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Accepting the facts and deciding to act on them.

In the last post, I replaced the vague question of "should I accept myself as I am?" with a process of discernment of a decision to change.  

It occurred to me that these decisions have long-, medium-, and short-term manifestations, so I thought I'd work through an example.  Perhaps this will become a series.

Here's what I came up with in that post:

1.  Understand and believe the relevant facts.

2.  From those facts, judge whether a change offers benefits.

3.  If a change offers benefits,  judge from the facts whether they are possible to attain.

4.  If there are benefits that are possible to attain, determine from the facts how they could be attained. 

5.  Decide whether you want to expend the effort to attain them.

  

LONG-TERM LEVEL

Understand and believe the facts:  "I wear such-and-such a dress size, or I went to the doctor and he told me I risk diabetes if I stay at my current weight."

Judge if a change is desirable:  "Yes, I want to have a smaller dress size, or avoid developing diabetes."

Judge if a change is possible:  "Yes, it must be possible because other people have permanently dropped a dress size or lost weight or changed their risk of developing diabetes.  Many of them have done it by eating less or otherwise changing their diets.  I don't yet have evidence that this approach would not work if I made a similar change in my behavior.  So it's possible that if I permanently changed my behavior, I'd permanently drop a dress size or avoid diabetes."

Judge how such a change is possible:  "Well, I could sit down and figure out what behaviors I could change most easily.  Then I could develop some strategies to remind me of my motivation.  That would take some planning time.  I'd have to practice the new behaviors.  That means learning to do something that's hard, over and over again.  I'd also have to learn how to deal with negative comments from people who notice the changes I'm making.  And I'll have to be ready to respond to setbacks by making useful adjustments instead of just giving up."

Decide:  "Do I want to do this?"

 

MEDIUM-TERM LEVEL

Understand and believe the facts: "I figured out that I habitually take second and third helpings at meals.  I don't actually know whether I could be satisfied with only one helping."

Judge if a change is desirable:  "Yes, I don't want to be ignorant about whether I can be satisfied with only one helping.  If I knew the answer to that question, I'd know whether sticking to one helping would be an easy way for me to permanently change my habits in the direction I want to go."

Judge if a change is possible:  "Yes, I could find out the answer by trying out the behavior of stopping after one plateful, and then seeing if I feel satisfied after the food has been put away."

Judge how such a change is possible:  "I'd have to resist eating second helpings after I finished my plate, and then I'd have to pay attention to how I feel for a while after the meal, and maybe write down my observations.  I'll need several strategies to resist the temptation to take seconds -- I could try eating slowly so that I don't finish my plate until it's nearly time to clear the dishes, or I could have a stick of gum ready to pop into my mouth as soon as I finish, or I could have a cup of coffee after dinner, or I could get up and leave the table as soon as my plate is empty.   I'd have to eat this way at several meals -- say, five or six dinners -- before I could really come to a conclusion. "

Decide:  "Do I want to do this?"

   SHORT-TERM LEVEL

Understand and believe the facts: "I told myself I wanted to know whether I'd be satisfied with one helping.  Now I've finished my helping and I want to eat more food.  I won't know whether one helping satisfies me unless I can get to the end of the meal to find out how I feel after only having had one helping.  But I want to eat more food and it sucks."

Judge if a change is desirable:  "Yes, I don't want to sit here any more looking at the food and wanting it and knowing I could have it if I chose."

Judge if a change is possible:  "Yes, I don't have to sit here any longer looking at the food.  I could eat it.  Or I could escape this situation.  Or I could change the situation somehow so I wouldn't want the food anymore."

Judge how such a change is possible:  "I could get up from the table and walk away. "

Decide:  Do you want to do it?

 

See how small the changes can be?  Even the long-term example needn't be "do I want to lose fifty pounds" or "do I want to drop six dress sizes," but can be a much tinier goal: "do I want to lose some weight" or "do I want a smaller dress size."   It's long-term because the intent is for it to be long-lasting, not because it'll take a long time to achieve.  The medium-term example needn't be "do I want to eat fewer helpings at dinner," but "do I want to find out whether I would be satisfied with fewer helpings at dinner?"  The short-term example is the most immediate:  shall I resist this helping? 

+ + +

I made up those examples.  Tune in next time for a real-life, real-time example from my own frustrations with maintaining my current weight loss...

What do you mean, "acceptance?"

