Did you ever get to a "what's the use" number?
 

I'm there: 290.2 today. Highest ever, and I really feel like there's no end in sight. We're having extremely hot, humid weather, and it seems like each day I get on the scale, it's gone up a little more.

I've been battling my weight, with varying degrees of success, for over 30 years now, and it's getting so frustrating now that I'm on the verge of JUST NOT TRYING any more.

It was only a few months ago that I hit the 280s. Now here I am at 290.

I just CANNOT hit 300, because if I do, I have a feeling I'll be so overwhelmed I'll just give up. I know there are people here who started at over 300, but they must have tons of inner strength or something I don't have, because lately, each time I try to lose weight, my inner strength is weaker than the time before.

I'm only 53, too young to sit in a chair or otherwise be inactive for the rest of my life.

Did you ever hit a "what's the use of trying" number? How were you able to muster up the strength and caring to give it another try?

I feel like I have SO much to lose now that, as slow as I lose, I'll NEVER make a dent in it. :(

I read somewhere on this site not long ago - every SINGLE pound counts.

I just left another thread about breaking it up into 10 lb goals.

Come on, hang in there. Tackle that one pound to the ground and make it holler uncle!!!:) You can do it. Repeat.

I started out 7 lbs. heaver than you, and I'm 2 inches shorter so I understand where you are and how you're feeling right now. You can do this. YOU CAN! If you're struggling to find some strength and motivation, join a thread around here (there are tons!) and thrive off the accountability it provides! :hug: Good luck!

Come on Truffle, you can do it! Yeah, it's been hotter and more humid than we're used to up here but I've been going for my walks in the morning before the heat comes on hard.

And Marcia is right, every pound counts. If you only lose a pound a week next year you'll be 50 pounds lighter. I started up where you are and I can tell you, 50 pounds makes a BIG difference. Even a pound a month would make a difference.

I'm very excited I'm losing weight but even if somehow I hadn't lost weight I know just eating healthy whole foods, staying away from junk food, and walking a mile (almost) every day would still have made a difference in my health. The losing weight is almost a bonus (although it's a great one.)

What plan are you using? Having a plan is very important!

Just think of where you will end up if you do stop trying.

Think about previous attempts you've made over the last 30 years. What parts worked for you? Incorporate those into your new plan, leave out the things that didn't work and start again. Don't try for anything extreme that will cause you to burn out. Do what you can and build from there.

I think I may have had a "what's the use number?". But looking back, sorry, but that is just crazy talk, ya hear?

You have the ability to lose the weight. You ARE capable of it. And no, it's got nothing to do with strength. It's got to do with WILLINGNESS.

Wait a sec - just wrote this on another thread titled "How do I start". Take a look, it may be apropos:

We hear a lot about finding a plan that you CAN stick to. Well, I say combine that with finding/devising a plan that you are WILLING to stick to. To me, the willingness is much more vital.

At some point you have to come to the realization that a change must occur. That you can't go on eating whatever, whenever. So you have to come to terms with that and realize there is some restrictive component to losing weight, getting to a healthy weight and staying there. So you have to want this and you have to be willing to make the changes that are necessary to make it happen.

But the good thing is, I think anyone who's gotten to goal (and those well on their way), that once you get past that initial, temporary discomfort stage or transition period of losing the bad habits and incorporating the new healthy ones that you will realize that it's not so restrictive at all. That it is freeing. That the real restrictiveness, the real deprivation comes from remaining fat. Once you work past the initial tough stage of breaking the bad habits, allowing the good habits to take hold, you will see it's not all that hard. Really.

I would love for you to start by getting excited. Get excited about the changes you are about to implement. Because adhering to a healthy lifestyle is no prison sentence, but a key to freedom that will open up more doors to you than you can possibly imagine, ones you didn't even realize were closed.

I would also start by ridding my home of the junk - you can't eat it if it's not there. It benefits no one. Get rid of the junk it is the only way, but please load it up with tons of lower calorie, healthy DELICIOUS items. Be creative!

I would then make a plan - and stick to that sucker like glue. Plan out each and every meal and snack, leaving nothing to chance. This is too important - you can't wing it. Much easier to stay on plan when you've got one.

Be creative. Make substitutions. Scrounge around the net for healthy recipes and foods.

Also start by knowing that you CAN do this - regardless of your prior history. You 10000% have the ability to lose the weight. We are all capable of it. You don't have to be fat if you don't want to be.

MAke the decision to do this no matter what, once and for all and permanently. But please set yourself up for success. Write down everything you eat - no exceptions and again - get rid of the junk - add in the good stuff and plan your foods ahead of time - taking them with you if need be. Plan, plan and than plan some more

Wrote this on another thread recently, I also think it's fitting:

I think one of the biggest problems is that people (I was surely one of them for decades) think that adhering to a healthy lifestyle - eating well - is some kind of miserable thing. But it's not. It's not!!! You must look for the joy in this - not the dread. You must focus on what you are GAINING - not giving up. Fairly quickly into my journey I fell in love with eating right. It turned out to be a joy, not the burden I always feared.

