Happy New Year

New Year’s Eve is a great time to reflect on the issue of Maintenance. Today I’m posting an article by one of the very few bloggers who have continued sharing information about their weight-loss and maintenance efforts for an extended time after achieving a large weight loss and getting close to their weight-loss goal.

In January 2009 Kate began dieting, and this summer, 2012, her weight was about 120 lbs lighter that when she started. I’ve enjoyed reading her blog over the years.

She says she used “no pills, no rules, no plans, no shots, no surgery, no supplements.” …that she “ate less, ate better food, found the joy in exercise, and learned to appreciate (her) body.”

Although her diet efforts, as a vegetarian, were not the same as mine, the content of her writings indicate that we have many Thoughts in common…including that people aren’t all the same, and there are many different ways to lose weight.

Kate tells us that she is “just a normal woman who got tired of yo-yo dieting and finally decided to change (her) lifestyle for good.” She is not a nutritionist, personal trainer, or medical professional. She doesn’t work for any company, endorse any diet plan, and isn’t paid to promote any product.

  At the end of the article, I will comment further.

Weight & Weight Loss, I’m Over It. 
                                      by Kate on 12/8/12  in "This is Not a Diet …It’s my life"

I don't weigh myself anymore. It's been about a month since I did. This may come to a surprise to people who have been following me and know I used to be a daily weigher.

Those who really know me should not be surprised though, because if there's one thing I will always continue to embrace, it's change. I know that in order to continue to grow, I will sometimes change my mind.

So what happened? A couple of things. The first thing was my injury the day after Labor Day, when I fell and suffered a concussion. My weight all the sudden meant less to me. It seemed so silly and ridiculous the amount of time I spent ensuring I always stayed in the same range after losing 120 pounds 2 years ago. Every day, weighing myself, adjusting what I ate, adjusting what exercise I did... it seemed reasonable at the time. It doesn't now. When I was really feeling shitty from the concussion, I felt like it was clear which things were important and which weren't. Spending a lot of time thinking about my weight lost importance, it went into the same category as stressing out about my job. Not that it's simple stop thinking about those things, but I've been putting in the effort not to be absorbed by things that don't improve my daily happiness.

I've relaxed significantly. The other thing that I'm dealing with is my chronic back pain which has been constant and frankly getting worse for the last year. I've de-intensified my exercise for this reason. I've been listening to my body, and my physical therapist. I've stopped lifting heavy weights altogether. I've stopped running. I've stopped doing any sort of impactful exercise. I've started doing certain yoga poses specifically for my back. I've started doing the gentle abdominal exercises prescribed to me. I get my heartrate up by uphill walking, elliptical trainer, or recumbent biking.

I've also started changing my daily habits to eliminate long periods of sitting. I just received a standing desk for my office at work and I'm already sitting less than 4 hours a day at work which is a huge improvement over sitting over 8 hours or more. I plan to gradually reduce sitting time as much as I can.

I feel really good about my eating habits. I haven't changed what I've been eating, though I've become more aware of eating what I really want to eat and spending less time thinking about whether I "should" eat it. I've found that I often want a hot breakfast with eggs, something I used to have very infrequently. I've found that for lunch, I generally want soup or chili. I've found that for dinner, I tend to prefer a huge pile of vegetables with some sort of grain or pasta.

But I've also found that sometimes, I don't need to cook everything from scratch. At least once a week, I've been having a frozen Amy's meal (love them!). Sometimes I stop at Whole Foods and make myself a big salad for lunch or get breakfast from their hot foods case. I sometimes have Chipotle for dinner. Starbucks has this veggie artisan sandwich I just love.

I had gotten so adverse to foods I didn't cook myself, that I was foregoing these things, that I do actually really like! Yes, I can make decently good pre-made food choices. I don't need to be so stringent. I still cook most of what I eat myself, but I'm just feeling less strict about it and this has released so much stress from my life that I didn't really realize was building up.

And finally, the tipping event, I started reading the book Health at Every Size. I plan to review it when I finish it, but the minute I started reading it, I recognized something in myself that I immediately knew had to stop: spending one more second thinking about my weight. Done. Over it. That's that.

And here's the real kicker, something I never realized until I started to read this book. Say what I would about focusing on health instead of weight, I was not entirely doing that myself.
I am doing it now. Part of letting go was coming to a place of acceptance that I might gain some weight. That's what stopped me from getting off the scale for so long: fear of gaining weight. In fact, when I stopped weighing myself last April for a month, I did gain weight.

