To lose weight is difficult. To lose a lot of weight, very difficult. To then keep your new weight, is almost impossible. At least, if you are forcing yourself to do it. That takes willpower I don’t have.
Over the last eight (!) months, I have learned a lot about myself. I was able to transform myself into a person capable of losing weight, first a little, and then a lot. 68 pounds is a lot by anyone’s measure. (I will have about 52 to go before I plan to stop and re-assess.) Willpower-as-force wasn’t in it. I tried ordering myself to lose weight many times in the past. Amazingly, that didn’t work. So it was time to change.
My food intake and calorie count
Breakfast – ham (150) and Muenster cheese (70) on bread (140)
- 360 calories
Lunch – grilled bratwurst wrap (300); 4 ounces cooked spaghetti (200), 2 Costco meatballs (100)
- 600 calories
Dinner – 4 ounces corned beef (300); cabbage (25); carrots (25); potatoes (200)
- 550 calories
Snacking – tea with half and half (80); pretzels and cheese (210); red grapes (100)
- 390 calories
Total for the day: 1900 calories (limit 1800)
And those were pretty awesome grapes
I went a bit over my calorie limit today. I didn’t plan on it either, which is a bit weak. But I did carefully plan out dinner – corned beef and cabbage using a slow cooker! The cabbage was a bit well done, but everything else was perfectly cooked. I will probably do that again. It was so easy. But then I decided to eat grapes, and they were really, really good. So I will have to pay for that at my next weighing.
Good news: I got on the scale again this morning – 257.2 pounds, the lowest ever. Maybe I was onto something real yesterday, when I speculated that it takes time for extra food (binge) that I ate earlier in the week, to work its way out of the body. Let’s look at the math. Normally I would lose about 2 pounds per week which is 0.3 per day over 7 days. I weighed 258 on Sunday and 257.2 Monday. That’s an extra half pound less than I should expect. (Note that this doesn’t mean anything much today – bodies and scales are imprecise and vary a lot. What will I weigh tomorrow? If the trend continues I will take it as confirmation.)
Above, I was talking about what had to change for me to lose weight. The first thing that had to change was my mind. In my mind, I didn’t want to bother with getting thin and staying thin. I thought I was enjoying life, not paying attention and just satisfying whatever cravings I had with as much food as I could eat. I thought that was pretty satisfying.
But it turns out that lifestyle was kind of shallow and unrefined. And resulted in overweight. And as my dissatisfaction with my body’s weight increased, the pleasure of eating without paying any attention, diminished. I wasn’t able to lose weight by force (willpower). So what was there to change? (1) What I valued and (2) how much attention I was willing to pay.
To examine your values and sacrifice your old self – that is a fundamental transformation. I’m not the same person anymore. I pay a lot of attention to what I am eating and how much. And I value being in control of my weight more than I value most other things in my life. What happened to my old self? It’s gone. How I experience the world and how I grapple with the problem of my body is different. Now, it is dramatic and exciting and satisfying, and I am living very intensely by paying a lot of attention.
What do you value? What are your top three values? I can tell you one of mine – be in control of your bod’s weight.
-The Doctor