Yesterday, for the first time in forever, I went for a mind-clearing 5 mile walk – in under 72 minutes, I might add – and found myself thinking about where I am today with my weight/body/mind insanity sanity.

It’s almost three years since I stepped on the scale and realised that I’d put back on all the weight I’d worked so hard to lose for a big family wedding.  I’d done it many times before, but this time I also heard a voice from deep inside that said, “NO MORE”.

I didn’t feel any sense of thrill about dieting; I just knew I had to do it. Surrounded by supportive cyber-friends I decided to combine hard work with writing about the weight loss process – no “click”, no dieting euphoria.  That was the start of breaking a cycle that I had been perpetuating in my life since my teens.

So what about now?  How is it possible that the first 20 pounds has stayed off and I’m on my way to the last 10 being gone forever?  I’m not talking about losing the weight – dieting is not a problem – I’m talking about keeping it off.

• No whining.  No excuses.

Ah, BCB.  If I hadn’t learned this, I never would have learned that there was no one but MYSELF who was responsible for the amount of fat on my body and for the negative way I was feeding my body.  Years of food/body issues can make a person take on a victim role.  No excuses means the following: If there’s junk food in my cupboard, I put it there.  If there’s wine in my belly, I put it there.  If there’s fat on my body – I put it there.  There’s been lots of complicated life stuff to sort through, but in the end, if I feed my sadness/anger/boredom  (fill in your own favourite state of mind), then I will gain weight. I may not be able to fix my life, (just call me Queen of Understatement), but I CAN choose how I deal with those emotions.  I’m not a victim.

• Permanent change.

For the first time ever, I realised that this couldn’t be a “diet” followed by “normal”.  It was all a new normal.  This meant that I actually bothered to find new foods to love not just new “diet foods”.

For the years and years and years (30 plus) that I regained every pound lost through dieting, I can see now that I simply didn’t want to change.  I didn’t want a new way of eating.  I didn’t want to not eat when I wasn’t hungry.  My body proved quite dramatically that these weren’t great decisions but it took me a long long time to work out the (obvious) connection.

• Move for the sake of your health, not for weight loss.

This is a new one for me.  Years of earning “Points” have led me to equate exercise with being allowed to eat more.  This past year I’ve been learning to eat according to what by body needs – to feed my body so that it can move well.  This is quite a leap from moving so that I can drink more wine. 

• Write

For some reason, writing about this process has made it happen. Or helped it to happen. I suppose it’s a combination of my temperament and my talents but getting it all down on paper makes the process more understandable.  It’s as though, for all those years and through all those diets, I just wanted to do it without thinking about it.  I didn’t want to think about why I stuffed myself with food when I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t want to think about my body shape or how to dress myself.  I didn’t want to think about how food and relationships were all tied up.

Writing has helped me to hang onto the “A-ha” moments of this process, to cement the permanent changes rather than just rushing through a diet as fast as I can so that life can get back to normal.  Writing about it all has helped to establish a new normal.

Is that really all there is to it?

• No whining, no excuses
• Make permanent changes
• Eat to move – don’t move to eat
• Write

Of course, each one of those involves a whole lot of trying and failing and figuring out and quitting for a bit then starting again where I left off.  It’s meant getting to grips with the woman in the mirror and the body in the changing room and I’m still a work in progress.

A work in progress.

You don’t use food as a drug for 30 years and “just change” over night.  If someone had told me, back in the summer of 2008, that three years from now I was still going to be working on this, I’m not sure I would have just said, “Well let’s get on with it anyway!”  I didn’t know at the time what was going to happen in my life.   But I was SO SICK of feeling like a failure over something that I knew was within my control.

And so I keep on writing and working and looking forward to the new phase ahead.

It’s the beginning of the third week and I’m wavering between encouragement and disappointment.

• Weight: It’s all over the place between 146 and 148 – up and down and up and down and etc…..

I’m not used to this stubborn lack of downward trend – especially when I’m eating the correct input/output balance of calories that should lead to a loss. That’s discouraging – but I’m still down overall and I can’t possibly not lose a little given the way I’m eating and moving.  So I’ll plough on.

• Exercise: Yesterday I did my “accidental” 10k in 70 minutes.

