I've been struggling with my weight my whole life.
I'm tired of it.
I'm ready to not be fat while I'm struggling, because I think I'll be struggling for the rest of my life. Let's struggle with this at the other end. Fight hard and work hard to keep it off instead of take it off.
I've lost some weight three separate times in my life and each of those times, while I was doing it - it was ridiculously easy. It felt like I had made a decision to get healthy and I was then acting on that decision - easy as pie.
The first time I did Nutri System or Jenni Craig, I think it was Nutri System. It doesn't matter which one it was, just that it was one with already prepared food. Just eat this and you will lose weight. Well I did eat it and in fact lost weight. I don't remember how much exactly; it was nearly 20 years ago when I was in my early 20s, but I think it was around 35 lbs. I got down to a size 10 or 12. I was mostly comfortable there. I stopped the program and wanted to see if I could maintain it on my own and I did great for a year or so, until my dad got sick. I had no coping mechanisms and I started eating out of control again. I used food and it helped. Slowly my weight crept back up and of course went higher.
Then I did weight watchers. Hmmm, that was not quite 10 years ago. I had at least my oldest son and he's now 10. And again, it was easy. And I lost weight. But I think I got bored counting points and paying constant attention, so I stopped and gained the weight and more back.
Then, OMG, I got seriously heavy. And I got sick and friggin fed up with it. By this point, I think I knew that my issue was more mental than anything else. I'm sure that's true of everyone. But the truth is I'm scared. I think I'm scared of success and not so much of failure. I mean, I've failed before, but what would happen if I succeeded. I sure wouldn't be so invisible as I am right now. I knew I had to make a change, and I knew it had to be with a mental component. I thought about just finding a counselor that specialized in weight loss. But I looked around and realized that Johns Hopkins is not too far from me and they have a weight managment center, so I called them up and joined and bought their food and saw a counselor one on one, and l lost 75 lbs. I felt great. I still had some more to lose, but was feeling really good. In this program you meet with a counselor and a medical doctor every week, which is good right....
But the problem...... right from the beginning. It was the same thing. Wildly easy. I tried to tell the counselor. I've been here before. This is easy. They kept saying 'you are doing great!, keep it up' I kept saying.... wait, no, I've been here before. It's been easy before. It's going to get hard. I'll get scared, I'll figure out a way to sabotage this, I won't want to succeed. When it gets hard I'll stop talking. I need to talk about this now. I need to figure it out now, while I can talk about it. Unfortunately their counselor's style and mine were at opposite ends of the scale. We talked about that - her style is to wait for a bad week to happen and then to analyze it. I told her I was sure when a bad week happened I didn't think I'd be able to talk about it. We needed to talk about all the other bad weeks I've had, well we struggled, I gave up trying to get her to talk to me about my past and we talked about what she did during the past week - we got along famously. Eventually, it stopped being easy. I think I got too close, even though I still had a ways to go.... I stopped going, I stopped doing, I gained almost 50 of it back.
I've stopped the upward trek but have been struggling to move consistently back downwards. Though for the first time in my life, I'm not giving up. I've been trying to do the same plan that had me lose that weight most recently, which is low carbs, high protein. I keep sort of going on and going off that. Which throws me in and out of ketosis. Which is just not working for me. So I've decided I need to do this under the umbrella of weight watchers and just choose things that are lower in carbs and higher in protein while I'm doing it.
I put that little ticker thing up there at the top and even though this is not really public because it's mostly anonymous, I still feel good about publicly putting those numbers up there. I actually put a goal weight for the first time that is actually what my weight should be. I've always shied away from saying that I could actually weigh 130 lbs or even less. I'm only 5'2", but I've weighed over 200 lbs for the vast majority of my adult life. And to think that I could actually be a normal weight has always seemed just not a realistic option. But... why not. I'm not suggesting I want to weigh 100 lbs or something ridiculous. 130 is the high end of the normal range for a person my height. I think that's what I'm aiming for.
A funny thing about that little ticker up there that I didn't expect. For some reason the 89 lbs to go seems less insurmountable than I expected... Odd. Like I can tick those off one by one and the turtle will happily move along; one pound at a time.
We'll see. Wish me luck.
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