And I've been struggling for awhile about this, but not wanting to write about it because I wanted to let what was taking place mentally with me happen naturally and not be influenced by the opinions of others. I have been vacillating between thinking of trying to lose the bit of weight I re-gained and embracing it. Every once in awhile I'd fire up the old MyFitnessPal app and start thinking about counting calories... and it just didn't happen.

I realized something when I got that concussion. Being comfortable with my eating and exercise habits as they are now, listening to what my body needs, focusing on the medical issues I have, these things are more important to me than what I weigh. The way I know to lose weight, calorie counting, means giving up something that's more important to me: my very healthy relationship with food! I have never had such a reasonable, moderate, and satisfying relationship with food. To put it bluntly, I don't want to fuck with a good thing.

In making this decision, I feel so powerful because I am ignoring all the false messaging that we all must constantly obsess about our weight. Note, this does not mean I no longer work out and I am going to eat a bunch of fast food and gain 100 pounds again. I get so tired fo hearing that from people: that if you aren't focused on your weight, the only other option is cheesy nachos, pizza, cake, chips, and television. That's just a false choice, a red herring. I love my healthy lifestyle! Exercise is vital! Eating real whole foods most of the time is practically magic in the way it makes you feel. Don't worry, I'm not headed to the drivethru.

Our society is so damned overly-obsessed with our weight, losing weight, gaining weight, celebrity's weight, baby weight, and being on a diet to the exclusion of everything else. I don't want to be a part of that. I definitely love that I can inspire people because I lost a lot of weight, but I'm hoping that instead of focusing on that aspect, I can get people to see that the most profound changes I have made over this journey are much deeper and more important: my actions, my habits, my internal dialogue, my self-esteem, my self-respect, my commitment to my own physical and mental health, taking care of my nutritional needs, and regularly moving my body. Without these things, weight loss would be meaningless.

                           www . thisisnotadiet-itsmylife. com 

  I understand and sympathize with Kate’s position. I, too, often feel like I am SO over weight-loss and maintenance. The problem is that I am Absolutely Certain that I, personally, must continue my present Efforts in order to keep my body out of morbid obesity.

I am now beginning the 8th year of maintaining a 146 lb weight-loss. My total weight-loss was a bit more than 156 lbs, but despite my consistent best efforts, during the past five years about 10 of the lost pounds have returned.

I am also interested in things other than weight issues, and during my lifetime, I experienced many things that improved my own “actions, habits, internal dialogue, self-esteem, self-respect, and commitment to my own physical and mental health”. l learned to like and respect myself - including my body, while I was still fat, long before I succeeded in losing weight from my highest weight.

 Sometimes I get very tired of the need to keep my focus on food and weight-related issues. I’d like to be “free”, to have no need to consciously control my food and my weight. The way Reduced Obese people can “free” themselves from controlling weight is to decide that their weight is not important, and whatever weight their body choses to be naturally is acceptable to them. I’ve chosen that decision quite a number of times in my life, but it always resulted in me gaining immense amounts of weight... to a point where the size of my body became more than twice it's ideal size ....which is a physical issue impossible for me to ignore. 

I love myself 
      when my “normal” body is buried in fat;
      when I have nothing attractive to wear;
      when parts of my body continually ache;
      when my size limits the physical activities I can engage in;
      when people with an anti-fat-bias treat me as though I were a retarded leper.

But I ALSO love myself enough to keep on working one-day-at-a-time to help my body avoid obesity and the disadvantages that go with it.

Unlike Kate or the Pasta Queen, I’m not in my 20s or early 30s. I’m over 60 and have lived with my own body and dealt with this issue for a very long time. As a short woman, 50 to 100 lbs up puts me high into obesity. I’ve lost 30 to 50 lbs many times, and 100 pounds several times and every time … until now, regained it all, plus more.

At present, I very much enjoy having my body be what is considered a “normal” weight. I am totally unwilling to go back to being a 5’0“ tall, 271 lb - morbidly obese woman again, and I intend to do whatever it takes to keep that from happening.

The article above shows a young woman who lost about 120 lbs and maintained most of that loss for about a-year-and-a-half, but who has grown weary of the struggle.

At 5’9” tall, in January 2009 she weighed 287 lbs and March 2011 she reached her goal of 165 lbs. This July 2012 she weighed 168 lbs. In October 2012 she posted that her weight was around 175, and recently said that she hasn’t weighed herself since October.

Kate has recently encountered some personal difficulties; has been reading a book about Intuitive Eating, and has decided to ease up on the things she has been doing do lose weight and to maintain that lost weight … with the understanding that she might need to accept a little bit of weight-gain and a size that is a bit larger than normal. Recently she has made the choice to follow Intuitive Eating principles.