On the post about vanity and physical fitness, Delores asked a question about weight loss:

what do you think is the sequence for losing weight? Not accepting your body, so you change it; or accepting who you are and then from that acceptance just 'loving' yourself enough to change.

I replied that I didn't think body acceptance was all that relevant:

I would say that dressing properly requires accepting the truth about your body. You should dress the body you have, not the body you wish you had or the body you fear you might have.

But for me, losing weight required accepting the truth about my behavior, not my body. Accepting or not accepting my body was sort of irrelevant.

I read that over a few times, and I am pretty sure that it's true.  But, I had to think for a while to be sure that statement wasn't reading back the story I'd like to tell into the past.  

But did you notice my vocabulary sleight-of-hand there? 

I'm not really happy with the vocabulary surrounding the debate about "acceptance."  Should people accept their bodies as they are?  Is the fat-acceptance movement healthy or not?    The reason I don't like it is that the words "accept" and "acceptance" are kind of weaselly -- they are chosen and used because they have positive connotations (who will come out against "acceptance?") but more information is needed before you can pin down the meaning precisely.   

First of all, "to accept" needs an object to make any sense at all.  One doesn't merely "accept," one accepts a thing -- or a person, or a place, or an idea.  A writer who understands this property of the verb "to accept"  won't make the error of describing a person as "very accepting."  It says nothing of substance, only imparts a glow of positivity, until the writer specifies:  Exactly what does she accept?

Second, the verb morphs its meaning depending on what the object is.  Watch this:

"I accepted the job" = "I agreed to the terms of the offer of employment."

"I accepted the gift" = "I agreed to receive the gift and I received it."

"The college accepted me" = "The college permitted me to enroll as a student."

"I accepted that fact" = "I acknowledged that fact as true."

"The restaurant accepts credit cards" = "The restaurant will receive payment in the form of credit cards"

"The employees accepted the poor working conditions" = "The employees endured the poor working conditions without complaining"

What all these threads of meaning have in common is the notion of receiving willingly or agreeably.   A thing which is "accepted" is received, along with all its consequences, whether they be good or bad, with the assent of the will in some way.   But notice the necessity of the concept of "receiving" -- something is grasped, or taken, or taken on, that was not grasped before. 

So when you're talking about "accepting a person" the meaning is perfectly clear if that person has undergone a sort of a change, has been "received."  When a college accepts a student or a team accepts an athlete, the meaning is that a person has newly become a member of a group because the group has agreed to admit him.  When a son's new bride is accepted as part of the family, that means that -- even though the other family members didn't get to choose her -- the family nevertheless willingly extends "membership privileges," treating her as they would a family member.  When we Catholics in our wedding vows agree that we "will accept children lovingly from God" we mean that we promise to welcome children that we don't yet have.  All of these cases involve an act of will, but also an act of receiving.  Even if the receiving isn't our choice (as in the case of the in-laws, or sometimes in the case of the children!), the act of will that turns it from merely "receiving" to "receiving willingly" -- to "accepting" -- is a choice.  That act of will may happen much later than the act of receiving (perhaps the in-laws take some time to "accept" the bride) but the receiving is still implied.

So -- here's a question -- how can one "accept one's body?"   "I receive my body willingly?"  That doesn't really work, unless personhood and will precede embodiment, a belief that I'm betting few or none of my readers subscribe to.    I have been embodied since my beginning.  I cannot "accept" it in any literal sense, because I never "received" it.   I can accept someone else's body (as a woman, I do, repeatedly in marriage and temporarily in pregnancy; as a Catholic, I do, repeatedly, in the Eucharist) but it's nonsense to say I accept my own.

So when we say something like "body acceptance," meaning one's own body, we must be using "body" as a euphemism or as shorthand for the real object of acceptance.  

One possibility is that we accept a physical condition that our body is in.    This has a connotation of "endure without complaining" -- in the way one might accept a privation, or a punishment, or the "poor working conditions" mentioned above, or a disease.  

But even this isn't really specific enough to say whether such "acceptance" is healthy or unhealthy.  What's going on inside?  The term doesn't specify whether the attitude is one of I'll-prove-I-can-withstand-this, or looking-on-the-bright-side, or uniting-my-suffering-to-the-suffering-of-Christ, or complaining-won't-help-so-why-bother.  Any of these will do to be described as "accepting the conditions."    But I think you'll agree that which one is meant makes a very big difference to the spirit.

