Weighing Every Day

 Psychology of Weight Loss, Things to try, Thoughts on the Process  No Responses »
Jan 142012
 
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How often should you weigh yourself?

If I were starting out on this weight loss thing for the first time, I’d say never more than once a week.

However, I have a history with scale insanity – brought about by the combination of my natural fear of failure and the stressful weekly ritual of the Weight Watchers weigh-in.

What do I mean by scale insanity?

I mean wearing the lightest clothes I own – but only after the initial weigh-in – then progressing to taking off my watch then my wedding ring.

I mean not eating breakfast and taking my coffee in a travel mug so that I can drink it after stepping on the scale.

I mean seeing that weekly event as something that could make or break my day.

I mean allowing myself to be defined by a number.

That’s not sane.

So the only way I could think of breaking that was to weigh myself every day till it held no power over me.

It works but there are strict parameters:

Weigh only first thing in the morning without clothes. (wedding ring can stay!)

Weigh only once. If your scale doesn’t give the same reading when you weigh yourself 3 times in 3 minutes, get a new scale.

Practice and practice some more the skill of seeing that the scale is just measuring changes in the weight of the composition of your body. It will fluctuate all over the place and does not in any way reflect who you are as a person.

Only another sufferer of scale insanity would think that the above sentence is not crazy.

Please please please only embark on daily weighing if it makes you more sane about your body rather than less. And never ever ever step on the scale in the evening. Really. Just don’t.

If you’d like to be bored to tears by the slow progress of my own weight loss, you can keep tabs on my Daily Weigh page.

 

 Posted by Millie at 3:20 am  Tagged with: ,

Experiments in Food Journalling

 Keeping Going, Psychology of Weight Loss  No Responses »
Dec 132011
 
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Last week’s “freedom” experiment morphed into a diet journalling exercise that has been most illuminating.

Before I eat, I have been asking myself (in writing):

  • What do I want this food to do for me?
  • How do I want to feel after I’ve eaten it?

And then I’ve been recording the results.  Here’s an assortment of entries from the last 9 days:

Sunday

2:30 No lunch yet and feeling hungry. What do I want from food? ~not to feel hungry. ~ to just get by until supper. 

Rushed to ferry. Ate pistachios and San Pellegrino lemonade sitting at the dock. Don’t feel hungry anymore but also don’t feel satisfied. Will cook a big pot of chili when I get home. Feel like I need protein and vegetables.

Monday

I want to eat to alleviate the fact that I have to face the Christmas party at Mom’s care home. I ate a bowl of chicken chili and felt full but not uncomfortable. Guess what? Food doesn’t take away responsibility so off to the party.

Party – not the least bit hungry but glad I went. Shared an orange with Mom and had a cup of coffee and a cookie just to be sociable.

Later

In the evening I remembered that I had all sorts of candies ready to decorate a gingerbread house. This is normally permission to to be stupid with food- just because it’s there.

Ate 2 toffees then made a cup of tea. Ate 2 more. Do I want more? Not really. They don’t add anything positive to how I feel. They don’t make me feel less hungry or nourished. They don’t leave a good taste. So will I eat more? Not if I want to get where I want to be.

So I didn’t. I have had that large bag of candy in my possession for a week and have eaten only 4.  This is a result which may just deserve the adjective, “miraculous”.

One caveat: I’m doing this during the sanest two weeks of my hormonal month. Therefore, I’m committed to keeping this going right through the nuttiness of Christmas and people and hormones just to see if I can still get results.

Whatever, I have rarely felt so in control of my eating and so satisfied by what I do eat. As I said earlier: illuminating.

 Posted by Millie at 11:06 am

Looking for Freedom

 Keeping Going, Psychology of Weight Loss  No Responses »
Dec 072011
 
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Not giving up on finding a solution to this disordered eating is the best I can offer at the moment. I’d rather report a big loss and do a “happy dance” about how loose my jeans are (that’s the way it works in Weight Loss World) but, instead I’m just plugging along trying to work out why most of my eating has nothing to do with physical hunger.

Of course, I have insight; no one writes about a subject for three years without developing a little insight into the matter. But I find that I need to deep revisiting those insights in order to make progress. This is all about making progress – keeping weight off and heading towards food/body healing.

That’s why it was SO SO SO frustrating to have put weight back on over the summer.  I was just cruising through my days – downhill, feet off the pedals, hands off the handlebars. It felt so good and was pretty upsetting to realize that I was actually just riding fast, without brakes, into a brick wall.

OK – so I stopped and tried to get back to my “normal” which is paying attention to what I’m doing and taking off those stupid 7 pounds. SEVEN. Not seventy.  But still. It’s heading up and, unchecked, would certainly end up thirty again.

Right now I’d chose sane over thin – except when I look in the mirror. Can I please have both?  Can I please live a life of moderation AND have a waist?

Anyway – back to the insight.  I was reading a column by a woman who’s fighting anorexia and she was talking about how her eating disorder was really about keeping control in a messy world.  It reminded me of the discovery I made some time ago that eating whatever and whenever, for me, is about freedom.  I’m a terribly responsible person and would never engage in any kind of reckless behaviour that could possibly harm anyone else but I need FREEDOM – from routine, from responsibility, from expectations.

