2012: Here We Go Again, Hopefully for the Last Time

Year before last, I tried a diet (Isagenix).  I lost 50 lbs on it relatively quickly.  I hated it. I hated being dependent on their products. I hated how expensive everything was. I hated every weekend of regular fasting.  I felt hungry, tired, miserable, and cranky.  I initially considered it my penance for treating my body so badly all of my life, but after about half a year of torturing myself weekly, I couldn't justify it anymore.  I failed miserably on the diet during the holidays of 2010 and never lost any weight after that.  I tried to get back on track numerous times, but could never move past the grudging hate I came to feel for those 48 consecutive hours of weekly fasting. My father, mother, sister, and aunt have all done well on Isagenix, losing anywhere from 40 to 90 lbs and keeping it off.  I couldn't do it.

Last year, sometime after I got engaged in January and before I got married in October, I decided that I was going to stop doing Isagenix. I've never felt so great about any dieting decision I have ever made in my entire life. Despite knowing I would be at a higher weight and a higher dress size for my wedding, I still felt relieved and excited about never having to torture myself again. I stopped the diet and gained 15 lbs back. I attended my wedding in a plus-sized wedding dress, but you couldn't have found a happier bride. I felt beautiful and confident. I've played this game before of diet, weight, guilt, and stress and I was bound and determined this wasn't going to ruin my day.  And it didn't.

However, I came back from the honeymoon nearly 10 lbs heavier.  I ate whatever I wanted to, whenever I wanted to.  I relaxed a lot and exercised little. It was a week of poor behavior distillation: all the bad stuff I've ever done regarding food was done in large quantities for a week. My reasoning was I would only get married and have this type of honeymoon once.  I might as well do whatever I want because I'd never get the chance to do it again.  When I got back, I wrote a list of every terrible thing I consumed during that week to tell me that overindulgence of that type and in that quantity should not be repeated.  I hung that list on the refrigerator as a reminder not to do it again.  It worked somewhat; I lost 5 lbs of the weight I gained during the honeymoon and have had no desire to go buy a pie and eat the whole thing.  But during the holidays I managed to eat far more than I should have and came away from the festivities of my birthday and Christmas with those 5 lbs regained and my pants getting dangerously tight. 

Enter the New Year. I can't remember a time when weight loss wasn't my foremost resolution.  I've lost on multiple diets over the course of the majority of my life.  Weight Watchers, Atkins, South Beach, Isagenix... I've lost weight on all of them.  Also--obviously--I've never managed to keep the weight off. In some cases, it was the fault of the diet: it never taught me how to eat and live like an normal human being.  (Isagenix especially. They want you to use their products for the rest of your life.  I don't have that kind of money.) But in most other instances, the fault was mine.  I wasn't really ready to stick with a plan for rest of my life. Food was a huge draw for me.  And so was the pressure to lose a very appreciable amount of weight nearly immediately.

I've discovered that I need to drastically alter my thinking about weight loss. I'm no longer interested in losing a large quantity of weight in a small amount of time.  Especially not after reading an article in the New York Times (The Fat Trap) that described how the body will fight to stay at a higher weight even after you've already lost it. If you've been heavy most of your life, your body will make it incredibly hard to lose weight and incredibly easy to put it on.  It will take years of struggling, decisiveness, hard work, and vigilance to do what some people who have never been heavy can do naturally. It's certainly off-putting and can be a deal-breaker for anyone wanting to start a diet with the hopes that it can finally help them reach their goal of a normal weight range. However, the article says that the dieters who lost the weight did so with low-calorie diets and lots of exercise.  They lost a lot of weight quickly.  They haven't completed studies that track individuals who lose weight slowly over a long period of time.  If that's the trick to keeping the weight off, I think I'm ready.

I was initially going to do Weight Watchers, but after thinking about how much it was going to cost, I determined that we can't afford it right now.  I'm going to give myself two weeks to try a different method, and if I can successfully lose weight on it, then I'll stick with that.  If not, I'll find a way to budget for WW and go with that instead.

So far I've signed up for My Fitness Pal.  I use it on my phone to track food, exercise, weight loss, and measurements.  It has a UPC code scanning function that makes it easy to add things to my daily food log.  I can also search from a comprehensive list of foods, add calories without doing a food search, and add recipes to determine how many calories are in a single serving.  It keeps track of nutrition information and allows you to add friends.  My husband joined so that we could both work towards being healthier. (If anything, I think this could be the ticket to me sticking with this plan.)

I've also been reading the library of health-related articles at Spark People. While My Fitness Pal gives me the format to keep track of everything that goes into my body, Spark People gives me all the information I need to make sure what I put in there is a smart choice.

Spark People gives me insights into how to eat like a normal person.  It tells me how to lose the weight and not develop unhealthy habits and disorders. It gives excellent advice on the types of foods to eat lots of, exercises to do, how to keep yourself on track, and what to do if you royally screw up. This is a remarkable change from what I've tried to do in the past. Before, the diet stipulated what I could and could not eat.  It never gave me the freedom to make my own decisions, thus omitting teaching me how to deal with all kinds of foods in every situation. I love food.  I like the experience of eating.  I need to know how I can still love to eat and love the foods I eat while losing weight and keeping it off. When I'm told not to touch carbs or to stay away from anything that isn't organic, that's not telling me how to live.  That's telling me how to eat a very narrow set of food parameters that will ultimately make me unsatisfied with my choices and cause me to cheat just to expand my variety. Spark People is an excellent resource for me because it tells me not to give up anything.  It tells me to have a small amount every week, which helps prevent binge eating and cravings. It also tells me to eat more of the good stuff like vegetables and lean proteins and whole grains, because these things will naturally make me fuller and less likely to want large quantities of the bad stuff. That's a way of eating that I can live with.

There are going to be multiple components to my lifestyle change. This week is all about food for me.  I'm developing the habit of making sure I log everything I put in my mouth. Next week I'll start incorporating regular exercise.  Just cardio at first. After another week, I'm going to try mixing strength-training into my weekly routine.  Just baby steps.  And hopefully my new commitment will stick.  I want to be accountable and make sure that I can keep moving forward, keep searching within, and keep forgiving myself so that I never have to make this a resolution again.  It'll just be part of my everyday life.