Another possibility is that we accept some idea or truth or statement about our body.   This means, simply, "we believe" that idea or truth.  In that case, whether it's healthy to "accept" the truth or idea hinges on whether the truth is true!    "I accept that this morning I weighed 205 pounds" is a lot different from "I accept that I will always weigh more than 200 pounds."   "I accept that my physical condition increases my risk of developing diabetes" is a lot different from "I accept that I will develop diabetes."  "I accept that I wear a size 16" is a lot different from "I accept that I have to wear big baggy clothes to hide my ugly hips."   "I accept that it's very difficult to exercise" is a lot different from "I accept that I am not able to exercise."

So, to return to Delores's question,

what do you think is the sequence for losing weight? Not accepting your body, so you change it; or accepting who you are and then from that acceptance just 'loving' yourself enough to change.

Does she mean "enduring" a body-condition, or does she mean "believing" a body-truth?  I think the question becomes logical if we frame it as follows:

"What do you think is the sequence for losing weight? 

• First, not accepting the proposition  "Changing your body is impossible or undesirable."   (In other words, accepting the  proposition "Changing your body is possible and desirable.")  Then, you change your body.
• Or accepting the relevant facts about yourself:  that your body is in a certain condition, and that you live under certain constraints, and that you have certain tendencies and desires; and then with the power that comes from that knowledge, just willingly making sacrifices or acts of will that create good changes."

Wow!  When you phrase it that way, it's stunningly obvious that this is not an either-or choice! 

1.  Understand and believe the relevant facts.

2.  From those facts, judge whether a change offers benefits.

3.  If a change offers benefits,  judge from the facts whether they are possible to attain.

4.  If there are benefits that are possible to attain, determine from the facts how they could be attained. 

5.  Decide whether you want to expend the effort to attain them.

That's the order of operations, without using the word "acceptance."

Clean eating and a short pre-review of the new Taubes book.

I'm feeling a little less despondent this morning than I was when I wrote the last post, probably because two full days of clean eating has eliminated my weight spike.   And thank you to commenter LeeAnn for reassuring me that I probably can continue watching portions for my health, and even if that tends to exacerbate my vanity problem, I probably don't have to stop, and can look for other ways to alleviate the vanity thing.

 From 116.6 the other day, I'm now back below 112.  Yes, I am aware that a lot of that weight is probably water.  Still, I think it was worthwhile reacting quickly.

For one thing, I had lost track of portion size.  During the first nine months or so of the baby's ex utero life, I needed to eat a lot more than I do now, and so I had pretty much been eating freely -- seconds and thirds, whole sandwiches instead of halves, et cetera.   I have gotten out of the habit of starting with a small amount and then waiting to see if I needed more. 

Are you curious what "two days of clean eating" looks like for me?   I planned on avoiding white flour as much as I could and keeping the calorie load under 1400 calories (reasonable for me -- I'm quite small framed, and the baby has not been nursing heavily).  I am currently staying as a houseguest, so I have limited control over what's available, but with self-control I can keep from getting derailed.  Here's what I did for two days:

First day:

• Breakfast:  1 hardboiled egg.  15 fresh blueberries.  Lots of coffee.
• Lunch:  100% whole wheat tortilla wrapped around half a cup of chili with beans, two tablespoons shredded cheddar cheese, and a generous handful of fresh spinach, plus some chopped tomato and onion.  10 fresh cherries.
• Snack:  5 pecan halves, an ounce of cheddar cheese, and ten more blueberries.
• Dinner (from the local pizza chain):  A big lettuce salad with an unknown amount of shredded cheese and one tablespoon Italian dressing.  One-eighth of a large thin-crust pizza (bacon and veg).
• Unplanned eating:  About a half ounce of hard pretzel near bedtime.

I felt hungry between meals right away, which I took as a good sign.  Second day:

• Breakfast:  One hardboiled egg.  Fifteen fresh blueberries.  Lots of coffee.
• Lunch:  100% whole wheat tortilla wrapped around 100 calories' worth of Italian sausage, 2 tablespoons of tomato sauce, 2 tablespoons of mozzarella cheese, and a handful of fresh spinach.  Another big lettuce salad with an unknown amount of shredded cheese (left over from the night before) and one tablespoon Italian dressing.
• Snack:  Five pecan halves and one small apple.  Coffee.
• Dinner:  About two cups cooked canned green beans.  One half cup canned baked beans in a sugary sauce.  One quarter-pound hamburger patty with a teaspoon of ketchup.
• Unplanned eating:  About a quarter-ounce of hard pretzels.  One bite of sugar cookie.

