I am spending the day cleaning out and decluttering. While cleaning out a closet, I have decided to draw a line in the sand. After a life of morbid obesity, I had lost a little over a 100 pounds, was below 200 and was feeling much better. Then my father was diagnosed with cancer and I started a long distance caregiver role. Between emotional eating, eating on the road, and feeling obliged to eat other people's cooking, I gained back to 244 pounds.
I have spent the last few months dealing with my emotions and trying to get back on plan. My weight has bounced between 236 and 240 for 3 months now. I have consoled myself with knowing that I did not gain all my weight back and reminding myself how bad I felt at my highest weight.
For some reason, I kept many of my clothes of all sizes. Going through my storage closet today, I was pulling out size 28s, size 30s, and even one 32. I tried some of them on and was both encouraged and horrified at how large they are. Considering how much my knees hurt now, I know that I won't be able to walk if I let myself get back to those sizes. I simply can not let that happen. It is within my control! So, I put two items aside as a reminder and everything else that is too big is either being thrown out or donated.
When I first started losing weight, I realized that my line in the sand was 300 pounds. When I hit that, I just had to do something about my weight. This year my line in the sand was 250 pounds. I simply could not bear the idea of hitting 250. I don't understand the psychology of my mental limits on my weight, what I call my line in the sand, but I know that I need to make a lower number that line in the sand.
Some people draw that line at weights that I consider low. How much better off I would have been if my line in the sand was 150 when I was in my twenties!!! I think that an important part of maintenance must be that line that you refuse to cross.
Well, break over and back to work. What about you? Do you have a line in the sand?
I never have. I have always been about full-effort weight loss or full-blown denial. I am really working on adopting a more sustainable WOE combined with reasonable exercise rather than extreme weight loss this time. Maybe part of my 'recovery' from my former habit of the extremes is regular weighing and embracing the idea of a line. Maybe then I will be successful this time at maintaining!
I totally agree! There has to be a place where you just know you have to stop yourself, take a step back, and then get going again in the right direction.
I weigh every day and I think I will when I maintain too, because I have pictures from a few years ago where I lost and gained weight but I don't have any idea when or why or anything. The scale keeps me in the moment and not bouncing around without any true sense of direction.
I don't know what my line will be yet, but it'll be lower than I weigh now.
This was a good post to read, thank you for making it
I think a line in the sand is a good idea, although I refer to it as my "as god is my witness!" weight (from Scarlett O'Hara's famous line). So, as god is my witness, I'll never weigh over 140 again.
I hope that, if I keep repeating that, I'll believe it and will work to make it stay true.
Like yourself, I wish I had much, much earlier on. Sadly I never even got on a scale most of my life, so denial has been my default setting for far too long. Right now I'm working on getting back down to 150 after regaining all the way back to 218, and once I'm there I believe 150 will be my own personal line in the sand. It has to be; it's just way too easy to go up, and much, much harder to get back down, and it's not like I'm getting any younger.
I think it's great that your line in the sand has changed as the journey progresses... I hope I can say the same sometime.
I guess my line was 260. I weighed myself this year after not weighing for at least 1, maybe 2 years... and I was 259.5. Highest weight ever for me, probably 10-20 lbs heavier than I thought I was. I finally realized that I have to say "here, and NO FURTHER." I realized that if left to my own devices, the weight was going to continue to creep on, and I really didn't want to see 300 lbs pop up seemingly out of the blue because I was in denial... And I'm sure it would have happened in another few years, at the rate I was going.
I'm still very much in the beginning phases of my weight loss and healthier living journey. At several other points in my life, I DID say "here and no further". I remember saying it at 220 lbs (I think I was 22?), and again at 240 (maybe 26?). I lost maybe 10-20 lbs each time and gave up because it was too hard, and I denied myself too much.
I am sure this time that as bumpy as the road has been and will be, I am on a forward progression now and It Will Get Better. I turn 30 next July, and I want to be much healthier than I am now.
One of the struggles I had with pregnancy was that my "line in the sand" got obliterated. Even though I knew there was a valid reason why, it sent me into bouts of being very upset and even ashamed that I had no control over my weight. Obviously, it wasn't logical and if you asked me, I understood (rationally) why I was gaining weight but internally, I was freaking out!
My current line is 215. For me, the line in the sand is the comfortable weight that I don't have to consciously think about to maintain. If my weight goes over that line, I know there's a reason why (I'm looking at you, peanut m&ms) and that a quick refocus will put me back under that number.
I don't think there's an easy way to adjust the line and "just make it lower", at least not for me because it has to be something that I already know how to maintain.
Lines in the sand