But I can’t be irresponsible.

I can’t just go out and drive fast or refuse to work or take drugs.

I’m not going to have an affair because I’m still completely in love with the man who’s been in my life for 30 years.

I was tempted to pitch a tent at St Paul’s but I don’t like protesting under anyone else’s banner.

I could certainly drink but I grew up in a family soaked in alcohol so I try to exercise some restraint there.

I did take on a profession which is unstable and unpredictable but leaves me pretty much in control of my time. That feels good.

I did let my hair go grey which happily horrified quite a few people, but they all seem to like it more than I do now so it hardly feels rebellious – though I am happily free from hair dye.

So that leaves eating. When I feel constrained by the responsibilities of my world, I eat. Of course, choosing the freedom to eat when and what I eat is also rejecting the freedom to wear the clothes I want or to like what I see in the mirror.

So – just for today – which FREEDOM do I choose?

Actually – that’s got to be asked more often than once daily. When I’m faced with a food decision today, I’ll ask myself what I’m doing: nourishing my body or satisfying my need for freedom.

Better get to it.

 Posted by Millie at 9:29 am

The Effects of Not Eating

 Psychology of Weight Loss  No Responses »
Nov 122011
 
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And by “effects” I don’t mean weight loss.

All day yesterday when thinking about eating, I asked myself, “What would happen if I didn’t eat?”  And here’s what happened.

  • Breakfast: Knew I’d be very cranky and hungry if I didn’t eat so I did.
  • Lunch in a coffee shop: The answer was I’d be too hungry to keep shopping so I ordered a small latte half a sandwich rather than a large latte and a whole sandwich.
  • Mid afternoon, walking past every other coffee shop two hours later when I was a little hungry and a lot fed up with shopping: I decided I wouldn’t die if I didn’t eat so I went home and had a big mug of tea.
  • Supper, faced with portion decisions: I decided I could eat a smaller portion than usual and filled up my plate with vegetables.
  • By 8 I was hungryish – not very and I didn’t really wait for an answer to the “what if I didn’t” question before eating peanut butter on a ryvita. Note that it was a good choice of food for the situation but I still wished I’d thought harder about finding an answer before eating it. I think this is just a matter of getting better at asking and waiting for myself to answer before eating.
  • Evening in a house with no wine: Asked myself what would happen if I didn’t have a gin and tonic. The answer was that I would become very resentful of the water I’d been happily drinking so I had a g & t.
  • Later in the evening (10:30 maybe) when the husband cracked open the cheese: I asked myself what would happen if I didn’t eat cheese too. Embarassingly, I decided that this could make me angry if I had to sit there and watch him enjoy cheese and bread and whiskey- even though I wasn’t in the least bit angry about anything else. So, I  went and got myself a little cheese and ate it.

I think we’ll call that little blip “dieting resentment” and I need to learn to think positively during those moments of self-denial that will have good consequences down the road a ways. What I should have done was just remove myself from the cheese – because it did look and smell good – and done something else for a few minutes that didn’t involve going into the kitchen. Next time.

Day 2 begins, complete with wine and cheese party tonight. Deep breath.

 Posted by Millie at 2:04 am  Tagged with: ,

Psychology and Weight Loss

 Psychology of Weight Loss  No Responses »
Nov 112011
 
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Losing weight and keeping it off involves acheiving a complete overhaul of, not just a person’s nutrition and exercise, but the way they think about food and their body. See yesterday’s post for more on the research that’s got me thinking about this.

I’ve spent years getting to know what kind of healthy eating works for me and what kind of exercise I can commit to for as long as my body will let me. But I still weigh too much because the psychological side of things lags behind the physical.

I’m pretty much a pro at the “just do it” side of things. I eat well and exercise……..ready for it?…………under ideal life conditions.

Who’s got those for more than 2 or 3 days at a time?  Not me.

So now I’m trusting in what I know about nutrition and getting to work on my psyche. This means ploughing through even when life is less than ideal. I fully understand that this doesn’t involve quick fixes. Instead, I just want to practice thinking in new ways about food, body and self.

Here’s what’s happened over the past two days

I decided that I often eat because it’s what I usually do at a certain time or what I do when a certain mood hits. So, yesterday I decided not to eat for most of the day. I had liquids and ate a small supper but mostly I wanted to draw a line between my slightly out of control food behaviour and a new way of thinking.

Today I started the experiment. All day today and for the next while  -always factoring my low boredom threshold – I’m trying not to think in terms of what I will feel like if I eat something, but what I’ll feel like if I don’t eat something. Will I still be stressed?  Will I still be hungry? Will it make me angry not to eat? Could it have another effect? If the answer is that I’ll be hungry, I eat the smallest portion available and check to see if I’m still hungry.

This isn’t a long term thing but it’s making me think of food from a different angle – not what eating will do for me but what NOT eating will do for me. If not eating will produce a negative effect, then I’ll eat.

Convoluted? Maybe….but I need to turn things upside down just to see my own chronically poor eating behaviour from another perspective.

Stay tuned. There’s a weekend of socialising to get through.

 Posted by Millie at 10:21 am  Tagged with: ,
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