Being a houseguest here, I'm free to make my own breakfasts and lunches from whatever's around, and dinner is whatever's being served.  The tortillas happen to be the most whole-grain bread in the house, so I stuck with them for lunch; on burger night, I quietly skipped the bun, and that didn't seem to cause a problem.    I enjoyed small portions of the sweet baked beans and the carryout pizza.  I measured the salad dressing and found the mixed-salad calories by looking them up on the restaurant website.

Some travel is coming up in which I'll have even less control over the types of food available, but I always have control over how much I eat of it.  So I'm feeling a lot better.

On a related note, I recently picked up Gary Taubes' new book, Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It.  You may remember that Taubes wrote the huge tome Good Calories, Bad Calories, which I reviewed in some detail here.  I will post a full review of the new Taubes book later, but the short review is this: 

 It's a shorter, more accessible version of Good Calories, Bad Calories.  So if you have been intimidated by that huge book, by all means, read the newer, sleeker version, and if you wish your doctor or spouse would read GCBC, consider lending them the new, less-frightening book instead.  It also contains dietary recommendations, basically for a paleo diet.  I have some comments about these recommendations, but I will save it for my full review.

The demon that feeds on fasting.

 

It just goes to show:  Never brag.  A couple of days ago I wrote a weight loss update in which I mentioned that when I tried to drop a pound, I hadn't been able to do it without effort, and (not really wanting to make the effort) I hadn't pushed it.  "But I'm holding pretty steady, and that's okay," I wrote. 

So, a couple of days after I'd been traveling, I suddenly saw my weight SPIKE.  Probably water, most of it; but my experience is that if I don't reverse it quickly, the water weight sticks around and becomes non-water weight.  Maybe a better way of putting this is that I suspect that the first sign I'm beginning to store some fat is a sudden episode of water retention.  Only a hypothesis, and only about me -- but still.  I was alarmed, and even more alarmed the next day when it didn't go away but was higher.

How big a spike?  Well, I've been a stable 113 pounds for about six weeks, but one morning the scale said 116, and the next 116.6 .  Yow!  I haven't seen either of those numbers for a long while.  And I have a philosophy about the scale:  don't bother too much about daily ups and downs, except when I see a number I haven't seen in a while.  I notice those.  The big ones scare me.

Like, really scare me.  Lie-awake-in-bed-sweating scared. 

And maybe here's the right time to mention a significant spiritual struggle.  Gluttony was a real problem for me, and somewhere between my asking and God answering and my work to meet Him where He wanted me to go, it's not a problem for me (much) anymore.  Yay me!  Except:  enter vanity.  I am now seriously, seriously afraid of regaining weight.  I like the way I look and feel now.  I am proud of myself -- not necessarily in a good way.  Am I diligent about getting to the gym... or obsessive?  It's hard to tell the difference. 

It's only natural to be pleased with my success so far.  There is, I am sure, a correct attitude somewhere, where I could be grateful to God for the gift of self-control, diligent in my stewardship of the health I have been graced with, pleased to adorn myself attractively for my husband and to reflect to the world my inward happiness and peace, and still unattached to the world and to my flesh.  I am not there.  I fear that I have made thinness and physical health an idol. 

Maybe it's always been an idol for me, but it was perhaps safer when I couldn't attain it.  Now it's my precious, y'know?  And I think the surest proof that it's really a problem is this:  I pray earnestly, "Please Lord, take away my vanity...." and what pops up in the mind is "...but even more than that please please please don't do it by making me fat again."   Don't make me choose between You and my body, I mean.  But I know darn well that God has already made me choose between Him and my flesh.

"If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple."

Oh yes, I know what THAT means.

And meanwhile I keep looking for a way around it.