I’ve seen this strategy quite a few times before in others, and have also experienced it myself. Unfortunately, it is based on merely wishful thinking, and I’ve never seen a Reduced Obese person maintain weight-loss for any length of time while using it. For most Reduced Obese people, easing up on the maintenance process is like a runaway train. Those empty fat cells are there just waiting to be filled, and without ongoing conscious control, there’s very little chance that a Reduced Obese person’s body won’t return to it’s previous high weight.

One reason I’ve never witnessed this happening to anyone who has been obese for a lengthy time period, -- is because very few people talk honestly about their experience with it.  I’ve seen many grandiose claims of success from “experts” and other marketers, but that type of puffery has little value. I see real people sharing information regarding a regain of up to about 50 lbs, at which time they disappear from internet view,  or refuse to discuss the subject any further. I have seen several people (including myself) … who after regaining all or most of their lost weight, …. start another weight-loss effort, and achieve great success again. A few of those people are willing to share about what happened to them after they made the choice to “ease up”.  After a large regain, some people do start dieting in order to keep their bodies from gaining the rest of the weight. Personally, I've learned that I much prefer being normal size, and dieting to stay there...  than being morbidly obese, and then dieting to keep from getting even larger.

 Kate’s post reminds me of another great blog that I followed for years. “The Pasta Queen”, another young woman (also 5’9” tall) who lost from 372 lbs down to 185 lbs (1/2 her total weight), published a book about it, developed ongoing headaches and published a book about that. After one-and-a-half-years of weight-loss maintenance, she admitted to a weight-gain of 50 lbs.

The Pasta Queen continued blogging for another one-and-a-half-years, but during that time she didn’t share her maintenance weights and seldom talked about weight-loss/maintenance issues. At that time she stopped posting in her diet blog, and began a new blog about non-diet issues in which there are only a very-few, very-vague references to her ongoing issues of weight-loss, weight-gain or maintenance. It seems fairly clear that she hasn't lost weight again.  So, has the Pasta Queen continued to regain lost weight? Maybe not, but my best guess is: Unless she has resumed dieting in the effort to keep her body from going above the inital 25% weight regain, then the answer to that question is probably, Yes.

The book mentioned in Kate’s article: “Health at Every Size” (2010) by Linda Bacon is based on the principles of Intuitive Eating.

There are many articles here in my DietHobby Achieves which state my position on Intuitive Eating, and I have read Linda Bacon’s book. It makes some interesting points, in that the author admits that a obese person’s body is different than a normal body and says that a person who follows the principles of Intuitive Eating might not lose any weight. However, what the book should have, … but did NOT say, … is that a “reduced obese” person following the principles of Intuitive Eating will probably regain ALL of their lost weight and become morbidly obese again.

Essentially, Intuitive Eating is simply another Diet (eating plan), and the Scale is merely a helpful tool. If a person who is attempting to follow that eating plan, can actually succeed with forever eating only very moderate amounts of healthy food, that person will be able to maintain or lose weight. Unfortunately … for a Reduced Obese person to Rely (depend on with trust and confidence) on eating Signals from a Body with a Goal to refill all of its deflated fat cells,... while refusing to exert ongoing, conscious control to limit the amounts and kinds of food eaten ... is a recipe for a weight regain.

I wish Good Luck to Kate, but based on my knowledge of Intuitive Eating, I expect that she will regain all, or most, of her lost weight … maybe not right away, but probably within the next several years. Evidentally she now intends to pay no attention to the scale, but there are many other ways to tell that one has regained all of the lost weight. I am curious to know whether Kate will be an unusual person who is open and truthful about what happens to the size and condition of her body due to her decision. It would be interesting to see her openly reverse her Before and After pictures.

Although I feel sad about what Kate will probably experience in her future, her post was helpful to me   because it reminds me of my past, and helps motivate me to continue on with my own personal maintenance efforts, …. no matter how weary I get of continually doing all the things that it takes to keep me from returning to morbid obesity.

 My own personal choice in 2013 is to continue on with my current maintenance efforts.

Happy New Year to you all.


 

Maintenance is KEEPING the Weight Off. We are almost at the end of 2012, and I’ve been reviewing my own personal 2012 “diet/way-of-eating/lifestyle” Efforts and Results.

My Eating Behavior wasn’t Perfect, and my Results were even further away from Perfect. 

I’d like to be about 10 lbs lighter, and during 2012, despite many, many Efforts, I didn’t achieve the Results that I believe that my eating behavior deserved.