Must explain the “accidental”.  I run 5k with a group of women every Sunday and the group meets around 2.5k from my house.  We are currently without a car so, if I want to run with the group, I need to cover 10k.  Last week I walked down and back.  This week I ran a bit and walked a bit down and back and ran most of the 5k in the middle.  Result: a 70 minute 10k.  I’m looking forward to improving on that next week.

So the “things to do by 50″ project moves forward.  My hair is almost all grey, I’m into the New Testament on my read through the bible and I can now cover a 10k in a respectable time.  If my weight isn’t exactly where I envisioned it, then I can hardly beat myself up.

If, on my 50th birthday, I wake up weighing 147lbs but able to run 10k in an hour, I won’t be disappointed.

But I still want to get that waist down another inch so I will keep working hard till the end of April to see if I can do it.

EDIT!  I wrote the above in my dressing gown, went upstairs, put on my jeans and did up my belt.  To the next hole.   Just the motivation to keep going and show a quick 2 fingers to the scales.

Last 10 Pounds ~ Daily Report

It’s good to see Paul Plakas back answering questions on his site.   The last question in December got me thinking.

Paul is answering a woman who wants to lose 20 pounds in three months.  His response:

My answer to you would be yes it is possible to lose 20lbs in 3 months. The question is are you willing to do everything to get there?

Let me repeat that last bit for my own benefit.

Are you willing to do everything to get there?

So many times I’ve started down the dieting path with a goal in mind but no clear idea of whether or not I’m prepared to pay the price to get there. Commercial programmes do all they can to make it appear as though there is no cost. (See every Weight Watchers ad ever created.)

The saner I’ve got about food and body, the more I tend to think about what I’m willing to commit to the process rather than where I want to be.  It’s no use at all saying that I want to weigh 125 pounds and have 20% body fat when I have no intention of putting in the work to get there.

So what am I willing to commit?

• I’m happy to give up junky processed food including fat free and artificially sweetened.

• I’m happy to go for a run at least 3 or maybe 4 times per week.

• I’m happy to park in the furthest parking space and generally increase my daily movement as much as possible.

• I’m happy to learn to eat small portions and enjoy feeding my physical hunger rather than my emotions.

• I’m happy to blog through the issues.

What am I NOT willing to commit?

• I won’t be giving up wine any time soon.

• I won’t be terribly assertive while eating out or at friends’ houses.

• I won’t let being a certain size or weight define who I am.

What have committed to in my head but not got around to implementing?

• I know that I need to work more on my whole body by adding functional training.

• I would like to stick to 14 units of alcohol per week.

After weighing less than 150 pounds for over a year, I now want to weigh less than 140 pounds.

Am I willing to do what it takes?

Today?  Yes.  Tomorrow? We’ll see.

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……….

I speak for women in general and myself in particular when I say that we’re not always very good at deciding what we want and going for it.  I suspect that, for me, I don’t dare to be ambitious because the risk of failure is too high.  There’s certainly an element of that in my professional life, but what about in my relationship with with food and my body?

Am I really afraid of failure?  I have failed and survived to tell the tale so many times that it shouldn’t be a big deterrent. Maybe it’s that I’ve failed so many many times at this that I picture failure rather than success right from the outset. I say what I want but I picture all the reasons that I won’t get there.

I have no idea why this little insight has popped up today and not before.  But it popped into my head when I was trying to think of what it is that I REALLY want right now from this body/food project and my thought was that I REALLY want to look at the scale and see a number that starts with 13…..

I hate to be that shallow. I hate to be that scale oriented.  But still…..that’s what I want before I want to run 10k or have low cholesterol or a healthy waist size.  And I do want all those things but they’re not what I REALLY WANT RIGHT NOW.

I want to weigh less than 140 pounds so I’m going to achieve it.

That’s a brave statement which, rather uncomfortably, leaves me open to failure.

It’s almost two years since I started heading towards something.  My last post pointed out that the number I was heading for isn’t exactly where I want to be.  But I didn’t say this:  I’m afraid that, if I get to where I want to be, I might have to re-invent myself as a thin person.

When I was very nearly down to 140, my daughter looked at me and said, “I’ve never had a thin mum before and you’re a thin mum!” Of course, thanks to years of body image insanity, that sent me into a tailspin.  Sigh.

