"My goal is to get the weight off and, this time, to keep it off."
"No...what is your goal? How much do you want to lose?"
"I don't care. Pick a number for me. YOU tell me what I am supposed to weigh and I will hit it. My goal is to get the weight off and keep it off."
I wasn't playing around. I didn't know why she couldn't get my point. I was not a rookie to weight loss. I had been a yo-yo dieter since I was 10 years old. I was now 46. 36 years of this crap had me at 286 lbs. I wanted to make a change and I wanted it permanently. I also knew, from experience, that once the weight was lost, the hardest part lie in front of me.
When I finished the diet around November 6th of last year, I weighed 205. I stepped on the scale yesterday. 200 lbs. It has been a year and I am 5 lbs lighter. One year later I have achieved my goal.
It has been a while since I posted to the diet blog. I am going to celebrate my one year anniversary by addressing the challenges along the way.
Dieting is hard for almost everyone. The optifast diet made the dieting part easy for me. 900 calories per day of a rigid eating regimen coupled with 2.6 miles per day of brisk walking to create exertion resulted in about 80-85 lbs lost. Approached this way, it was a very fast process. Many people on this diet, however, do not exercise or do not follow the strict eating guidelines. When they do this, the diet takes a long time. It puts the optifast dieter into the same category as all other dieters. It makes you feel like dieting is your life. That is because, when you lose weight that way, it takes a long time and it IS your life. That is why so many people fail on diets. When it becomes your life it hangs over you like a shadow. You wonder every single day if you will ever be able to wake up in the morning and not think about the diet.
If you think that is hard, I have some bad news for you. When you finally reach that goal of losing all the weight you wanted to lose, that is precisely how you will live the rest of your life.
I know. That sounds incredibly demoralizing. It shouldn't. The one thing that makes getting thin and staying thin different is being able to see yourself thin (the fruits of your labor) and knowing that you never want to go back to what you were. When I get on that scale each morning (and I weigh myself EVERY day) and see myself in the mirror, I smile. When I pull on my pants and see the "Size 36" waist marker (remembering that it was 42 last year), I smile again. When I sit in my car and see the loose piece of plastic under my seat that broke last year because I was massive, I smile again. You know, I purposely didn't fix it because it makes me smile when I see it. Seeing what you have become makes the discipline easier than getting up every morning, looking in the mirror, and sadly thinking you will never get there and that you are suffering. That is the difference.
If you are still trying to achieve that critical first step of just losing the weight, there is light at the end of the tunnel. You WILL be able to look at yourself in the mirror and like what you see. Once you do that, it makes the discipline easier than what you are going through to complete that first step.
Believe it or not, many thin people think about what they eat every day. It is how they manage to stay thin. They have, however, become so regular about it that it doesn't seem like they are thinking about it at all. That is the trick. That is the trick right there. People who you know as thin regulate themselves as a normal course of action. Whether from good eating habits, an active life style or some built in neurosis from strange parenting, they are doing it reflexively. THAT is one of the tricks to keeping the weight off. The way you think about your eating has to first become concious and then it has to become unconcious. Once that happens, you will NOT think about the diet every day. Your body and its eating habits will be on autopilot.
This is the first trick to keeping the weight off. You have to find a way to build into your psyche the same thought processes that are in the thin people. I believe I have successfully done that. I do not eat reflexively anymore...but I also do not make my eating choices by over-thinking it. I plan my meals each day and I plan my exercise and I stick to it. Planning meals sounds hard. It isn't. What that means is that I know what I am going to eat everyday. I know if I go out to lunch that I am going to stick to roughly the same healthy choices. I have built into my head a rough idea of how many calories I am taking in when I eat and I am keeping a running ticker. My breakfast is the same every day. My snacks come to work with me in a bag. Granola and berries for mid morning. Nut mix for the afternoon or a protein bar. If lunch seems to be overdone, I will make sure I lighten the load for dinner. It has become reflexive. So much so that when I watch other people eat meals, I do the math and figure they won't need to eat for the next two days.
I also exercise regularly. Some would say I over-exercise. When I count the calories, I also know how much I burn when I exercise. Exercising makes me feel like I can have small indulgences. Sometimes they are medium to large indulgences. I now jog/run about 25 miles per week. At age 47, I ran my first 5K road race last Saturday. I ran it in 24:08. For my age bracket of 45-49 years old, that is supposed to be an excellent time. I surprised a lot of people with the time, I surprised myself. Pleasantly.
So I am going to blog this week about the challenges of keeping the weight off. Many things like (a) disruptions to the routine, (b) alcohol, (c) visiting old habits, and (d) finally burning the old BIG clothes. Glad to be back for a while. Stay focused and keep the faith, it will work out for you.
Next: Your new life and how people treat you
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