Round

For a while now I’ve wanted to do several exercises related to mentally getting yourself into the “losing weight” mode.  Although I’m doing pretty well right now, there is still room for improvement (especially in diet) and the next few weeks with vacations etc will be full of challenging situations, plus I’d like to get this off the “to-do” list.   Upcoming days will have other exercises from this series.

What 5 positive steps for your health have you taken in the past month?

1. Started exercising 2 weeks ago
2. Re-started the vitamins consistently
3. Various medical tests and doctors visits
4. Kept doing multiple stress-managment things including reading, walking, and adequate sleep
5. Watching what I eat (reducing sugar, white carbs, volumes)
6. Eating lots of fruits and veggies 
7. New electric toothbrush (it’s fabulous!)
8. Keeping up my blog
9. Started doing the 100 pushups program (thanks, Josephine!)
10. Cooking regularly from healthy recipes and cookbooks
11. Planning my week with food, exercise and cooking
12. Bought several pairs of cute comfortable shoes so that I can walk a bit between appointments when I get the opportunity
13. Shopping on Sundays to stock up on healthy things
14. Several hours spent prepping veggies and cooking for the week on Sunday
15. Made extra efforts to walk at least 15 minutes if I didn’t make it to a “real” exercise session
16. Standardized breakfasts (cold cereal or oatmeal or museli)

Here’s the “Prepare to Lose Weight” Homework :

• Write down the reasons why you want to lose weight and how serious you are about losing weight
• Confirm in your writing how committed you are to following your weight loss program
• Write down where you have to make major changes in your life, including what you eat, where you eat, and how you eat. Look at your eating habits and decide if there are any that you can break
• Review the amount of exercise you do now, and how much you are prepared to do in the future. Exercise should eventually become a part of your daily routine
• Look at the size and style of the clothing you wear now and compare it to what you want to wear when you have reached your weight loss goal
• Set a realistic set of weight loss goals and factor in a self reward system for when you reach certain goals.
• Plan a healthy diet that you know you can live with

My answers coming soon…

I have just come to realize that my desire to start this blog & the other activities I am doing around weight management (reading mainly) are stemming from a real desire to lose another chunk of weight permanently, and in a way that works w my life. Which means it will probably be slow.

The times I have lost a good amount of weight I have always had a ‘getting ready’ phase, so I think this is a really good realization. Right now I am focused on maintaining my weight around 183. I have our US reception for my French wedding in just over 2 weeks, and I have to fit into my dress, so the motivation is external. Plus I am still recovering from surgery and still not allowed exercise, so if I wanted to lose weight right now it would be really hard, since I’d have to do it all by calorie restriction (something that I’m never good at, especially without exercise).

What does getting ready to lose mean?

• Building some of the good habits back in, such as eating a lot of fruit & vegetables, regular exercise, etc.
• Having a clear plan of what I am going to do
• Being willing to make the sacrifices
• Having my motivations of why I want to lose weight crystal clear in my head
• Thinking through how I will deal w various challenging situations during the process
• Identifying a start date that is reasonable — not in the middle of a big project at work, but not letting endless excuses keep me from starting
• Having rewards in mind
• Deciding on the basics of the plan I am going to follow

I am not very far along on all these points, but at least I can now make more sense of the diet-related web searching, now that I know what I am really searching for.

Right now, my thinking is to find a way to lose weight without becoming obsessive. I don’t know if I can really do that. I’m thinking of a healthy diet with calorie counting (which I have done before) or maybe an exchange-type diet. I am kind of intrigued by Weight Watchers but I don’t know if that will be a good choice for me or not. I definitely plan to incorporate regular exercise as soon as I am able, but it will likely be swimming or maybe AquaGym & walking, at least for a few months. I think I’ll try to weigh weekly, or maybe even monthly, but probably not daily. I need to really look at my calendar, but most likely I would start in early Sept & keep on the good habits before then. I have 2 weeks of big professional meetings from August 20th, and since I’ll be living in hotels & working long hours that is probably not the time to start, since food choices & exercise time will both be out of my control. I am a very spoiled woman — I can’t think of anything I want as a reward right now that I don’t have — need to work on that!

I just found an article on getting ready to lose weight — I’ll try to address some of her ideas here in the future!