So it’s what I say I want but I have to give myself time when I get there to adjust my own perceptions of who I am and what I think I should look like.

Will I have to re-invent myself?  I just don’t know – maybe.

Will I have to find something else to blog about? I guess I could blog about reinventing myself as thin person.

Will I find out that people don’t really care one way or another how big or small I am? Probably.

But that’s all jumping the gun and worrying about the finish at the start line.  Instead of worrying about what’s at the end of this journey, I’m going to focus on what I want RIGHT NOW.  All day long I’m going to picture myself stepping on the scale and seeing the number 139. Simple. I’m going to plan, portion, journal and think about that number – not anything else – and see where it takes me.

Mollie commented a couple of posts back:

It must be why so many people who reach goal regain — because there is no “goal.” There is only “normal.”

That got me thinking again about the fact that we’ve established a new normal and it’s FAT.

I remember, way back in the 70′s, when the jeans we wore to school had to cover the whole shoe and, ideally, drag on the ground in the order to fray adequately.  And then, towards the end of my final year, the skinny/narrow leg appeared.  It looked horrible seeing whole shoes like that.  It looked weird and I thought I’d never cave in.  Of course, I had a pair within the month. And then the wide legs looked horrible.

Then it happened with shoulder pads.  Remember?

We seem to be programmed to adapt our feelings about what’s acceptable just by living with the changes going on around us.  So fashion begets fashion. And fat begets fat.

I’ve been googling around phrases like “obesity statistics by country” and the results bear out what I’ve just said.

If a full 70% of the people around you are overweight, then fat looks normal.  (WHO – USA 2005)

And maybe it feels a little weird to be bucking this particular fashion trend. I mean, if everyone is fat, then it feels a bit weird to be anything else.  I hesitate to say “thin” because that’s just not a word I’d use to describe myself.  Medium sized maybe but not thin.

Here’s the World Health Org site where I’ve been getting some of my information.  I’m not sure how it’s come to it’s 2010 statistics except perhaps by continuing to graph the trend based the increase in weight which has been measured since the 70s.  But the 2005 stats are in line with other sites.

When I was trying to lose weight 15 years ago, I used to say, “I just want to be normal”.  Now I guess I just want to be abnormal – and stay that way.  So, to re-express Mollie’s comment:  There is no goal.  There’s only abnormal. And it takes hard work and perseverance to be different.

In life in general I love the idea of new beginnings, blank slates, amnesties, jubilee years – grace and forgiveness .

When I decide to give myself one of those in my food/body struggles, it’s hard not to think of it as a whole new beginning.  Over on BCB I’ve re-invented myself a few times, changing my board name and starting from scratch.

But this time I’m going to prize the accumulated wisdom of this past year.  I’m going to view the next phase as just that: one leg of a long journey.

I’ve made a new daily weight page to see how long it takes to get from where I am now to where I want to go.  I’m not guessing how long that’s going to be – I’m just going to set out and accept that I’ll get there when I get there.  I’ll keep track of my behaviour and my weight and notice the connections.  In fact, I think I might go a bit Bridget Jonesish and put my weight and other pertinent information at the top of each post.  Maybe not.

My first priority is to fight my natural inclination and to plan meals ahead for a couple of days.

Oh this is boring.  I feel so incredibly uninspired. And yet.  And yet there is a solid core of WILL inside me that won’t rest until I have kept that promise to myself.  I will give myself a chance to be slim and fit for a whole year.  I will do it.

I may not feel like going through the process of getting there.  I may not feel like going through the process of staying there.  But I will do it with no rush of enthusiasm because I know how important it is that I do it.

Self-talk.  What blogging is really all about.

Apologies to anyone else reading this today.

But if you want to join me on this leg please step in and keep me company on this enthusiasm-free, wisdom and (hopefully) humour filled process.  I’ll make you a weight page of your very own if you are craving a little public accountability.

When I realised that I wanted to lose weight finally and forever, I had in my head the “goal” weight of 143lbs.  I think it was based on the tricky scale-insanity based mathematical formula which states that the personal goal weight plus two pounds equals the WW goal weight which is equal to or lesser than a number ending in zero or five.

Not that I thought about it much or anything.