It's a matter of working past that initial, temporary discomfort stage as your old eating habits die down and you incorporate the new healthy ones. That is the most difficult stage. But you MUST push through it. You must, you must, you must. It is the only way. You've just got to suck it up and do it. You have to hang on till you get to that sweet spot - of the old habits dying down and the new habits taking over. And they do. They do! This new healthy lifestyle eventually becomes automatic, second nature - and yes - enjoyable. But you must allow it to, working past that initial discomfort.

You also mentioned that you lose slow (not that losing at any pace isn't good!) - I must ask you this - is it because you veer off plan, even slightly. Because if you ask me, staying strictly on plan is good for many reasons - it makes this whole process much easier - never mind that you will lose weight faster, but yes that too - because it's quite motivating. But when you veer off, even slightly, it take muccccch longer for the good habits to take hold - and that's what makes the journey harder. The sooner you get the good habits ingrained, the easier it gets. But you've got to push past that discomfort. You've just got to. It's worth it. Get through it any which way that you can. Push. Push. PUSH. FIND OUT WHAT YOU ARE CAPABLE OF!

There IS a point - and a darn good one. :hug:

I've been dieting since I was 5 years old, and in a very real sense I dieted my way to 394 lbs, and a lot of it was due to "what's the use" thinking.

When I was 5, my parents primised me two painted turtles if I would lose 8 lbs (to bring me into the "normal" range for my height).

I remember losing 4 lbs of it (because I was convinced that I had earned one turtle, and considered it quite unfair that my parents expected me to lose all 8 lbs, before I could get both).

Somewhere between the 4th and 8th lb, the turtles disappeared from my kindergarten classroom, because they'd become illegal (or were soon to become illegal) because of the salmonella risk. I learned there would be no pet turtles for me.

I'm sure my parents tried to bribe me with something else, but I was heartbroken and refused to cooperate with the dieting. "What's the use....."

Every weight loss attempt I made, ended because I thought "What's the use." Whenever the weight was coming off too slow for my unrealistic expectations, I took it as proof that I was doomed to be fat forever "what's the use."

In 8th grade, after a very bad ankle sprain I was given a doctor's excuse to get out of gym class for the remainder of the year. The doctor also prescribed diet pills and promised an extention of the p.e. waiver as long as I continued to lose weight and promised to exercise at home.

By junior year I weighed 155 lbs, just shy of my goal of 150. I was struggling. The diet pills weren't working any more, and it was a struggle just to maintain my weight. My doctor decided to lower my goal weight to 140 lbs. In hindsight, I think he probably was trying to remotivate me. I think he assumed that I was thinking that 155 lbs was "close enough." But the opposite was true. 150 lbs was so close and yet so far away, that when the doctor lowered my goal another 10 lbs - I snapped. How I wished I had told the doctor to go to blazes (a very sweet man, but misguided as to diet motivation) and considered 155 my new goal weight - or continued to strive for 150.

Instead I decided that the doctor was telling me I was still too fat, and that thin wasn't possible for me "What's the use," and I regained all of the weight plus another 15.

I repeated this over and over until I weighed about 300 lbs. I encountered the fat acceptance movement and was introduced to the idea that dieting was more effective in causing weight gain, than weight loss - and it sure seemed true for me, so I swore off dieting for several years (during which time I didn't gain weight, I didn't lose weight either - it seemed to prove the "setpoint" theory).

Then I herniated a disc and had to lose weight in order to hopefully prevent the need for surgery. It started the yoyoing all over again.

Fast forward to "this time." I've been trying to lose weight for the last five years. I've lost slower than ever before, but I've also kept the weight off longer than ever before and it's only because "this time" I will not succumb to "what's the use thinking."

The first year I lost 20 lbs without trying (probably a result of my treatment for sleep apnea. The doctors told me I might lose some weight without trying, but I didn't believe it until I saw it). The next two years were spent trying to diet, but not having much success (but I refused to use "what's the use" as a reason to go "off" my weight loss plan). Even during those two years when I had no new weight loss and only maintained the 20 lbs I lost initially, I made a lot of health improvements even without the weight loss. Those health improvements were successes and I didn't dismiss them as unimportant. It really was encouraging to remember that even if I lost no weight at all, there were health improvements to be made by eating healthier and moving more.

I swore that every pound mattered, and that even when weight loss didn't seem possible, weight maintenance was. Even when I saw a gain on the scale, I swore not allow myself to think "what's the use," and instead think "at least I can make sure I don't gain (or gain any more).

For me, it was key to see weight loss as a result, not a behavior. I cannot choose to lose weight, I can only choose to take actions that are likely to result in weight loss. Side benefit is a good way to look at it.

"This time" is also different in that I did not commit to weight loss, I committed to changes that I could see myself making whether or not they led to weight loss.

This is an important distinction, because there are some healthy behaviors that can actually seem counterproductive if weight loss is your only measure of success. For example, exercise often results (in the short term) in weight gain for a couple reasons. Water retention to repair and build muscle tissue. Increased hunger and cravings. When weight loss is the only goal, seeing the weight fluctuations can make it very tempting to give up exercise. In the long-run though exercise helps weight loss (and more importantly is healthy in its own right).

