What the Numbers Say

My previous weight loss attempts have been so short lived that the only data I have are a small pile of old Weight Watchers cards which show that I lost weight.  Then it ends and I have no idea what happened next.  Well I do know – I obviously put all the weight back on – but I don’t know how long it took me or what was going on in my life to make me give up so quickly.

This time I have 22 months of numbers because, even though I’ve had struggles, I haven’t quit. I haven’t quit!!!! That’s a shout-it-from-the-rooftops fact.  So I can see how what was going on in my life affected my weight and vice versa.   Here’s what it looks like so far split into five different “eras”.

January – June 2008

Jan -4

Feb -5

Mar +1

Apr +1

May +1

Jun +1

- 5

I can remember seeing pictures of myself at Christmas and feeling a little stick. That’s when I stepped on the scale expecting to be around 160 but really saw 170.  I was also alarmed by my elderly parents’ lack of mobility and realised that I needed to start working on that immediately rather than wait until it was a problem so we joined a gym and really got working hard.   I obviously worked at it for a couple of months then petered out and started to put it all on again. I don’t really know when the pounds came back on but I do know that five were still off the next time I weighed myself in July.

There was a big family wedding that May which included hours of video and thousands of pictures.  There was no escaping that I had more work to do but I was so so fed up with dieting.

July to November 2008

Jul  -4

Aug  -5

Sep  -3

Oct  -3

Nov -2

-16

It was in July that something snapped and I realised there was no way I was going to spend the rest of my life dieting, getting bored and putting it all back on again.   The start is documented here and the concept of Talking It Off was born. I wrote and wrote and wrote and worked hard.  We had workmen in the house for the summer and no kitchen but I was SO determined that nothing was going to halt the process.

Then life happened and I got “the call” to fly home because Mom had had a terrible accident.  I spent September and October living with my elderly dad and trying to sort out getting my brain-injured mom back home with him. (Sadly, that didn’t work and she’s in a care home.) The weight kept falling off, partly because I walked a lot and partly because I was in that very rare state of being too stressed to eat.

Then, I had my own health issues and, when the weight continued to come off easily, I panicked and decided (as you do) that I was dying.  The next phase reflects all that.

December 2008 – February 2009

Dec +5

Jan 0

Feb +3

+8

I had lost my appetite so much that I forced myself to eat with the obvious results.  I finally had surgery in January which gave me the all-clear but, two weeks into my recovery, Dad died suddenly.  I spent February alone in my parents’ house, both of them gone in different ways, and I ate my grief.  The gain was limited by daily walking and the fact that I kept checking in with my  friends and trying to find a strategy for dealing with the apparently unlimited food in my life.

March to August 2009

Mar  -1.5

Apr 0

May -2

Jun  -1.5

Jul 0

Aug 0

-5

I have since found myself in a bizarre lifestyle of two or three months in my own house with my husband and my work followed by a month to six weeks alone in my mom’s house 5,000 miles away with a completely different routine.  The six months from March to August this year were a regrouping time characterised by sudden flashes of grief, some interesting times with peri-menopausal hormones and inconsistent exercise.

But the weight was coming off again and I didn’t give up because I knew (and know) without a doubt that there is nothing in my life that can be made better by being ten pounds heavier.  Nothing.

September 2009 – Present

Sep +1

Oct  -4

Nov  -1 so far…….

This final era is a work in progress.  After a wreck of a September, I feel like getting down to the hard work again – which means both watching the food and getting in the exercise.  From the beginning, many years ago on the BCB site, my strap line has been “still keeping a promise to myself”.   That promise was to get to a sensible weight and stay there for a whole year and I still have every intention of doing that.  I’m still not quite sure what that lower wieght should be but I want to figure it out by the end of the year and have 2010 actually be that year of keeping my promise – of allowing myself to learn to be smaller and learn what it takes to keep off the weight.