Here we are again, another year, another blog post, and another shot at losing weight. I looked back at many of the failed attempts on this blog and thought really hard about deleting them, but decided that I’m going to own my failures and keep them here for all to see. After all, we always see the after picture, but never the 10 years it took of failing to get to the after picture.
You can read back through these posts if you’d like of course, you’ll find optimism of the same sort that you’ll find in this post. That, in my opinion, is absolutely the hardest thing for an obese individual like me who is addicted to food and chronically overeats; I’ve failed so many times. It’s very difficult to look at this time as different from any other, at first I could almost feel the clammy hands of failure closing around me and felt like giving up even as I was just getting started.
This time though? I’m really not that concerned and truly don’t feel like I will fail. This feeling is completely due to a change in attitude and a lot of self-introspection of myself and a review of things I already knew to be true, but never truly accepted or understood how to apply. I’ll share those here, for any who might be interested and just maybe it’ll turn the lightbulb on for someone else also.
Weight Watchers
I’m utilizing Weight Watchers as my basis of weight loss. This program works for a bunch of different reasons. The new Points Plus system is a formula that was made by a bunch of people far smarter than myself to figure out a nutritional value for food based on the fat, fiber, protein, and carbohydrate balance. Instead of just focusing on calories it focuses on what the food is and how nutritious it is. I can eat whatever I want as long as I stay within a point value assigned by a calculator that factors in your weight, height and whether you are male or female.
The reason it works so well is that it teaches you portion control on a very fundamentally easy basis in addition to breaking down something that can be difficult to keep track of. You don’t have to keep track of every gram of protein or fat you put in your mouth, you don’t have to know every calorie balance, you just need to know how many points it is and take it out of your daily points. You eat all your points and when you are out you can’t eat anything else. Since anything is allowed it gives you the freedom to choose what foods you want to splurge on and to understand how much food you should be eating in a sitting. As you learn the different points and what certain things cost you’ll almost automatically begin to make smarter and healthier decisions. In addition the weekly points you are allowed that are basically cheat points let you go all out for a day or split it up however you want in order to make you feel less restrained. All of this adds up to a system that you can live with, not a diet, but a life change.
Better yet, though Weight Watchers itself is expensive, you can actually get started for free. Sure, this won’t earn me a sponsorship from Weight Watchers, but I simply don’t have the money to participate in the official program and the information you need is widely available on the internet. I’ve partnered that with a killer free Android app that not only is a calculator for the points for food, but also helps to track my daily points as well as my weekly points. I’ll slap a link to both of those below so you can get started too.
Calculating Your Points Value - http://www.healthyweightforum.org/eng/articles/points-plus/
Tracker and Calculator - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mattdonders.android.wppcalculator
NOT a Diet
This one sounds pretty corny, I know, and I’ve dismissed it out of hand a lot of times or parroting it without ever accepting it as a mantra. I’m not on a diet, I’m changing my lifestyle. It sounds like a silly concession, but accepting it has been extremely important part of the success I’ve found thus far. Instead of focusing on short term losses or being frustrated by small failures or setbacks I’ve decided to look at this as a long term thing. I KNOW I’ll lose the weight, not because I have some secret weapon that will lose it in 3 months, but because I have no intention of going back to the way I was. I finally understand that all I have to do is keep doing my best to eat and live better every day and that weight loss will happen naturally in the same way it did when I gained weight. Days will go by, time will pass (all too quickly for my taste most times) and before I know it I will be at my goal weight.
This sounds like the simplest and most obvious thing ever, but I really don’t think it is. Easy to say, hard to really accept it and understand it. I’ve failed every other time because I’ve been so intensely focused on the scale and how quickly I was losing or wanting results so quickly. This time I’ve accepted that it might be slow and I’m ok with that because I’m never going back to the way I used to live.
No Scale…..Yet
This next part is going to be down to you and the things that motivate and discourage you, but another key to my success thus far is the fact I haven’t stepped foot on a scale after my initial weigh in. I decided at the very beginning of all of this that I would abstain from doing so for an entire month after my start date. It’s been hard as I’ve done better with this weight loss program than any I’ve ever tried and stuck with it for longer than I’ve ever really stuck with anything; so I know the weight loss is there and I’d love to see it reflected in pounds so I have something more concrete to celebrate.
However, too many times before I’ve set on the scale when I was first starting and completely derailed myself because I didn’t lose enough weight or I’d even gained weight. Weight loss is a difficult thing for your body to go through and every single person reacts differently. Your body doesn’t know what to do when you are suddenly drinking nothing but water, drastically cutting your meal intake, and lifting weights or exercising. Just about anything can affect that number and when you are still struggling with adapting to these really difficult changes that is one more thing you simply don’t need. It might not work for you, but it’s been crucial for me and has pushed me even harder to behave. I can’t wait to stand on the scale at the end of the month and see my victory and on days I feel particularly drawn to food or wanting to overeat I think of that moment and can draw strength from it.
This has drawn on too long already, and I’ve probably lost pretty much everyone by now. I only write this to encourage myself and maybe help someone out at the same time. I’m so excited for the next part of my life, I can feel the changes in my behavior already and I can’t help but be elated.
I can do this. I will do this. You can too.
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