HYC Check In – Slow but Steady

Happy Tuesday, everybody, and happy Week 974,312 (feels like)! Hope everyone’s having a great week.

There’s something very encouraging about steady progress, while at the same time a bit demoralizing. This weighing every day is starting to wear on my nerves. It’s good to step on and see that “-0.4″ but it’s so consistent I’m wondering if it’s broken? Hopefully we’ll see tomorrow, because tonight is the Biggest Loser, which is typically a huge workout night for me. So maybe it’ll be different tomorrow. As in “more”, not as in “less”.

But even if it’s not, I’m pleased. I said before that if I can manage a 0.4 loss even most days (because “all” is out of the question; this is reality, not reality TV) I’ll reach my goal before the end of the year. And (I don’t think I mentioned it yesterday) my net loss for last week, after subtracting the fluid I put on the previous weekend, was 3 pounds, which is awesome. (Total loss was 8 pounds, which would have me screaming for joy or passing out in shock if I didn’t know for a fact that 5 pounds was fluid gain from the weekend.) 3 pounds a week is beyond my wildest dreams. But 0.4 a day is 2.8, so who knows?

I’m still waiting for the gain that I can’t explain. It happens; I know it happens. It’s happened to me so many times. It’s demoralizing, but I have to admit that this daily weighing does one thing – you have instant feedback, so the gains are easier to explain. For example: if I gained a pound over the course of a week, I’d have to think back to the entire week to see what I might have done that could explain it. The day before might have been an awesome day, but if I had a bad day three days before that caused me to retain massive fluid, I wouldn’t necessarily associate that. I’d just be furious that I had a gain after working so hard.

Weighing daily, if I have a gain, I really only have to look at the previous day, and it’s pretty readily apparent what the problem was. One pound “real gain” over the course of a week is possible. One pound over a day? Not so much. (And the answer is nearly always “salt”. I’m hypersensitive to sodium so I have to be hyper-careful.) So in that sense, I guess it’s good. I just don’t like the compulsive feel of it. I have this burning desire to be scale-free (okay, weightless then, that sounds less like I have terrible skin lesions), but I know realistically that I’m going to have to wait till I get to a healthy weight and have my body where I want it before I can really do that. (That’s me, not you – I need the feedback. You might not. We’re all different.)

So, for now, I’ll keep doing the daily Body Tests. At least it’s a reason to get up in the morning.

As much as I dislike time-limited goals (because there’s so much pressure associated with them, and for me at least I’ve found that pressure is a big obstacle to consistency and sustainability) I have to admit that I’m keeping my eyes on the end-of-the-year trip. I’m not going into details because it’s still top-secret but I’m excited about it. It’s not going to make a bit of difference to the trip whether I weigh what I weigh now, or 50 pounds lighter, or somewhere in between. But…we’ve gone to this place before, and in the pictures I look…um…less than my best. So it would be very neat to be able to compare this year’s pictures to those, and see a major difference. So that’s a good motivator too.

But it’s not really about motivation, this time around. I was talking at DH last night (yes, “at”, not “to”, because love his heart, he listens even when I’m unfocused and not making much sense) about the mindset you have to be in to be consistent. I made spaghetti and garlic bread last night , and while I’ve been doing great at avoiding white flours I have to admit the garlic bread was killing me. I ate half of one breadstick, and not going back for more was looking like a struggle. But as I told DH, you have to find that mental switch that takes you from, “Oh, poor me, look at this food, I can’t have it, it’s so terrible, oh, it’s so hard…” and so on, into, “It’s just not an option. I’ve eaten what I needed to eat, and that’s it.”

Finding that mental switch gets a lot easier with practice. It’s what happens unconsciously when you’re really “motivated” – you have to get into that dress by next week, or you’re competing for a prize, or whatever your ‘motivation’ is. But making it happen consciously is the battle, and that’s a process that, for some people, can take years (or never happen at all). That’s one area where having a history of panic disorder has helped, strangely enough, because it’s the same mental switch I use to short-circuits the panic attack. I can’t explain it, I wish I could. It’s not a “trick” that I could teach someone. I’ve learned it over the course of 15 years through biofeedback, meditation, and (strangely) Lamaze, and it’s been a slow learning process. But I’ve finally learned to apply it to food, or at least I’m getting better at applying it to food. It’s just a way of thinking, of controlling the physical reactions with the mental muscles, so to speak, that takes you out of whatever mental process you’re in and puts you in another. [Incidentally, if you want to try to learn something like this, I highly recommend biofeedback. It's amazing.]

Okay, that was quite a digression. Anyway, it’s been a good week, and I’m looking forward to another one. Tonight is the Biggest Loser and tomorrow night I hope to walk with B., but other than that I will take tomorrow night off. I found when doing Jillian’s circuits that having about every third or fourth night off is very effective at avoiding the overtrained feeling, and I’m feeling ready for a night off – and I expect I’ll be even more ready after tonight.

Hope everyone has a wonderful and very successful week!