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.

I’m not big on military imagery but this weight loss thing certainly has some parallels with “warring”.

These past 2.5 years have been a series of battles won and lost, interspersed with periods of peace – and it’s time for the “last battle”.

The first thing I want to point out is that the enemy is not my body.  And the enemy is not food.  Those are both good, no, wonderful things and my closest allies during these next few weeks.

The enemy is my own attitude – that is, the sizable commitment gap between what I want and what I’m prepared to do to get it.

This week I’m prepared to close that gap by throwing all my ammunition at these last few pounds.

Ammunition?

Burning off at least 200 calories through exercise no matter what.

• a 2 mile run
• a 3 mile walk
• 2 hours of shopping
• Those are daily minimums.

The thing I’m not going to do is spend one whole day doing nothing because I know that I’m going on a 5 mile run the next day.  While the battle is raging, this has got to be an everyday commitment.

Eating with exacting discipline.

• Breakfast lunch and dinners will be the same for 4 days at a time.  Boring but it makes planning and shopping easier.
• All ingredients weighed and measured.  ie The 1/4 of milk I usually journal for coffee is actually 3/8.  That won’t matter a bit in a few weeks, but it matters in battle.
• Eating more than the recommended 5 a day of fruit and veg. This means snacking on carrots even when it’s easier to grab a cracker.

Counting the cost.

• As someone in the bible wrote, “No one goes into battle without first counting the cost.”  Really?  I do it all the time with predictable results.
• The cost to me this week is no wine in the house.  At all.
• The cost is eating very carefully during the day when I’m going out for dinner in the evening.
• The cost is choosing what I’m going to eat at the restaurant before I go – and sticking to it.
• The cost is not being a very flexible human being when it comes to food choices.  I will stick with my decisions even when they are socially a bit awkward. (This is my biggest “cost”.)

I will keep up this lack of flexibility (regime, dare I say, “diet”?) until the scale is really moving.  Then I’ll rethink my strategy.  I’m assuming that I will be eating like this until I leave for Canada at the end of March.

And what has prompted this last push?  I’ve made a decision that, whatever I weigh when I wake up on my 50th birthday will be the lowest weight I will ever aspire to again.  I’ve had enough of “ought” and “should” and even “want”.  Time to hit real middle age with my head high  – no matter what I weigh.

In the meantime, realising that I am serious about that has made me think that I will be very disappointed if I don’t ever keep that promise to myself to get down to 140lbs and live with it for a while.  Hence the battle.

(Now, where are my bagpipes?)

OP

On Programme

On Plan

When I want to lose weight, I stick to a plan.

Except, of course, when I want to lose weight but can’t quite get up the guts to stick to a plan.  It’s not that I don’t make a plan.

Here’s the plan now!

• measure portions
• write down everything I eat
• eat around 1400 calories and less than 50g fat  – Nutracheck calculates – I’m not that crazy.
• move every day to the tune of around 200 calories

If I do this, I lose weight.

So what’s stopping me?  God, (and this is a prayer, not a name in vain moment), please show me what’s stopping me.

People with no food/body issues will look at the “plan” and figure that the problem is obviously that people aren’t meant to measure and weigh and write down everything they eat. I get that.  But I also get that it’s the right thing for me when I need restraint in my food life.

I can usually keep weight off without doing that stuff but I sure can’t lose weight without those little disciplines.  And they are little.  I don’t have to think about food all day long; I just have to be honest, on paper, about what I’m consuming.  The food scale and measuring cups are right there under the kitchen counter.  It’s not really an inconvenicne to get back into that habit. And all I have to do is type the results into my laptop or Blackberry.  Again, what’s the hassle?

HABITS.  That’s what this is all about.

So starting today,  I’m going to add the habit of checking my portions and recording them in my food journal – not because I’m obsessed – but because it’s the best tool for losing weight.

I will do this until I’ve lost the 5lbs that I gained over the past few months.

Sorry for the boring blogging but it’s all I’ve got till I start taking care of myself again.

For the past six weeks, I been weighing myself every morning and writing down the numbers.  I am not doing this expecting to see loss after loss after loss.  I’m doing it because I really want to get to grips with how the actually shedding of pounds works.

