Why It All Seems So Futile Sometimes ....

That feeling of futility .... 

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/many-fronts-in-fighting-obesity/

 

I quote:

 

"When an overweight person cuts down significantly on what he eats, the body defends itself by using fewer calories. The effect can be long-lasting: If a person’s weight drops to 150 pounds from 250, significantly fewer calories must be consumed daily to stay at that weight than would be necessary if the person had never been overweight. 

 

"Even if a 170-pound person loses 20 pounds, he needs 15 percent fewer calories to maintain the new weight than someone who always weighed 150."

Really, the dispiriting thing about an article like this is that it basically says, "If you're already overweight, forget those fantasies of losing weight and living like a 'normal' person, because even if you do, you won't.  Oh, and did we mention?  Once you've been overweight: there's about a 99% chance it's already too late." 

*SIGH*

... and start all over again!

"Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again." That's the attitude I'm taking right now, faced with the reality that not only did I fall off the wagon, I tumbled all the way down the hill, too.

As the graph and the weight log to the right show, over the last several months I've managed to surrender all the territory I won since I started Sancho Panza's Weighty Thoughts back in February 2009. I decided, though, that I wasn't going to delete the blog or even reboot it - pretending that I didn't lose over 70 pounds and then gain it back is not going to help.

Instead, I'm leaving the unvarnished truth up here for anyone to read who stumbles onto this blog. Yes, I lost a substantial amount of weight, and yes, I gained it all back. But I'm going to focus on the first half of that statement. I did lose it. That means I can lose it again. My new target date for losing those unnecessary 100 pounds: October 26, 2013. The day I turn 50. It would be very cool to weigh myself that day and see a number representing a real achievement like that.

Wish me luck.

Making Myself Scream

In her excellent book Refuse to Regain and on her website of the same name, Barbara Berkeley has coined the phrase "scream weight" for a previously heavy person's new upper limit - the number which will trigger Full Diet Mode the moment it shows up on the scale, heading off any further backsliding before it gets out of hand.

I like this concept a lot. Setting this kind of limit seems good common sense. But, speaking as someone who's gained back a lot of lost weight over the years, I can also say there's a problem with it: you have to regularly and ruthlessly climb onto the scale to see your Scream Weight in the first place.

This has always been a problem for me. The moment I start to backslide after a successful spell of dieting (excuse me, "lifestyle modification"!), I also start avoiding the bathroom scale - denial is part of backsliding. I'm aware that I'm eating food I shouldn't, I can see and feel that I'm putting weight back on, so it's very easy to talk myself out of finding out exactly how bad things are getting. And if I don't get on the scale and see a number greater than my Scream Weight, then that dietary and fitness "red alert" (cue Star Trek claxon sound here) doesn't kick in.

Usually, of course, once I've eaten my way back into my fatter clothes and my wardrobe options narrow, I do finally force myself to climb onto the scale and assess the damage. By then, though, I've exceeded my Scream Weight by thirty or forty pounds, and it will be months before I get back there, much less below it.

Scream Weight is a great concept for catching a bad trend before it gains traction. But it only works when you have the self-discipline to keep checking your weight, so there's a paradox in play. If you have the self-discipline to do that, you're probably also able to maintain at least most of your good eating and exercise habits, so there's less chance you'll have a Scream Weight crisis in the first place. The people who really need those regular reality checks, though, are also the ones, like me, who are most likely to persuade themselves to let the scale gather dust "just until they get back into the groove" or whatever. And then the damage mounts.

Self-monitoring: it's obviously necessary for long-term success, but it's hard, especially on the days you know you won't like what you see on the scale.

Trench Warfare

Dieting is like trench warfare in World War I.

Obviously, dieting can't compare to actual trench warfare for sheer horror and misery - but there are similarities. Trench warfare was an agonizingly slow process, where one side could spend months struggling to advance only a few hundred yards across a battlefield strewn with barbed wire; then, of course, the other side would often recapture those few hundred yards, equally gradually, and after months of struggle, everyone would be in the same trenches where they'd begun. Even worse, sometimes those soldiers who first advanced, then retreated, lost even more ground.

You see where I'm going with this, don't you? Dieting feels like that to me: months of striving to take off however many pounds, followed by gaining most or all of it back and then desperately trying not to surrender any additional territory beyond that. It feels as though I were back to Square One, but scarier than that is the anxiety that I could end up back to Square Minus-One!

On the other hand, fighting in the trenches is better than surrendering, right?

Call Me Sisyphus

Okay, I'm convinced: posting self-confident blog predictions is a sure way to have those predictions not come true. Tempting fate is always a bad idea.