I was unsuccessful at losing the weight my body regained over the previous 4 years. However, Today, in the last week of 2012, I’m only about one lb higher than I was during the first week of 2012, which actually is excellent maintenance.

Behavior I’m proud of in 2012 is ... that I continued working on my weight-loss maintenance for another 12 months. I did my very best to eat in a way that would cause weight-loss and keep me from regaining my weight. I entered all my food into my computer food journal, DietPower. I entered my weights, and kept additional charts & records updated even when I felt sick-to-death of the weight Results I kept seeing.

I’ve continued to do my best to make Dieting an enjoyable Hobby.  Some of the ways I’ve done this is to continually search for new information; read diet-related books; try out new recipes, and write and make videos here at DietHobby.

I’ve now maintained my current weight-loss for SEVEN years, and am now starting on year EIGHT.  As stated in the article below, avoiding obesity requires “lifelong management”, and to achieve continued Maintenance success, I can never stop my Efforts. 

There have been many days when I got tired of the whole thing, and wanted to live “normally”, but I am a “Reduced Obese” person. A person with a disability like amputed legs will always have to make “lifestyle” adjustments, and I am in the same boat. I can never expect to handle food the way a “naturally thin” person does. My own experience has taught me that eating like a “normal” person will put my body back into morbid obesity. 

“The only weight loss that matters
 is the weight you can keep off.” 

Weight Loss-Maintenance
                Dr. Arya Sharma

“We are bombarded with anecdotal instances of how easy it is to lose vast amounts of weight. Not just the ‘weight-loss industry’ … think of TV reality shows, popular magazines, and fad diets.

We celebrate people for losing weight. We seldom check to see if they are still keeping it off. I am always asked by patients, “How much weight can I lose and how fast can I lose it?” I tell them that that’s the wrong question … the only weight loss that matters is the weight you can keep off.

This is why we introduced the term ‘best weight’ … the lowest weight you can realistically maintain. Your ‘best weight’ depends on your individual circumstances. Everyone’s ‘best weight’ will be different.

The public, but also health professionals and policy makers. need to understand that when you focus on ‘weight loss’ you get ‘weight loss’ – when you focus on ‘maintenance of weight loss’ you get ‘maintenance of weight loss’.

Another point is that we often frame weight regain as ‘failure’ when it is really the only natural expected consequence of stopping the treatment for a chronic condition. Even worse, the failure is often framed in the context of the treatment.

If you take a drug … lose weight … stop the drug … regain the weight …we would attribute the failure to the drug and not to ‘stopping’ the drug. No drug or treatment works when you don’t take it.”

I tell my patients, stopping your food journal it is like stopping your medication.

The principle is that you’re never done.  The idea you’re going to do something for a while and then stop doing it is not going to work. So you’ve got to find something that works for you that you can keep on doing.

The bottom line is that obesity is a chronic condition that requires lifelong management. So don’t do anything that you can’t afford to do, or that is so time-intensive that you’re just going to run out of time to do it, or so onerous that you’re just not going to stick with it.

                                 Dr Sharma’s Obesity Notes, www .drsharma. ca

Counting down 2012.

There isn’t One-Diet-For-Everyone,
and there are lots of good eating plans available to us all.
Each of us can find way-to-eat-less that we can make fit our lifestyle.

Here’s a diet recommendation from one obesity doctor.

A Life of Thoughtful Reduction

Why not live a life of thoughtful reduction?
No blind restrictions, but also no blind consumptions.
Ask yourself whether or not something's worth its calories
and how much you need of it to be happily satisfied.

             Yoni Freedhoff, MD

As part of my dieting hobby, I visit many different websites here on the internet,
and sometimes I post comments on different forums and other blogs.
Today, I've decided to post a copy of some dialogue from one of these forums,
consisting of another member's unusual comments, and my responses to them.

This member and I have been corresponding for more than 4 years, and we have developed a rather close relationship. She is an educated person who is quite religious. Although her desire and efforts for weight-loss have been ongoing, she has been consistently unwilling to work toward exercising conscious control over the amounts of food that she eats, and has been unsuccessful with her dieting attempts throughout that time period.

Quote from a forum member:: 

"Portion Control is Evil"

My Response:

I challenge this offensive, incorrect, and illogical statement.
Just because we dislike something doesn't mean we get to redefine it.

Portion Control is simply using the brain that God has given you,
to work toward eating the correct amount of food for the body he has given you.
Portion Control simply means = eating less food.
How Much Less? That depends on WHAT you are choosing to eat.
The goal is to take in the same amount of energy as your body, at it's healthiest, uses.