I think I’m going to make it a public exercise, not because it’s particularly interesting for, but because it’s another accountability tool for me during the next month of feasting and partying – a time when I would normally embrace the “What the hell” attitude of the season and pop in another piece of shortbread.

Just to be clear, the appropriate response to then numbers decreasing is not “Way to go Millie!” but:

• “Hmmmmm, interesting”

And the appropriate response to numbers increasing is not “You can DO this Millie!” but:

• Hmmmmm, interesting”

That’s the vibe of the activity.

December 09
Decided to make this a permanent page
4-145.6
3-145.6-after a day of pretty heavy eating. interesting.
2-144.2
1-144.4 Canadian scales
November 09
30-143
29-143
28-142.8
27-143.6
26-144.2
25-144.8
24-145.4
23-145.6
22-147
21-didn’t weigh after emotional eating
20-146.4
19-145.8
18-146.2
17-146.2
16-didn’t weigh
15-146.4
14-146.2
13-146.6
12-147
11-146.9
10-146.6
9-146.7
8-147.4
7-147.4
6-out of town
5-147
4-147.4
3-147.8
2-148.4
1-148
October 2009
31-147.6
30-149
29-150.2
28-150.4
27-149.8
26-150
25-150
24-150.2
23-151.2
22-didn’t weigh
21-151.6
20-151.2
19-150.4

I took another break from journalling yesterday and just ate according to what my body seemed to want. That included a piece of cheese mid-morning and peanut butter on crackers mid-afternoon.   I would normally have eaten an orange or a banana at those times but I went with what I wanted rather than what I “should have”. Permission to not be perfect rules during hormone week.

This morning, I decided to journal it all in retrospect and found that,  by listening to my body, I ate smaller portions more frequently and ended up eating just within the weight loss range. I ate only 78% of my 5-a-day fruit and veg but other than that I was really pleased with the outcome.

Now – if my house had had any junk food at all, the outcome would have been different.  But I suppose that’s another measure of how far we’ve come in our family eating habits.  There was a time when, after dinner,  we’d get that wicked co-dependent glint in our eyes and someone would be on a junk food run before you could say “how many points in a giant Cadbury Fruit and Nut bar?”  But it didn’t even cross our minds yesterday as we snuggled down on the sofa for the evening.

Oh dear – that’s kind of depressing.  It reminds of my first ever Weight Watchers leaders.  And I sort of hated them.  But that’s another story.

I’m starting a journal today.  I’m going to try to write something every day and I’m going to try to make note of my feelings.  An honest note of my feelings.  That’s why I’m going to keep my journal to myself, if I post it out somewhere then there will be too much temptation to edit it for other people.

When I was posting on the Fab 40s Remedial site this summer, I was logging my food faithfully and staying on program.  I’ve had to face the fact that maybe all those people who talk about journalling their feelings might be onto something.  I’ve always kind of dismissed that, not for others but for myself.  I didn’t think I was an emotional eater.  Well, maybe I was just fooling myself.  I guess I’ll find out.  However, I think it will be good for me, even if it doesn’t help with controlling my food intake.

I definitely feel like I’m back in boot camp – a newbie struggling to sort it all out and maintain a rather rigid schedule. I made a few commitments to myself this week, and I’m going to make an HONEST effort to keep them.

1) Exercise (with a capital “E”) – that was the key to my success before, and that is that ONLY way I will maintain and get more weight off. I have to face it – I can’t do it by diet alone. It has NEVER worked for me in the past.

Exercise is my friend.

2) Journaling. I have come to the conclusion that journaling and weighing/measuring are there for one purpose – and that is to serve as a “stop-gap” for the brain. I crave = I eat vs. I crave = I journal/weigh/measure (think!) = I don’t eat/I eat sensibly.

3) Sleep/relax. When work gets to much, I owe it to myself to take a time out and relax. And no matter how much work I have, it is NEVER productive for me to sleep less than 7-8 hours (preferably 8).

4) Keep up with my hobbies. A happy person is a healthy person. When I am so caught up with work and stress that I neglect the fun little things like sewing, reading and gardening, then I lose the ability to stay happy and focused. Instead, I begin drifting and become aimless. That’s not good for me and not good for my body.

Okay, that’s enough deep thoughts for the day – how’s everyone doing out there?