Entering year 10 of maintenance (V): Long-term thinking.

Let me tell you what I had to eat yesterday (still following along in my French book of meal plans):

Breakfast called for coffee or tea, 50 g of bread, and 20 g of cheese.   

.........I had: coffee, a packaged English-style crumpet (49 g) and 20 g of four-pepper goat cheese spread on it.  140 calories.

Lunch called for 100 g of chicken "escalope grillée;" 120 g of pasta, rice, or quinoa; vegetables; 1 teaspoon of oil to dress the vegetables; and 1 unsweetened dairy product.

........I made salsa chicken rice bowls to feed the co-schooling horde for lunch.  I had:  shredded chicken breast cooked in the crockpot with salsa; 120 g of mixed brown rice and red beans; a pile of braised green peppers and onions; 1/4 avocado in lieu of the oil ; and 20 g of shredded cheddar cheese.   500 calories.

Dinner called for 200 g of a velouté of winter vegetables with a teaspoon of crème fraîche stirred in; 2 soft-boiled eggs; 40 g of whole grain bread; and 2 clementines.

........I had:  200 g of some leftover curried squash soup that contained coconut milk; 2 soft-boiled eggs; 40 g of homemade whole wheat waffles; and the prescribed two clementines.  I also indulged in some syrup for my waffles, but skipped the sausage patties that everyone else had.  400 calories.

Also:  I chose to have half a doughnut at snack time—it was a birthday, with candles in the birthday teen's doughnut—165 calories—and enjoyed a gin and tonic at the theater (215).  The latter probably had something to do with my decision to eat a cold waffle out of hand when I got home, and also some saltine crackers (let's call that an additional 175 calories). 

I'd say the doughnut and the gin and tonic were celebratory pleasures that I freely chose to enjoy, and fit nicely into my overall-moderate day; but consuming the cold waffle and crackers was an impulse that represented the kind of behavior I want to minimize in long term. 

As maintenance has stretched into years, distinguishing between freely-chosen pleasures and not-so-pleasurable impulses has gotten easier and easier.

Remembering to put down the cold waffle, in the moment?  Not really any easier, especially under the influence of G&T-induced munchies.

 Still, the distinguishing is the first step.

+ + +

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to take another look at my long-term goals regarding weight, eating, and fitness.  The point of this exercise:  to inject some sanity and, well, serenity.  Too often I swing wildly between two poles:  either panicked feelings of lost control, or rigid, unhealthy obsession.

Fact:

If a time traveler from the future

came back and told me that I would weigh the same at age 55 as I do now

—even at my highest recent weight, which is ten to fifteen pounds more than I wish I weighed—

I'd be thrilled.

 

Because most of my anxiety surrounding weight gain has to do with slowly creeping back up to my old weight in the long term.  Where I am is a fine weight to grow older in. 

Sure, I'd be a little more thrilled to learn that future-me would weigh ten pounds less.

Or, better, to find out that I would weigh the same but would have more muscle mass because I will have made the time to lift weights consistently.

The point is that the difference is not so big as to call "I weigh the same at age 55" a failure.  If it comes to pass, I will count it a measure of success.

+ + +

The number "55" is not an arbitrary number, but it's a generous estimate.   

That's because at age 43, the most sensible long-term timeframe is "the other side of menopause."  No matter what, that'll be a time to take a new look at things.  So there's not much point in looking far beyond that.

I'm healthy now.  So one way to look at the long term is:  

What conditions do I want to persist until after menopause?

+ + +

(Before reading on, please recall that I'm under five feet tall.  People who forget this tend to gasp in horror)

+ + +

As long as I'm not engaged in systematic weight training, I would be happy to see my weight remain between 117 and 125.   The latter number represents a BMI that is just barely into the "overweight" category, but especially as I age, I'm fairly certain that it would still be a fine weight for me. 

(I am extremely skeptical of the boundaries of the "normal" BMI range for people as short as me.  Really?  I could go down to 92 pounds and be healthier than I am at 125 pounds?  This beggars belief.  When I briefly weighed 108 pounds, people said I looked unwell, and I was freezing cold all the time.)

In my last post in this series, I laid out my theory that numbers aren't goals, they're metrics.  

But I do have a goal related to those numbers.  The goal is:

 Stop myself from freaking out at weights between 117 and 125.

I know what many of you are thinking.

 Erin, do you really freak out at the scale when it measures between 117 and 125?

The answer is:  Yes.  Yes, I do freak out at these numbers, which are 40-45 pounds lower than the weight of the average American woman (who's only four inches taller than me, by the way).

And this is not a sign of good mental health.

