Weighing yourself
Hello everybody. One of my commitments to myself is a weekly weighing. I recommend it.
When I started this diet, I was actually too chicken to get on the scale (I weighed 325 pounds a few weeks before I started). It took a week before my courage returned. Now I do it every Saturday, before breakfast. My weight last week was 288.8 pounds on the trusty Homedics scale. So, how did I do this week?
Wonderful! I made fantastic progress. The weight loss professionals would have a fit, but I won’t. This means I have lost a total of….
That’s a big milestone. I will reward myself for all my faithful staying on the diet! Now, this part may confuse you. I am going to reward myself with food. Am I going to break my diet? No, I am not. Let me explain.
My last reward was for the milestone of weighing less than 290 pounds. The reward was going out to lunch, with friends, at my favorite Indian buffet restaurant. That day, I had a really small breakfast, an enormous lunch, and no dinner. I lost almost three pounds that week. The key here is that my reward reinforces my diet. One of my insights about myself is that I could transform my relationship with food. Instead of eating until I was totally full (my old goal), my new goal was to be hungry for my next meal. The meal had to be completely worth waiting for, worth being hungry for, and worth paying attention to. But it couldn’t be so large that it prevented me from anticipating my next meal, being hungry for it, and enjoying it in turn.
My weight loss plan is built around the idea that I must really be looking forward to my food. A little hunger at the right time is a good thing. (The trade-off, as I will explain later, is that I cannot be late for meals.) So, having a reward meal or dessert that I am really looking forward to actually reinforces my system. I have to be hungry for the special meal, anticipate and enjoy it, but not go so wild that I can’t be hungry for the next planned meal.
I hope you are beginning to see how this works.
It’s great progress, but I can’t help feeling a little depressed. I am still 80 pounds overweight. Losing weight is really slow, if you let yourself think about it that way. Usually, I don’t indulge in that kind of self-pity. After all, 80 pounds overweight is a lot less than 120 pounds overweight! Plus, I have never successfully lost weight on purpose before. Really, I have a lot to feel happy and thankful about. I have never felt so positive about myself. It is really meaningful to see different layers of my being lining up behind this effort and gives me a lot of positive feedback and a boost to my morale as I keep plugging away.
But there is a tiny seed of doubt every time I get on the scale. Will this keep working? So far, it has.
-The Doctor