+ + +

If any of my readers think of gluttony as a big spiritual problem for themselves, then maybe this sounds self-indulgent. Wish I had your spiritual struggle instead of mine, Erin!  But bear with me.  Back when I was fat, it was really obvious that food was a sort of idol for me. Looking back at those struggles back then, they seem so simple compared to these crazy mind games.   Simple, simple struggles of the flesh versus the spirit.  All I had to do was deny the flesh!  Just like it says in the Bible!  It wasn't easy to do, always, but it was easy to understand.  Such a childish little weakness, wanting more cake.  Now I struggle with spirit against spirit -- it's not myflesh that makes war against God's will, but instead my love for my flesh.  So much harder to root out cleanly.

 
Gluttony isn't that complicated to fix (it's tough, but uncomplicated), because you only have to change something visible.  Your attitude doesn't have to change right away.  You can will your fist to put down the plate, and your heart can let go later, when it sees that it is safe feeding on the Lord.  But now I have to change something invisible, while not changing the visible all that much.  Can my heart let go of the idol of health, while my decisions and actions still responsibly preserve it?  What does that look like?  Does it look like anything at all, or is it entirely within?  How?  If I could only drive this demon out by prayer and fasting -- but on fasts, this demon grows sleek and strong.

+ + +

Today, vanity or no, I'm controlling calories and experiencing hunger.  I am thankful for obedience, which relieves the heart of some of its responsibility to ferret apart good and bad intentions.  It only makes sense to follow through with my plan to respond to a weight spike with careful attention to my food intake. 

At the same time, I am troubled by the intensity of my worry, and I wonder if I can somehow find peace.  I know, rationally, that the answer is not to set my heart on thinness and health and youth and beauty -- even though these things are often rewards of a disciplined life, I must not love them.  I must love God more.  And He has not yet asked me to choose between Him and those things -- except in the tiniest possible ways, just enough to chide me, to show me where my heart lies. 

I must be willing to lose it all, cheerfully.  I am not willing.   And yet I must be willing.  And I'm not. 

Yet.

"He went away sorrowful; for he had many possessions." 

Yet.

Weight maintenance and the Akron U-turn.

It's been a while since I posted an update on the topic of weight loss and weight maintenance, which continues to be the number-one reason people find their way to my blog.  So.... how is it going?

Well, let's recap with a little data.  I gave birth almost a year ago, in January.  Here's some data that begins May first.  My postpartum goal was to take the weight down to 112.  Right about the time I got down to 112, the baby started solids.

 

Here's a closeup of data from this month.

 

I think I can safely say I'm holding pretty steady at 113, without much effort.  I want to bring it down to 110 eventually, but not on any particular time frame; and not because 113 is "too heavy," more because I want to give myself a little extra margin of error.  

So, one thing that I have noticed, about 3 years since I began the lifestyle changes that took me down to a healthy weight:  I think my body is doing a pretty good job at driving me to eat to maintain my current weight.  

About a month ago I thought I might try to control my eating a little bit more strictly to try to slowly take off just one pound.   Interestingly enough, it didn't work.  Granted, I wasn't working very hard at it (and I'm still confident that if I decide to work hard at it, I will do it).  But this is what happened several times.

(1) Day 1:  Wake up in the morning, decide "Today I will carefully watch what I eat, avoid taking seconds or nibbling leftovers, and I'll skip bedtime snack."

(2) Follow through well on this plan all day long.

(3) Day 2:  the scale will look about the same, which is fine and to be expected.  I'll continue my plan.

(4) All goes well until dinner.

(5) At dinner I'll be freezing cold and RAVENOUSLY HUNGRY.  Real, pit of the stomach hunger.  Since it's not terribly important that I lose weight at this time, I go "Screw this, I'm starving" and I have more than one helping.  

(6) Continue craving, freezing, and nibbling all evening.

(7) Day 3:  Get on the scale expecting to see that it is spiking high because I put so much food into my body the night before.  Scale actually shows that I am a pound or so low.

(8) Remain hungry, cold, and nibbly for the next couple of days.  Scale eventually returns to where I was on Day 1.  

(9) Once scale goes back to where I was, I miraculously regain the will to control my food intake.

My guess as to what's going on:  my body is driving me to eat every time I start to burn some fat, and I am mostly responding to it.   This is not a bad development, considering that where I am is a good place to be (BMI 22.8, and looking pretty good in my own opinion, and my clothes all fit.)  

I think I always have had this weight-stabilizing mechanism in place though.  I suspect most people have it, and it works pretty well even in the obese:  a feedback loop, a system of urges which responds to fat burning by driving people to eat, and which go away when we stop burning fat.     Weight stability seems to be something the body naturally seeks.  