If we are talking in terms of Good vs. Evil,
Portion Control must be Good,
BECAUSE
it is the opposite of the "evil" behavior: "Gluttony",
which Christianity (and many other Religions) define as sinful, bad, "evil".
If Gluttony equals bad; then Portion Control equals good.
Therefore, Portion Control is Godly Behavior.

Avoiding obesity requires limiting your food intake...
no matter what method you use to do this will always involve some form of portion control.
The concept of "free will" means that we can choose NOT to use our brain
to help us eat less food,
However, an attempt to redefine "good" as "evil" is Foolishness.

Quote from a forum member:

Gluttony used to mean eating before the time to eat,
according to a book on medieval eating that I bought.
Webster's online dictionary now says "an excess in eating or drinking."

Why, then, would there be a Shrove Tuesday or a Twelve Days of Christmas
when people were expected to and encouraged to eat more than they required?

I think our society may have changed the meaning of the word, with disasterous results.

Think about this:
What if portion control really is a new concept
and really is the cause of the obesity epidemic?

My Response:

The term "Portion Control" is merely a modern term for an ancient concept.
The term is commonly used to indicate "eating less".

..........Question: What is a "portion" of food?
..........Answer: It is an amount of food.

..........Question: What is "control"?
..........Answer: It is to exercise restraint or direction over, to command,
.........................to hold in check, to regulate, to curb.

I, personally, choose not to think of eating in terms of “good” and “evil”.
However, in support of my above-post, it is easy to see
that the definition of Gluttony has been fairly consistent for thousands of years.

Regarding the past definition of “Gluttony”, even a brief review of the Bible
makes it clear that in ancient, biblical times, “gluttony” meant overeating to excess,
and a “glutton” was often equated with a “drunkard …
which shows that they were considered to be similar behaviors.

The English word, "Gluttony", was derived from the Latin gluttire meaning to gulp down or swallow,
It means over-indulgence and over-consumption of food, drink, or wealth items
to the point of extravagance or waste.

In some Christian denominations, Gluttony is considered one of the seven deadly sins
and it is specifically defined as - a misplaced desire of food…
... eating more than needed, eating more than one’s share.

The word "Greed" is defined as a selfish and excessive desire
for more of something (like food or money) than is needed,
A "Glutton" is "Greedy", and both of these words are often used to define similar behavior.

Deuteronomy 21:20 says:
”And they shall say unto the elders of his city,
This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice;
he is a glutton, and a drunkard.”

Proverbs 23:20-21 warns,
“Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat,
for drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags.”

Proverbs 28:7 declares,
“He who keeps the law is a discerning son,
but a companion of gluttons disgraces his father.”

Proverbs 23:2 proclaims,
“Put a knife to your throat if you are given to gluttony.”

Biblical New Testament Scripture tells Christian believers
that they are not to let their appetites control them,
but they are to have control over their appetites.
(See Deuteronomy 21:20, Proverbs 23:2, 2 Peter 1:5-7,
2 Timothy 3:1-9, and 2 Corinthians 10:5.)

The ability to say “no” to anything in excess—self-control—
- is one of the fruits of the Spirit common to all believers
(Galatians 5:22).


It seems clear that IF one chooses to think of eating in terms of “good” and “evil”,
that eating less = i.e. portion control is “good”, and overeating is “evil”.

The establishment of various historical customs which appear to encourage overeating, don't change the definition of Gluttony.

Quote:

The Origins of Shrove Tuesday Shrove Tuesday originated during the Middle Ages. As in contemporary times, food items like meats, fats, eggs, milk, and fish were regarded as restricted during Lent. To keep such food from being wasted, many families would have big feasts on Shrove Tuesday in order to consume those items that would inevitably become spoiled during the next forty days. The English tradition of eating pancakes on Shrove Tuesday came about as a way to use as much milk, fats, and eggs as possible before Ash Wednesday began. In France, the consumption of all fats and fatty foods on this day coined the name "Fat Tuesday" or Mardi Gras.

Quote:

The origin of the Twelve Days of Christmas is complicated, which is related to differences in church traditions, and different cultures observe this tradition in a variety of ways. By the 16th century, European and Scandinavian cultures had combined the Twelve Days of Christmas with (sometimes pagan) festivals celebrating the changing of the year. These were usually associated with driving away evil spirits for the start of the new year. Over the centuries, differing Christian denominations have had different customs involving the Twelve Days of Christmas, which are currently celebrated in widely differing ways.