Anxious feelings are not always under our control.  I'm aware of that.  But one way we can dispel anxious feelings is to look critically at the picture of reality that they are painting for us.  We do that by holding on to pieces of objective reality to which we can compare them.  And this is such an anchor.  When I feel anxious about numbers that are between 117 and 125, I must talk myself down from it:    

Your feelings do not reflect your rational thinking about this number. 

This is a good number. 

This is a number that you have already decided is a fine place to be, not just now, but far into the future.

Mind you, I'm not giving myself permission to indulge in anxiety when my weight is out-of-range.   Anxiety at those times, however, is a different problem, and not a problem I have right now.

Dealing with my present problem requires me to banish the periodic delusion that the good place I happen to be in will never be good enough.  

And while "I don't freak out" is more of a metric than a goal, because anxious feelings aren't entirely under my control:  I can set a goal to react to them by consciously changing my thought patterns.

+ + + 

I have now-until-55 goals for exercise too.

Because I'm engaged in many activities that put pressure on my time and that I wish to prioritize alongside fitness, my long-term fitness goals are modest.  

I very much want to maintain the level of fitness that I have.  I can run three to four miles without stopping, I can climb stairs, I can sprint to catch a bus or a fleeing child, I can climb at a climbing gym, I can ski any intermediate downhill terrain, and I can hike all day carrying a weighted pack.

I can do that, I believe, with three workouts per week.  Where a workout is defined as any of the following:

• A run at any pace around any of the local lakes
• 30 minutes of running in a gym or on a treadmill
• At least 20 minutes of steady lap swimming
• 1 hour spent at the climbing gym
• 60 minutes of continuous walking
• 30 minutes of walking with a weighted pack

A secondary goal is to record performance data.  That's to give me more than one number, so the scale gets less important by comparison.

How many workouts per week?  That's the simplest thing to record.  But I'm also tracking, now, my average running and swimming pace.  I hope, no, expect, to speed up and eventually plateau, at a point where I would have to change my priorities to go faster; and then, if I don't want to change my priorities, I suppose I will have to be satisfied with maintaining those paces.

If I decide to take up weight training between now and then, I'll re-evaluate my goals.

+ + +

These are my long-term thoughts.  I do have short-term and medium-term ones.  I touched on those at the beginning of this post and in my latest maintenance story, where I explained my post-vacation austerity measures working with the French book of meal plans.  In the next post I will try to tie the short-, medium-, and long-term thinking together.  This might require me to repeat myself, but I think it'll be a little more organized presentation of the information.  Stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Jenny]

Are you weighing out your food on a scale? We have a scale, but I never think to pull it out.

I just punched out my BMI range. At about two inches taller than you, my range is 101 lbs to 135 lbs. It is hard to believe 101 pounds would be healthy for me since I have a small bone structure and couldn't keep my weight that low in high school. (Believe me, I tried. I just couldn't tip over into anorexia. I couldn't deal with feeling that hungry.)

If I could pick a weight from the weight fairy, it would be 115. I feel so thin and all my clothes hang just right. Of course, I only weigh that much for about six weeks when the actively nursing baby is about seven months old.

I could see weighing 135 after menopause. I don't want to be too thin then because it seems to lead nowhere good. In the meantime, I'd like to hang out in your goal weight range of 117-125.

I start feeling not great about my weight at about 123 pounds but I don't start to worry until I hit 126. My main source of discontent has to do with my pants. My pants start to not fit at about 125 pounds.

Right now, at 7 weeks postpartum, I weigh 140 pounds. It is just on the top edge of overweight. It feels like a lot to me so it is a little surprising it is so close to "normal" weight. I did buy two new pair of pants so as to not be quite as distressed as the weight comes off--or doesn't.

[Christy P.]

Wow, I'll declare as #3 in the same weight comfort range. I'm taller than either of you, and with a different structure, so at 120 I'm at BMI of 20.0 (5'5").

[bearing]

Oh my goodness. Body structure makes such a difference. If my BMI was 20.0 I would weigh 99 pounds.

I have met women who are my height and (I would guess) about that weight, and who look well, but that would not be a good look for me.

There is a picture of me at 109, in a black shirt and jeans, on my “chronological index” post. I cannot imagine how I would look at ten pounds less.

[bearing]

Oh, and Jenny, I am weighing food on a scale right now, at home anyway. I have one that lives on the counter because we weigh coffee grounds with it. (60 g per 12-coffee-cup pot)

I have always done periodic bouts of Weighing Everything in order to stay aware of what portion sizes look like. I don’t take one with me to restaurants, but to do so would not be crazy.