Dialin' it Down

Weight loss isn't easy. Weight maintance is worse. In fact, I think it may be considered excruciating. When you're losing weight, you have the changing numbers to give you momentary highs... at least when they're going in the right direction. You can do three things. Gain weight. Stay the same. Lose weight. But it's a lot of pressure.

Once you hit maintenance, it is a different kind of pressure. At best, you can maintain. At worst, you can gain weight and fail. I maintained for well over 18 months, then over the last holiday season, I let it go and I gained 9 pounds. I've been struggling with those nine since then.

One of the biggest indicators of permanent weight gain, from my view, is to stop looking at the issue. In my former life, the whole point was to hide from the numbers... I would not get on the scale when I gained. I would not buy clothes to fit my expanding body, and when I was forced to, I made it the larger numbers on the clothes the fault of the clothing manufacturers. Smaller cuts... shrinking fabric.

This time, I decided to handle the issue differently. It's been frustrating, maddening, painful. Despite the gain, I got on the scale each and every day. I wrote to Richard about the issue, letting him know early on that I had a serious problem. I discussed it with Lucy too. My friends knew about it, as did Eric. Family too. They were all very supportive of me in my struggles, but I never expected them to come up with an answer. The problem was mine to deal with.

I don't think that weight gain has as much to do with food as commonly believed. Rather, it has everything to do with changing lifestyles and inability to look at what continues to work and what behaviors are no longer productive in our lives. The obese tend to want to isolate themselves (we have reason... trust me on that), and live in a world of denial where if we don't acknowledge our failures. If they don't exist, we don't feel quite as badly about ourselves.

My lifestyle has changed radically over the last year. Eric came into it and with an intimate relationship, I've had to shift a lot of the things that I do. We're a "we" now, rather than a him and me. That's a wonderful thing and feeling; knowing that we will always have each other's backs. But there's the flip side. Social encounters often mean eating engagements. And trust me, I've eaten.

I never completely lost focus on what could be lost from my life if I let food get out of control, and truthfully, Eric has been more than accomodating in helping me. We tend to go to smaller restaurants, or those that can accomodate my need for lower calorie fare. But as Richard says, and Lucy too... going out for meals is a ticket to weight gain. In order to keep going, I needed to make adjustments in other areas.

The first and most obvious area I could change was my exercise. But that is not so easy. Matters of health keep popping up, forcing me back into either a chair or on a complete hiatus from movement. It was clear that I needed to change my eating habits. But that was a tough nut to crack. I had only been keeping sporadic food journals since last December... hmmmm - a one on one correlation to not wanting to deal with the issue.

Still, I never completely turned away from the issue. And it appears to finally be paying off in dividends. Several things have happened in the past few weeks that have made a significant change. I finally opened up enough to try the meal replacements at HMR. I only take in two a day; not as a substitution for meals but to use as snacks. Truthfully, my Crohns doctor is the one who finally forced this issue because I was not processing real food properly and I was going downhill. Fast. When I started taking them, I got a big surprise. The MRs are nutritionally balanced, and I suddenly was getting vitimans and nutrients that were not being absorbed from real food. I felt better and didn't feel the compulsion to eat so much. As the total calories in the MRs I take in combined are only 200, I know the loss is not because I've turned away from food. Trust me, I'm eating. But there's a physical component that has shifted.

They also had me double up on my daily vitiman. That helped too.

But then there was a very important turning point. Two weeks ago, Richard was holding another of his chats in his clubhouse. He talked about a student at Slimmons who had been struggling. (No, I honestly don't know who this student is.) They were parked next to each other one evening and after class, he saw what she had in the passenger compartment of her car. All sorts of junk food!

At that point, he stopped her and together, they made a written list of her top 10 trigger foods. He had her keep the list and told her to avoid buying anything on it. And she kept her promise and she lost weight.

So I thought about this story and decided that it was worth a try. I decided to list my trigger foods.

1.) Chili Encrusted Dried Mango
2.) Dried Cranberries
3.) Crackers
4.) Bread (if not kept in the freezer)
5.) Hard Candy (I had taken it up as a breath freshener since getting sick)
6.) Protein bars from HMR

I looked at the list. This was all I could come up with! And I realized that my eating habits had changed so fundamentally that I no longer crave cookies and candy and cakes and whatnot. No wonder that my gain had been so slow! What was on the list was just not such a big deal.

I decided to apply Richard's idea along with the other two components that I had added into my life. And remarkably, have lost 5 of the 9 pounds.

I know that this is not the end of the story. But it has been a lesson that is not lost on me. I know in my head and heart that the most important thing I can to to ensure my long-term success is always be willing to look at myself with a rational - not condeming - mind. To be willing to acknowledge not only my successes but my challenges too. (Not failures... just issues.) To be willing to change things up, to experiment, until something clicks into place that works.

My life circumstances are a constant evolution. I need to be sure that my mind evolves along with them.

