I weigh myself once a week. It’s a habit now. There are times when I am embarrassed to get on the scale – if I had a bad week or couple of days just be fore weighing. But it is better to see what the effect of a bad week is, then to not know. And your body may surprise you. But knowing is better than not knowing. Ignorance kills, after all.
Anyway, I have about a year and a half of my body weight written down. It’s mostly decreased though there have been pauses and backslidings here and there. This week I hardly budged:
Last week I weighed 225, a big dip. But I went down again very slightly this week, so it looks like the weight loss was real. Since January 2019, I have lost:
What a milestone!
Strange to think every time I walk up the stairs that I used to be carrying an extra 100 pounds up with me. If my skeleton is discovered millions of years from now I wonder what they will make of mine! “He was probably a slave who carried heavy boulders to build the Pyramids!” I suppose I was a slave, to my lack of responsibility. I shouldn’t be too hard on myself, but I didn’t have the kind of thinking that would get me out of the trap of eating for the wrong reasons.
Mostly what got me out of that old thinking was reading about responsibility. It was very inspiring and I can’t think why I never caught on to the idea before. It also helped to think of myself as two people: the articulate will (hi, that’s me writing right now) and the deeper, animal self that might actually be in charge, who knows. Both parts had to be negotiated with and aligned for me to be successful in this weight control lifestyle. I’ve talked about that a lot over the last year and a half.
It’s also interesting that the first 90 pounds of loss all came steadily over about a year. Then I had a big pause for six months, then I have lost the next 10 pounds in fits and starts. I read today about a man who weighed 425 pounds. He lost over 220 (wow!) mostly by changing his reason for eating. He decided that food was fuel and not for pleasure, and then he lived that out. He also mentioned that a lot of the weight came off in one long steady effort, then he had a pause and had to work hard to lose the last 30-40 pounds. Maybe that’s a common theme.
Don’t get discouraged! You can go a long way and then find you have a little more ways to go.
…and when you are concentrating on your weight, don’t forget you have a lot of responsibilities to take care of! Don’t slack off in other important areas, you only live once.
-The Doctor