When people say that their "hunger signals are broken" I think that this may really just mean that they have difficulty identifying the sensation of hunger as hunger -- a cognitive difficulty.  Ultimately it doesn't matter how the body convinces your will to put stuff in your mouth.  I think, sometimes, in its drive to keep you from burning more than a little fat, it will use all the tools at its disposal to get you to eat and STOP THE SCARY DANGEROUS FAT BURNING, from pure animal hunger to emotional mood swings to higher-brain rationalization.

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.  

  Not "I have made progress, so I can reverse my progress;" but "I have made progress, so I can continue my progress."

Successful weight losers have to exert their will to override all the messages the body sends them to try to put the brakes on their progress.  They have to get hungry and stay hungry for at least a little while every day.  They have to resist the impulse to respond to a milestone by turning around and going back to the last one.   

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.  If I decide I am going to drop that one pound, it will require me to spend a couple of weeks feeling an urge to eat and resisting that urge.  I know I could do it if I really wanted to because I've done it before; the evidence is that I don't want to enough right now to push back (which is fine; as I said, I am in a healthy weight range).

And there's the hard truth about weight loss in general -- if you have many pounds that you want to lose, it requires you to spend quite a long time feeling the urge to eat and resisting the urge.   It is do-able, but it is difficult, and because (I believe) the body enlists the help of the brain's rationalization capacity to trick your will into submission, it requires mustering your intellect as well.  

Because really, don't you want to get out of Akron?

The "maintenance algorithm" as it stands today.

Rebekka asked me a couple of days ago to write about the weight maintenance algorithm some more.  I already mentioned it pretty recently, but I'll do it again.  As always, I find there's a difference between the ideal and the reality, and that difference changes over time too, and I'll try to show that.

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.

Seven in a row. And a new ID.

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...

 

 * * *

In other news, my new driver's license arrived today.  It strikes me as a really stupid idea to scan pictures of my ID and put them on my blog, so I won't, but let me tell you -- the difference between the old one and the new one is really cool.  I keep putting them side by side and looking at them.

A couple of times over the last couple of years, I pulled my driver's license out to prove to someone that I used to be heavy.  (The weight listed on my old DL is 160 lbs; my new one, 112.)  I think I'll go on carrying the old one in a spare slot in my wallet.

 

Post-mining complete for printable version.

OK, I've been through my ENTIRE blog since the beginning of 2008 and I have stuck every post that had anything to do with weight loss into one or more of four provisional categories:

1. Weight Subtopic Other Writers (where I do links to other people or sometimes book reviews)
2. Weight Subtopic Recipes Menus (self-explanatory)
3. Weight Subtopic Tips (also, I hope, self-explanatory)
4. Weight Subtopic Personal (which was going to be "my personal story" but also which got "personal philosophy" in there too and so is very bloated compared to the others.)

I am still not sure what form to put everything in.  I guess the biggest question is, should I take the "personal" subtopic and divide it up into two or more separate threads?  There seems to be a difference between "just telling my own story" and struggling to articulate principles that might help other people, but the dividing line is difficult.

I could just leave it as it is now, put together chronologically.  If you'd like to see roughly what that would look like, only backwards, you could start with the earliest posts (which as of today appear at this link: http://arlinghaus.typepad.com/blog/weight-subtopic-personal/page/19/), go to the bottom, and read upwards/page backward.  

(Note for the future:  As I continue to post in that category, the "earliest" posts will move to a page with a higher index page number.  So that link may go out of date.)

If you've an opinion, let me know in the comments.

Seeking.

I just had to pull this analogy out of the comments to the last post, because I think Tabitha hit it out of the park.  I had written that I didn't think cutting back on habits and  "just maintaining" the numbers on the scale was a good goal, because going back to old habits isn't "maintaining" behavior, it's "gaining" behavior.  Tabitha wrote:

I see what you mean, Erin. It's like when my NFP teacher told me that if you "take chances" your behavior says you are seeking a pregnancy.

The eating behaviors aren't a perfect analogy, of course, but it makes sense that you either have the healthy habits or gaining habits.

I remember encountering that language in NFP class too, and I thought it was a very helpful and realistic way of thinking about it.  There is no such thing as "avoiding pregnancy" and "taking chances" at the same time.  The criterion of whether you're "seeking pregnancy" or "avoiding pregnancy" is to be judged by what your ACTUAL REAL BEHAVIOR is consistent with.  