I also picked a weight which was well away from any “wall” like the infamous 140lbs of 2001.  I remember going to WW week after week stuck at two pounds from goal and finally giving up and agreeing that I would never weigh less than 142.  That number was on a gold card in my wallet until very recently.

Fast forward a few years and we have a new generation of goal-setters.  Now, canny weight watchers set their goal at the highest possible healthy BMI so that they no longer have to pay for meetings once they’ve reached that number.  So my new gold card is going to say 10 stone 9lbs.  This is actually a pound less that my highest acceptable BMI because I have the psychological burden of being bi-cultural in the weight loss game and wanted to keep it below 150lbs.

Not that I thought about it much or anything.

So what’s my real goal -besides, obviously, getting some decent psychological help?

Last week I decided to head for 138, not because of any of the above but because my goal has been revised to include a health waist size.  I’m guessing that I’m going to have to lose that much more weight to get there because,  when I say waist size, I mean abdominal size – measured right around the navel.  That’s different from my much smaller “technical waist” where my jeans used to sit in 1979.

Of course, back in the early 90′s, before the BMI Revolution, my upper goal weight was 139lbs.  That was the weight I would have been aiming for all along.  Now I KNOW that BMI is supposed to be about health, but at the top “healthy” weight of 150lbs, my waist size puts me at risk for all sorts of things – even though I can wear Gap size 8 jeans.

The point?  The point is that I need to find a goal set by me for reasons that I can trust.  I trust the waist measurement science more than I trust BMI science.  So that’s where I’m headed. For now.  Not that I’ve thought about it much or anything.

Oh yeah – the reason I started on this topic: I hit 143lbs this morning.

There was so much in this post over at BCB that I don’t want to let it drop.  The main topic  of conversation is basically, do we fail to lose weight and keep it off because we are afraid of success?  Or at least afraid of what is on the “other side” of weight loss.

For anyone who has lost and gained back their weight more than a couple of times, this is the Golden Question.

So why, over the last thirty years, have I regained the same 20 – 30 pounds so many times?  Except for a couple of pregnancies, I put weight on because I don’t allow myself to become the thinner version of me.  It’s like “goal weight” is a bright and colourful object at the bottom of a deep pool.  I work really hard to dive down and retrieve the object then float right back up to the surface again.  I have no means of anchoring myself to that weight – just an idea that that’s what I should weigh and a diet which can get me there.  And who wants to be anchored to the bottom of a pool anyway?  The whole picture is wrong and impossible.

Instead of thinking of a weight as the goal, I am trying to think of maintaining a lifestyle as the goal.  Yes, in order to be a slimmer version of me, I have to weigh less; I can’t change that.  But the numbers on the scale are only a tiny part of the change that is taking place.  I need a machine to measure attitude to food, self-perception, reaction to others – all those things that we don’t deal with so we put the weight back on.

I used to work in a prison – a real Victorian jail full of not the nicest men on earth and many of them in there for the umpteenth time.  When we talked, it became clear that they didn’t have any strategies for what they were going to do differently on the day they got released.  Many of them admitted that they were going to walk out the gates, cross the street to where their drug dealer would be waiting and spend their discharge grant on heroin.

That story tends to make people judgemental because we can see clearly what their problem is.   They need to walk right past the thing that keeps them in the loop of self-destruction and they need to work out that plan before they get released.  What makes me so different?  My drug of choice is food and I can’t give it up completely, but my attitude is exactly the same.

I hit some fairly arbitrary number, get released from my diet and run right back to the thing that got me locked up in the first place.   Heroin addicts see the drug as part of their freedom.  Dieters see unmeasured calories as part of their freedom.  We have to redefine freedom.

OK…..so here’s the freedom I want.

I want the freedom to try on clothes in a dressing room not feel disappointed in myself.

I want the freedom to walk upstairs beside someone 20 years younger and not be puffing and sweaty at the top.

I want the freedom to feel my stress/anger/sadness and not stuff it down with food.

I want the freedom to love food.

I want the freedom to be a slim & fit person without feeling that there’s a fat one trying to get out.

Because this weight loss journey has been so slow, I’ve had time to get closer to a few of those freedoms.  I may always be a work in progress but I do finally know in the depths of my heart that there is nothing in the fridge that will help me meet a deadline or pay my Visa bill.   And if you don’t understand what an achievement that is, you’re probably reading the wrong blog.