Losing weight is still hard.
I lost 52 pounds from February 2008 to February 2009.
I gained back 8 of them, and am currently in the repeating process of gaining and losing the top 4 of those pounds.
I don’t feel that this recent struggle is a black mark on my success; on the contrary, I think it’s the establishment of a new starting place. I never reached my goal, and I still have time.
But golly, gee, damn is it harder now.
I had this idea that, after having lost 50 pounds, my body would have made some kind of adjustment. Nope. Now I am just more hungry, even when I’m maintaining my weight. I recently described myself as “teetering on the edge of starvation” which was apt for how I felt at that time, and I was rewarded for that day with a reasonable loss.
I shouldn’t complain too heartily about a minor setback nor a plateau. This is me not complaining.
I am very happy about what I’ve been able to achieve, and aim to be happier when I achieve it all again, and more. Even still, I really had a misconception that something essential would change. When I weighed in the 200 lbs range, it never occurred to me that I could lose all this weight and not be happy.
And here I am still nearly 50 lbs lighter than the day I started, and every day I wake up, look in the mirror, and see a much smaller fat person. This is very much a glass-half-empty/glass-half-full situation. Yay for being much smaller! Boo for still seeing and feeling myself as a fat person. I see people who I know are the same size as I am, objectively; we’d displace the same volume of water and yet I think that they are thinner, fitter and more fabulous than I am. (Which is not to say that I think negatively about myself, only that I *compare* myself negatively, as if I can’t possibly compare with x other thing/person/achievement in question.)
I looked at myself in a mirror today, and had to ask the friend I was with: is this what I really look like? Because I looked much thinner than in my mirror at home, and I couldn’t evaluate how well my own image represented me without having someone else look at me, and then compare me to my reflection and let me know.
All the posts I’m making these days demonstrate that my the real battles are not fought on my scale, on my plate, or in my actions, but truly in my head. And I wonder if I’ll ever stop thinking like the heavier person I used to be. Or will my mind just rattle around inside a shell that’s much too big?
I can say this for sure. The past two months, dealing with an intensity of emotion I’ve rarely experienced in my life, and a level of loss that is (thus far and completely, completely luckily) unparalleled, I let myself fall into a tailspin. And as far as diet, health and fitness are concerned, here are the things I’ve experienced and learned from it:
1. Convenience foods, which I entertained to make things easier on myself for a while, predictably only made things harder. Convenience foods are 100-Calorie packs of all shapes and sizes. Processed food derivatives. Things that come wrapped in plastic and waxed paper in boxes of 12 for $3.99. Frozen, refrigerated or straight up cupboard storage. Things that did not at all resemble The shit’s bad, folks, it messed me up in my head, in my body and in the world, from my trash can to the landfill.
a) They were remarkably unsatisfying for such greasy, fatty morsels. I expected to have a craving quashed by a serving, and what I found was that I was revved and ready for more.
b) They are digestion’s worst friend, all those hydrogenated oils and heavy who knows what. I’ve never had problems with regularity, but as a result of convenience snack foods, I now take my fiber pills every day. Yup, I’m 30.
c) They are incredibly wasteful! So much plastic for a little snack. I knew after opening my first ever box that I’d never buy them again, and I hold myself to this promise.
Someone recommended that I might try them and not be so hard on myself with weight loss. I don’t blame that recommendation for the 8 lbs of work cut out for me, but I blame myself for following it. I did myself far more harm than good.
2. Kidding myself (and/or being lazy) never works. Inadequately accounting for my food intake may be a pleasing game to play on the face of it, but on the other face of it (namely, the face of the scale in the morning) it means more disappointment and feelings of failure. It’s easy to eyeball measurements and be slack about keeping track, but let me tell you that when you’re eating about half of what you were when you started this crazy game, suddenly every bite counts for something. It may be satisfying to play the mental numbers game and fudge a few here and there, but either way I had to suck it up and deal with reality in the end. Sooner is definitely better than later.
3. I now find myself thinking things like, “I gained 3 lb and now my jeans don’t fit right!” 40 lbs up from here, I’d hear “skinny” girls say things like this and beseech them to cry me a river in the soundoff in the back of my head. But 40 lb ago, 3 lb was a much less significant fraction of my total weight than it is now, and I am now able to appreciate that problem.
3 lb is also far harder to lose and much easier to gain than it was when I was 40 pounds heavier. Perspective is everything. I eat my words and thoughts.