That's not to say there's not room for an oops, as in, an honest mistake interpreting a chart, or medication screwing up your fertility signs -- that's a time when you might say "I was avoiding pregnancy but I got pregnant anyway" --- although a better way of phrasing it would be "I THOUGHT I was avoiding pregnancy but I got pregnant anyway."

But see here, if you have sex during your fertile time, you're "seeking pregnancy" even if you don't want to get pregnant.  Your biology doesn't care one whit about your intentions, or whether you have your fingers crossed.

And yeah, Tabitha's right -- regaining weight is kind of like that, although it can be a little more complicated because there are more behaviors involved.  If you change enough of your habits from "new weight-maintaining habit" to "old weight-gaining habit," well, you're trying to gain weight, whether you want to or not.  

That's why I want to point out that it's much better to think in terms of permanent change to new, low-weight-maintaining behaviors, and eliminating the old, high-weight-maintaining behaviors.

Just maintaining.

I'm almost done going through and finding all my weight loss posts and categorizing them into broad categories so that I can maybe, eventually, produce a printable version.    

Along the way I'm re-reading some of them, remembering where I was at each stage, and occasionally thinking of interesting updates.  (Remember those cookies on my dresser?  Guess what?  They are STILL THERE.)

One thing I've been trying to figure out is whether there is really anything original or unique about my own approach and philosophy.  I know that I have an original and unique personal experience and an original and unique voice, because everyone does, sheesh.  But what is there in the meat of what I did and what I write about that is different from all the other gazillion books out there?  If not, why bother?  (Of course, the other way of looking at it is -- if so many other people can publish and self-publish the same old advice over and over again, why not me?  But I digress.)

The part that seems to me like it might not have been done (much) before is the notion that what we really can control is the habit-changing, not the numbers changing.   To let go of the numbers and embrace the desirable habits whether they "pay" in numbers or not.  Add that to the idea of measuring and celebrating success in habits, not in numbers -- and the idea of adding habits slowly, systematically, and deliberately ---and I'm not sure I've seen that anywhere else.  

The closest thing I've seen is in The Beck Diet, which is a cognitive-behavioral therapist's take on it.  I am not a cognitive-behavioral therapist, but it seems like a good approach (or at least, it seems similar to mine).

Is there something I'm missing, or does that sound about right?

This occurred to me a couple of weeks ago when a friend who has been changing her habits and who has dropped 20-odd pounds in the last several months posted that she was changing her goals during an upcoming stressful time.  She was going to work on maintaining her weight rather than on losing weight during that period of predictable high stress.  

It is the sort of thing that years ago I would have said "Great goal!"  about, but these days I just don't believe that anymore.  I commented that I didn't think maintaining the scale was a "goal."  The reason I gave is that it's not directly under your control the way habit is.  (Post and comment are here.)

It bugged me and bugged me for a few days because there was something else about the notion of easing up on yourself, and just maintaining weight rather than continuing to lose it, during a stressful time that bugged me. Even though on the surface it sounded perfectly reasonable.

And then this morning I think I figured it out.  Here on the other side of weight loss, it's perfectly obvious that "how I lost the weight" and "how I maintain the weight" are THE SAME.  There is not a  significant difference between my behaviors as a weight-losing person and my behaviors as a weight-maintaining person.  

Oh, sure, I must be consuming more calories.  (Especially since I am breastfeeding an eight-month-old.)  But the habits are not very different.  At least, if you compare these three versions of me:

•  (A) stable-but-heavy, pre-2008 me; 
• (B) 2008, weight-losing me; 
• (C) stable-but-normal weight, current me

... well, (A) and (C) behave very, very differently.  (B) and (C) behave much the same.  

(Whereas conventional energy-balance wisdom might seem to imply that (A) and (C) would behave similarly, and (B) is the one who would be behaving differently.)

I guess I now believe that maintaining is just as hard, or just as easy, as losing weight.  I guess I now believe that you can't really save much effort and stress by changing from "trying to lose" to "trying to maintain."  Going back to old habits is not "maintaining" behavior, it's "gaining" behavior.

What you can do to ease up on yourself, to make things less stressful, is to temporarily stop adding new good habits and "maintain" the ones you have.  

Like much that I've learned, it's kind of bad news.   But it's good news in a way too, I think.