and I'll lose 1 pound, and I'll prove to myself that I could still lose weight again any time I want to."
And then I can't "crack down on myself" as hard as I think I should, and the little line I still plot on a chart most days goes down a little and up a little and down a little just like it always does, and I fret some more. Maybe I'll never get that groove back, even if I need it. If I can't make it happen whenever I want to, whether I need it or not, will I be able to make it happen someday if I do need it?
And then I imagine a future where everyone makes fun of me because I blogged about overcoming gluttony but then I got fat again. Seriously? This is what I worry about? Becoming a data point on the nobody can lose weight and keep it off side? Or is it being proven wrong? Am I a thin-person impostor? Are the size 2's only a disguise?
This is not a healthy mental space to be in.
I am really, really frustrated by the non-budging of my postpartum bathroom scale.
Is it just the difference of being four years older in this last pregnancy than I was in the pregnancy before that? Or is it from being four years farther removed from the felt experience of constant, successful self-denial in my 2008 weight loss, so that I forgot how to work hard? Or is it from having 25% more children vying for my limited attention than the last time around? Whatever: After my last pregnancy, the weight came off with very little effort, and fairly quickly. This time -- it appears to be happening, but verrrrrrrry sloooooowly.
Seventeen months postpartum, I am still 7-10 pounds above my prepregnancy weight, which (on my 4'11" frame) means I am still one full clothing size larger, which means that I have a bunch of clothes that I would really like to wear that I can't. The conflict: I am still, unnecessarily it would seem, living in the yoga pants that I bought at the beginning of pregnancy to bridge the gap until maternity clothes. Should I accept life in my current size, buy more clothes that fit me, and get rid of the ones that don't? Or should I keep on working at it, in the hope that little by little, enough flesh will slip away to allow me to wear my "real clothes" again?
I don't look bad. I don't feel bad. But I don't want to buy a whole new wardrobe either. It feels like giving up.
My brain is a traitor. It has completely gone over to the side of the body in this one. How to explain it? My brain doesn't try to get me to break my resolutions, to foil my plans, anymore. It's learned that this does not work.
I don't do the emotional-eating thing. I don't get tempted to break my resolutions. If I am conscious of a plan I have made (say "Don't eat dessert tonight") you can wave a chocolate cake in front of me all evening and I will not take that first fatal bite. My brain has given up trying to tempt me away from my plans.
Instead my brain has learned a better way: it causes me to forget I had a plan in the first place. "Ha ha!" the brain says. "If I refuse to do my job of remembering important things, there's nothing that the rest of you can do about it!" And when dinnertime comes it's all like "Plan? What plan? Pass the potatoes."
I realize that this sounds absolutely insane.
I can't think of a better way to describe it.
I make plans. I literally forget them, or at least forget that they matter, when I sit down at the table. And then immediately after we are all done eating, I seem to remember them again. Shit. And then the remorse.
This is not a good mental situation. I really have to do something about it, because it is the kind of mental situation that eating disorders are made of: a cycle of self-recrimination that begins immediately after a meal. It's bad.
In sum, a not-quite-five-foot-tall woman like me -- fairly physically active -- gets to eat approximately half of the average restaurant meal, without fries, unless she doesn't mind sticking with a simple bowl of soup.
And that is without saving any room for a dessert -- or rather, for a couple of bites of someone else's dessert.
This gets old really fast -- unless you can really internalize the notion that restaurants portion for big, hungry males, and small women are second-class citizens.
...Oh, wait, it still gets old really fast.
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May 2016: What makes me different from the people who regain?
I really, really hate the "hopeless" narrative of obesity reversal: the idea that there is nothing we can do to get rid of excess fat and keep it off. Very hard work and obsessive attention can make it happen under some circumstances. We know this because a few people succeed, and none call it easy.
But I also really hate its opposite, the "slacker" narrative of obesity reversal: the idea that, because weight loss is possible, those who stay obese must be greedy, lazy, or stupid.
I prefer a "heroic" narrative of obesity reversal. Every piece of evidence points to the conclusion that it is massively difficult to reverse obesity long-term. Failing to lose a great deal of weight is no more proof of a person's sloth and greed and self-indulgence, than his failing to run the Ironman would be....'
Sometimes, to be honest, I think my body creates the feeling on purpose to reverse any weight loss I may have managed. But it is very difficult to resist -- there's this general feeling that I can't think, and I will be able to think if I just have a sandwich. Maybe that is what I get instead of the constant hunger thing, now that I have learned that a growly stomach won't kill me and I can wait a couple of hours to silence it. A new tactic, and a more effective one, since I hate the "can't think" feeling.
And then there are still cravings: the desire to eat when not hungry, or to have seconds and thirds after an already-satisfying plate. It's moderately hard to resist these; I can do it, usually without a great deal of effort, but not effortlessly. And all those little efforts add up to fatigue.
This is the part about working on weight maintenance that has been so frustrating, if not entirely unexpected. It costs. I feel permanently, or at least periodically, diminished. Fuzzy in the head, fatigued from saying "no thank you" to every impulse, chilly enough to put on a sweater, wanting a nap, irritable. I drink more coffee and snap at children. I have to spend some of the time and motivation that could have gone to create, or write, or analyze, or plan -- instead on getting from meal to meal. I feel that weight maintenance has made me slightly stupider.
So, I don't know. Is it worth it?
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And... in fall 2016 I was too depressed about politics to even think about it. And in May I was too busy.
Which brings us to this fall.
And I'll write this fall's maintenance posts next.
Thanks for pulling these all together in one place.
Posted by: MrsDarwin | 30 October 2017 at 03:11 PM
Your story about the jeans denoting fatness reminds me of something I was always told growing up.
For whatever reason I was always told growing up that having skin tags (ugh. I know. I hate them.) meant you were fat. Only fat people had skin tags. Therefore when I went through puberty and grew some horrible skin tags of my own, this was evident proof I was fat. At 105 pounds. Years later I learned my sister had the very same body image problem.
Only fat people have skin tags. I have skin tags. I must be fat. QED
Posted by: Jenny | 31 October 2017 at 11:46 AM
Anyway, this is a timely series for me since I lost 20 pounds within 2 weeks of giving birth and haven't lost an ounce since. I still have 15-20 pounds that doesn't seem to be in any hurry to leave. It took seven solid monthe last time, but it is still hard not to feel a little panicky.
Posted by: Jenny | 31 October 2017 at 11:49 AM
Resist the postpartum panic, Jenny. I think it's slower as you age.
Re: skin tags: That is NUTS.
Posted by: bearing | 31 October 2017 at 12:26 PM