And so, here I am, right where I was weight-wise two years ago this month. Last fall the wheels started coming off: I completely lost my motivation, first to drop more weight and then even to maintain the loss I'd already achieved. Starting around my birthday in October, I craved all kinds of high-carb foods, and I ate them - always telling myself that I would behave myself "starting tomorrow" or "after Thanksgiving" or "after the holidays" or whatever. But tomorrow did not come, and the weight gain was fast and steady. Worse, I stopped checking the scale, deliberately avoiding the hard numbers which would might have rattled me enough to change my McDonalds fries- and Panera pastries-fueled momentum.

There's not much good news to take from this, except these small consolations:
1. I did manage to get back on the scale last week, knowing that what I'd see would motivate me.
2. I stopped before I exceeded my previous peak weight; it's one thing to gain lost weight back, but it's even more demoralizing to gain back even more.
3. I did do an Atkins-centered grocery run, filling my refrigerator and pantry with the kinds of foods I need to start eating again and throwing out the bad stuff.
4. I started eating those foods again.
5. I do know how to lose the weight now.

On the other hand, it's also discouraging to feel as though not only will I never achieve my 100-pound weight loss goal, but I can also never trust myself not to backslide. Ever.

Just call me Sisyphus.

Living Low-Carb, One Year Later

It was one year ago today that I decided to try a low-carb diet. I'd begun yet another diet (and this blog!) on February 1st, 2009, and I hadn't made much progress on the low-fat, restricted-calorie system I'd always previously used to take off excess weight (though, obviously, not with long-term success!). But after reading a lot about the low-carb approach online and buying the original Atkins diet book, I decided to give it a shot.

And here I am, one year later and 65 pounds lighter - from 273 lbs. on May 20, 2009 to 208 lbs. on May 20, 2010. Am I pleased? Oh yes. It hasn't always been easy, and there was one period between my birthday in late October and New Year's where my sugar cravings got out of control and I got lazy about exercising; on the other hand, as I've commented before, that might have been good for me, because I learned that I could stop that kind of slide before it got too far out of hand, instead of feeling powerless like I had in the past.

More important, I'm nearing the best weight I achieved on my last low-fat, calorie-counting diet: 202 lbs., in the early summer of 2007. (In fact, that's the best weight I have recorded for myself going back to 2004, when I was in the 250's; I don't have records from prior to that.) But then I got an injury that put a stop to my running and my will power evaporated, and I quickly started gaining weight back. Worse, I stopped weighing myself out of avoidance, and by November of that year I found myself over 250 lbs. again, well on my way to passing the 280-pound mark yet one more time.

Looking back, though, I think at least part of the problem in 2007 was that even before I got injured and couldn't run, I was already nearing the end of my "diet rope" with the low-fat system. I was bone-tired of never feeling full, never eating any rich foods, and practicing the various other kinds of daily, even hourly self-denial that kind of lifestyle requires. (And I'm sure all the low-calorie carbs were not helping my glucose and insulin situation, either.) Right now, though, I'm not feeling that way about living low-carb. I'm still enjoying what I'm allowed to eat, the occasional sugar cravings are manageable, and I'm seeing my best weight in 3 years and perhaps my best fitness level ever. I definitely feel that I can maintain this for some time to come, though it's impossible to know for sure.

In the meantime, though, I'm keeping my fingers crossed! Wish me luck as we head into summer.

The Tortoise and the Hares

This morning I ran a 5k for the third time since last fall: the cleverly-named See Spot Run in Guthrie, Oklahoma, a race to benefit the no-kill Free to Live animal sanctuary north of Edmond. It's a good cause and a good motivation to keep pushing myself while working out, so I figured, why not?

My time was also okay - a 31:33, only 2 minutes and 17 seconds faster than today's winning time for the 10k, which certainly keeps my speed in perspective. On the other hand, that's a minute faster than the two 10k times I logged last September and October, so obviously I'm improving, however slowly. And I was not the slowest guy in the 45-49 age group, either, which I believe is a first for me!

Of course, whatever time I post, I can never let myself forget that running a 5k represents a personal victory for me. It's a fitness victory, since I would never have done this when I weighed 285 pounds and had a hard enough time just hauling my body off the sofa, much less moving it faster than a slow walk for 3 miles.

Even more important, though, it's a self-esteem victory. I know I'm no longer enormous, but I'm also well-aware that I don't exactly cut an athletic figure out there, weighing as much as I still do. There was a time when I would not have wanted to expose either my out-of-shape body or my less-than-graceful running style in front of race spectators, but I'm much better with that now. They might not know how much weight I've lost and what running a 5k represents for me, but I know it, and that's enough.