On Being in Maintenance Mode
The last few weeks have been a very challenging time for me in terms of food and my weight loss journey. I find that, with the stress of job hunting and interviewing, all I want to do is feed my face. With the pain I've been dealing with in my left knee, I've been averse to impact exercise even as I miss it in the extreme. And so my weight loss has slowed.
All this self-medication-by-food behavior has been modified considerably by how I've been living this last year. Where I used to reach for sweets, breads, cakey goodness, or handfuls of cereal, I'm reaching now for grapes or applesauce or hummus and carrots or popcorn: all high-fiber, low-fat snacks. And in the mix, I've still parsed out a Theo hazelnut crunch chocolate bar (at 10 PointsPlus values for a whole bar, a quarter a day over four days is a perfectly acceptable--and tasty--points hit). So I have tools available to me when I'm craving a chew. One of those tools is more clearly recognizing what my behaviors signal. I still need to work on modifying the reach-for-food-for-comfort reaction, but at least now, when I do, I'm reaching for better stuff. For a while, I was reaching for exercise instead of snacks, but see above re: bad knee. Need to fix this . . . but one goal at a time.
One of the Weight Watchers receptionists, as well as my leader, has observed that sometimes you have to just maintain rather than lose and deal with the other stuff life is throwing at you. It's hard for me to remember this, because I want so badly to reach goal as soon as I can and to get with the business of the rest of life. But the truth is, sometimes you lose and sometimes you maintain. Your body is going to do what it's going to do. So I've been trying to think of myself, in the midst of all this self-medication-by-food behavior, as being on maintenance until I can find my focus and kickstart my weight loss again. That means cutting myself a little slack when I indulge, staying aware that my weigh-in will show either a negligible loss or gain, and remembering not to give myself a hard time about it. Thinking of myself on maintenance reduces my predilection for judging myself as bad or undisciplined. It is, in short, living life at my new weight with awareness and acceptance--and that's ultimately what reaching my final goal and maintenance weight will be like. So, in the end, this is practice for what I hope the next 40 years are like once I reach my final goal. It can be seen as a goodness.
As it happens, I went to my meeting last night and was down 1.2 pounds for a total of 55 pounds lost (or five-and-a-half cats). I was pretty sure I'd be up this week, so it was a delightful surprise. But that's been after a few weeks of fractions of a pound lost here and there--which is what got me thinking about maintenance in the first place.
And so we go. It's hard, it's a struggle, but it can be done. I've already proven it to myself. It just may all take longer than I want it to. At the same time, we learn by doing, and the longer I do this, the more I learn. I don't have any appointments to keep so I can do this as long as it's necessary. My hope is that I'll reach goal my year's end. Whether I do or not, I'll get there eventually, one forkful at a time.
All this self-medication-by-food behavior has been modified considerably by how I've been living this last year. Where I used to reach for sweets, breads, cakey goodness, or handfuls of cereal, I'm reaching now for grapes or applesauce or hummus and carrots or popcorn: all high-fiber, low-fat snacks. And in the mix, I've still parsed out a Theo hazelnut crunch chocolate bar (at 10 PointsPlus values for a whole bar, a quarter a day over four days is a perfectly acceptable--and tasty--points hit). So I have tools available to me when I'm craving a chew. One of those tools is more clearly recognizing what my behaviors signal. I still need to work on modifying the reach-for-food-for-comfort reaction, but at least now, when I do, I'm reaching for better stuff. For a while, I was reaching for exercise instead of snacks, but see above re: bad knee. Need to fix this . . . but one goal at a time.
One of the Weight Watchers receptionists, as well as my leader, has observed that sometimes you have to just maintain rather than lose and deal with the other stuff life is throwing at you. It's hard for me to remember this, because I want so badly to reach goal as soon as I can and to get with the business of the rest of life. But the truth is, sometimes you lose and sometimes you maintain. Your body is going to do what it's going to do. So I've been trying to think of myself, in the midst of all this self-medication-by-food behavior, as being on maintenance until I can find my focus and kickstart my weight loss again. That means cutting myself a little slack when I indulge, staying aware that my weigh-in will show either a negligible loss or gain, and remembering not to give myself a hard time about it. Thinking of myself on maintenance reduces my predilection for judging myself as bad or undisciplined. It is, in short, living life at my new weight with awareness and acceptance--and that's ultimately what reaching my final goal and maintenance weight will be like. So, in the end, this is practice for what I hope the next 40 years are like once I reach my final goal. It can be seen as a goodness.
As it happens, I went to my meeting last night and was down 1.2 pounds for a total of 55 pounds lost (or five-and-a-half cats). I was pretty sure I'd be up this week, so it was a delightful surprise. But that's been after a few weeks of fractions of a pound lost here and there--which is what got me thinking about maintenance in the first place.
And so we go. It's hard, it's a struggle, but it can be done. I've already proven it to myself. It just may all take longer than I want it to. At the same time, we learn by doing, and the longer I do this, the more I learn. I don't have any appointments to keep so I can do this as long as it's necessary. My hope is that I'll reach goal my year's end. Whether I do or not, I'll get there eventually, one forkful at a time.