Lying awake last night, in an effort to stop thinking about packing, I started thinking about this whole weight loss journey.

For ages now I’ve been thinking that I’m ready to experience maintenance, finally – for the first time ever – actually paying attention to keeping my weight stable.  But I’m not yet at the weight I want to maintain.

SO…..and this is where I’m feeling a little bit clever, what if I focus on maintaining the weight I want to be?

What if I just eat and move as though I’m lighter than I actually am?  Wouldn’t I eventually just weigh that much?

I’ve taken 2 years to get to where I am anyway and that slow process has been the best thing possible for changing my thinking about the “all or nothing” pendulum of weight loss and weight gain.  However, it’s only slowed it and I want to stop the pendulum completely!  I want to just eat the way I’m going to have to eat for the rest of my life, understanding that I will need less as I get older and that I will have to stay committed to moving.

There’s no getting away from the fact that, to lose weight right now, I have to put myself into “diet” mode and I need a break from that. A big fat permanent break.

Of course, I’m only saying all this because I’m not particularly unhappy with how I’m looking these days.  For my optimum health and vanity I should weigh less, but, in the big scheme of an increasingly obese society, I don’t look very fat.  I also own clothes that I like and want to wear again in the autumn and winter.  In truth, I’ll be very happy to take a whole year to lose the last bit of weight.  But I’m not sure it’s going to take that long.

Here are the numbers:

A sedentary 50 year old woman who is maintaining a weight of 135 pounds should eat about 70 calories per day less than a moderatley active 49 year old woman who weighs 145 pounds.

When I factor in my minimal weekly activity,  I figure I’ve got a deficit of around 230 calories per day.

Of course, I will lose that 70 calories from the age and weight difference as I get older and lighter, so I’ll have to move that much more every day.  I’m hoping that walking about extra mile will do the trick.

If 10 pounds equals 35,000 calories, it will take me around 22 weeks to actually end up weighing 135 pounds.  That’s basically how many weeks there are left this year.  And I’m not that fussed about the 135 number – it was just nice and tidy to think in terms of 10 pounds. I’m also not that fussed about the 5 months.  I turn 50 at the end of April so wouldn’t that be a nice gift to give myself?

So – a recap of this experiment.  For the next few months I’m going to eat as though I’m an inactive 135 pound 50 year old.  But I’m going to live as though I’m a moderately active 49 year old. By the time I’m actually 50, I will know what it takes to stay slim and healthy.

That’s the plan.

At least until someone points out the fatal flaw in my apparently flawless thinking……….

Thanks to daily weighing, I can now safely say without a doubt that eating and drinking too much and moving too little lead to weight gain.

Yes,

I know,

D’UH.

But there are still weeks when I’d like to “get away with it”- defy nature, as Donna said.

Bizarrely, until I typed the words “defy nature”, I had forgotten what I’d written about just a few days ago. It must be something that I really need to process in order to get over this period/slump/quagmire.

On a positive note, I am certainly more body aware now than I was a couple of years ago.  A “slump” like this would last months or more and I wouldn’t step on the scale until my weight was into the 160s – or the 170s as in January 2008.

So I’m happy that I get this feeling at 146. I promised the women over at BCB that I wouldn’t weigh more than 145.8  by the time I got to my specialist’s appointment at the hospital next week.  Rather than set that as a distant boundary, I used it as a safe target so that I could give myself permission to eat and drink my stress away.  As of this moment, I no longer have that permission.

• I have permission to walk off my stress.
• I have permission to bubble bath my stress away.
• I have permission to curl up with a good book – and there’s one by my bed.
• I have permission to work.
• I have permission to drink large mugs of tea if I need to feel warm and full.

I don’t have permission to bake and eat.

I don’t have permission to eat more than enough for one person.

I don’t have permission to open another bottle of wine.

And the reason I’m banishing those things is NOT because I want to live some joyless life, but because I simply need to cope with stress in other ways.  I know what the other ways are, but I never give them enough of a chance to become real tools in my life.  They are always food substitutes rather than real stress-relievers.  I want to get my mind to the point that I think of walking or reading when I feel stressed.  Right now I think of walking or reading or bubble bathing as something to combat the urge to eat – not something to calm the worry.

Well that was revealing so I’m going to say it again but louder:

Right now I think of walking or reading or bubble bathing as something to combat the urge to eat – not something to calm the worry.

I am going to find foodless drinkless tools for combatting stress.  Maybe I should crack that Beck book finally to see if I can make some permanent changes in my thinking.

Happy Weekend.

Why does it take me so long to get to the point of actually going beyond good intentions to good practice?

Why does it take weeks to go from wanting to do the right thing to actually doing it?

That’s the same question but it baffles me so much that I wanted to ask it twice.

The word that keeps flashing in my brain is FREEDOM – a concept that comes up again and again for me in this battle to gain food/body sanity.  When I get my thinking twisted around, I find myself looking for freedom in all the wrong places.

I can have the freedom to eat and drink whatever and whenever I want.  This includes the freedom to sit around and do nothing whenever I want.

OR

I can have the freedom to feel comfortable in my own skin, the freedom to look good in clothes, the freedom to run up stairs and not collapse at the top.

So two sets of freedoms which each cost the other.

Each cost the other – I’d never thought of it like that before.  I don’t expect to be able to smoke and have healthy lungs. I don’t expect to spend all my money and have it in the bank.  Everything costs – good stuff and bad stuff in my life – it all costs something.

OK – So I what will food and body sanity cost me today?  This week?

Today it will cost me being thoughtful while I’m shopping in the city.  It will cost me the effort to say “small” and “skinny” when ordering a coffee.  It will cost me reading some labels when I order lunch.  It will cost me asking if we can eat somewhere with nutritional info – which costs me my delightful freedom of eating in my favourite Italian cafe.

OR  I can eat in my favourite Italian cafe and commit to a long walk later this afternoon.  Or it might cost me a short walk and water rather than a g&t before dinner and carrot sticks for a snack later on.

Freedom costs – but it doesn’t have to be all or nothing.  I get that for now.  I wonder how long it will be before I need to write about his again?

But in the meantime – I’m going shopping.

Thinking about the diet/non-diet thing again and how exercise reflects my frame of mind.

When I have my diet head on, I exercise to eat.  I see my hour on the treadmill as earning calories.  I think that attitude comes largely from Weight Watchers which does encourage exercise as “earning Points”.

But my non-diet head strives to eat to live and I want exercise to simply be part of living.  So yesterday, before I went to the gym, I ate a tablespoon of peanut butter on a ryvita and drank a small glass of milk.  Of course, I barely burnt off enough calories to cover that, but I felt great on the treadmill.

Even writing this, I’m wondering if the difference is so subtle that it doesn’t matter.  As long as you exercise, why fuss about the reason?

But I’ve always failed at maintaining weight loss because of the on-diet/off-diet attitude and exercise gets tangled up in it and disappears when I’m “off”.  So maybe I need to be strict with myself for a while and only eat to exercise because that’s the attitude I want to take with me for the rest of my life. I want to eat to fuel my body and enjoy social times without ignoring that.  I don’t want to exercise like mad because I’ve got a dinner coming up where I might want to stuff my face.

What do you think?  Do you eat to move or move to eat?