Assessing My Health Risk

As if I wasn't already stressed enough, HMR has issued their Risk Factor Questionaires again. The last time they did so, I looked at the questions and decided that I did not have the mental fortitude to cope with them, so I decided not to participate. Some of that decision, though, was based on a misbelief that this statistical information was only for the benefit of HMR. When I later found out that they issued Health Inventory reports back to their clients, I was a little bit sorry that I didn't partake.

So this time I decided to fill out the survey.
I don't particularly expect to live a long life. I've been sick way to long to ascribe to undue optimism. And the first page, asking about family history and personal health issues seems to bear out that belief.
However, the second page, looking at lifestyle, wasn't nearly as bad although it could have been better too.

The third page had mostly to do with addictive and unhealthy behaviors other than food. I do not smoke and I am not a drinker. That pretty-much sizes up all the answers.
I had a little trouble filling out question # 18. I would actually characterize myself a little higher than "Most from Box A" but definitely not "Virtually all from Box A" because I do eat eggs and at times, cold cuts. But the rest of it was left behind with my old lifestyle. Other Lifestyle Health Factors were a mish-mash of good and bad answers.
And the General Health questions were the same.
The surprising results were when I got my bloodwork results back today. If you recall, I had them measure them specifically during my pre-op appointment so that they were fresh for this questioneer.

Cholesterol - My overall result was excellent although my "good" cholesterol, percentually speaking, was a little low. My other measurements were within normal bounds. I was having a bad day last Friday, though, and my BP actually measured a bit high for me.

All in all, it will be interesting to see how I am rated as a long-term health risk.

Making Plans

Apparently, I remain suggestable. Despite myself. When I would love to just do my own thing, especially where my weight maintenance, and hopefully loss is concerened, I am in situations where everyone wants to help me. And help me they do, despite my announced intention to the contrary.

On Tuesday, I went to my regular weight maintenance class at HMR where the unit, since the new year began, is on getting back to basics.

It has been the perfect unit for me since, in December, I let go of food sheets for the first time in several years, and not so coincidentally, gained four pounds. That on top of the weight that I had been slowly gaining over the prior six months. An eight pound increase.

I did a lot of things right in December, though, including continuing to go to exercise class, going to my weight maintenance class (where - ahem - I had a perfect attendance record all through November and December), and weighing myself every single day. Despite the fact that I did not like what I was seeing on the scale. Also, I not only did not hide the fact that I was failing to keep records, but I made sure that both Lucy and Richard were aware. Both encouraged me to pick them back up again, but wisely did not press the point.

I truly believe that being honest with myself, and with others, was what made it easy for me to start over right after Chritmas.

But keeping food sheets has proven to be only half the issue. I actually needed to address the problem eating areas that was driving my weight up. It started with purging my home of all the junk and processed foods that I had collected. That has proven not to be enough, though. While I've stopped the weight gain dead in it's tracks, I've only dropped a couple of pounds and, with my impending knee and foot surgeries coming up (my friend Wendy refers to me as "At Wounded Knee." Thanks, Wendy - lol!), I need to get more agressive. After all, the exercise is going to grind to a halt during recovery.

So what to do? I'm not good at limiting myself at foods, nor am I good at making food plans. "Decisionless days." Lucy calls them. As soon as I lock myself into a set menu, I revolt (against who or what, I don't know) and deviate. So I've been very resistant to the idea.

The thing is, though, that pretty-much everyone who advocates weight loss says that a plan is essential. Richard reiterates it over and over again. Lucy promises us that weight loss is not very likely without one. And in the face of this pressure, how do I deal with it?

Well, Lucy has seemingly come up with an idea for her class that may do the trick. Last Tuesday, she suggested that we not plan every bite that we are going to eat that day, but instead figure out what we were going to do for exercise, how we were going to get our minimum five fruits and vegetables per day into our diet, and - for those who participate, not me - how and when we were going to take our meal replacements. She had us pull out our HMR Food Journals and commit these plans to paper. The idea being that 1.) we are way more likely to maintain a healthy lifestyle if we commit to it in writing and 2.) we are way more likely to displace bad habits by crowding them out by good than by just saying no.

I did not want to write anything down, but I humored her and did so.




Surprisingly, I did not have much trouble keeping the plan. I was resistent to the idea, though, and did not do them yesterday. But then woke up this morning and thought "Why not? I'll give it a try."

The results were startling. Except for not making a salad to go with my dinner because I was not hungry enough for it, and not using tomato sauce on my baked spaghetti squash because when I pulled it out of the refrigerator, it looked like a science experiment, I kept to the quasi-plan perfectly. I ate other foods in addition to my written record, but pulled my day in at a net calorie level (food intake minus exercise calories burned) of 1150 calories. Wow!

So when I got home this evening after Richard's class, I decided to try it again tomorrow. Wrote down my exercise plan, which by the way, included the 25 abdominal crunches and the four push ups that Richard, this evening, implored us to do on a daily basis. Came up with a plan to get more than my minimumly prescribed roughage, and included a Benefit Bar treat in the mix. And I also sketched in an outline of an exercise plan for Saturday.



Now, I don't pretend that my troubles are over, that this new form of less-commital weight loss plans is going to be the panacea for all that ails me. But I'm willing to give it a try.

I'll let you know how it goes.