The scale is only one measure of success. If I list all of the health improvements and physical and psychological benefits - the scale is actually the least of them. When I start to think "what's the use," I start asking myself if I really want to lose all of the improvements I made. Do I want to go back to needing my husband's help to tie my shoes?

I'm sorry for the long, ranting monologue, but this is such a passionate issue for me. If I could change one thing in my life it would be to have never, ever thought "what's the use."

"What's the use," has been the single most destructive force in my life - and I've seen it in the lives of others. With my degree in psych and my experience in social services and law enforcement, I saw it in the people I worked with. As a probation officer I saw people with the same attitude that kept me from losing weight. The career criminal who wanted to go straight, but thought "what's the use... no one will give me a chance anyway." The mother who'd had her kids taken away and stopped fighting to regain custody, because "what's the use.... my kids are better off without me, and I don't know how to change and every time I try I fail...."


Learned helplessness is a very powerful force. When you don't see results for your efforts, you give up. You stop trying and you begin to assume that change isn't possible.

But often we don't see success because we don't know where to look for it. When I looked for success only on the scale, I was disappointed too often for me to feel that my choices were worthwhile. I had to change my definition of success, and I had to broaden my definition of progress.

We're taught in dieting that only perfection "counts." How many times has one mouthfull of food led us to think "what's the use." I don't care if that mouthful is pure butter, no weight loss effort is made or broken by one mouthful of food. But we think that way, because we're taught to. It's as if one bite of off-plan food will "poof" magically undo all of the weight loss efforts to that point. And we make it true by deciding to eat off plan until we can "start over" and retry perfection.


If we were climbing a mountain and slipped and fell backwards a few steps, we wouldn't throw ourselves over the cliff so that we could "start fresh" from the bottom, but with dieting we do it all the time. That's how "it's done," in our culture. To make progress, you really have to rethink weight loss. The traditions of weight loss make it ineffective. We have to change the rules in order to succeed, and often the first tradition that has to be broken is "what's the use" thinking.

Removing "what's the use" thinking almost guarantees your success. As they say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and if you refuse to backtrack you will reach your destination eventually. Even if you only take one step a day, you'll eventually get there as long as you don't decide to go back to the beginning because the journey's too hard.

For me, "What's the use" thinking was an excuse. If I decided it was pointless, I could have a good cry, wail at the gods a bit, beat myself up a bit for "letting it reach this point" and then go on with my life, desperately unhappy but resigned. It allowed me to accept my misery and live with it and was less scary than actually committing to change (which I dreaded, mostly because I thought weight loss = very low calorie ****).

I don't know you and I have no reason to think this is true for you, but I put it out there as a lesson I learned the hard way.

This describes me and my experience to a *T*. In fact, I "experienced" it many times over the decades.

About that commitment to change though (a bit off topic) - for me, it got to the point, that as scary as committing to the change was, it was scarier NOT to change.

:hug::hug::hug::hug:

Yes. I hit the "What's the use?" number at 231. I was 31 years old. I thought that I'd never be happy weighing more than 150, the weight I weighed through high school and most of college. I did the math. That was 81 pounds. I had never in my entire life heard of or met anyone who had lost that much. So I gave up.

BOY WAS THAT STUPID.

I had to gain 65 more pounds and get 19 years older before I realized that I was becoming disabled and I was doing it to myself.

Here's the big secret: it is NOT harder to lose 100 lbs than it is to lose 20 lbs. The first 20 are the hardest, because that's the part where you are still not convinced you are going to succeed. Ask anyone here, and they'll tell you it gets easier and easier.

The second big secret: you don't have to lose 100 lbs to feel one hundred million times better. Getting that BMI down from 45 to 35 was HUGE for me. With a BMI of 45 I had A LOT of trouble doing basic daily activities. By the time I got down to a BMI of 35 I felt GREAT.

I'm 49 and I had never succeeded before. The past does not predict the future.

Wow, what a lot of excellent replies on this thread! Thank you for your thoughts.

Vladadog, I'm afraid I veer back and forth on which plans to try, never being able to settle on one. With all my heart, I feel that low carb would be the best way to go for health, yet I cannot stick with it, even for a day. I go back and forth between simply trying to count calories, blow it, then try low carbing again, but blow that too, then I give up until I can psych myself up for a new try at something.

Kaplods, I could identify with much that you said. For the most part, I've "dieted" my way up the scale too. I've also tried the non-diet/intuitive eating route, and it worked for awhile, until I let somebody talk me into joining them on whatever diet program they were doing. I also tried the size acceptance route, but I can't fool myself: I HATE being fat, and I can't quite see remaining this big for the rest of my life. It hinders too many things.

I feel like I'm too exhausted, physically and emotionally, to try again, but I don't want to give up and throw in the towel either.

I love what you said about how, if we slip when climbing a mountain, we don't fling ourselves off the cliff just so we can "start fresh" at the bottom. That's exactly what we do, I do. And that eating-one-wrong-bite-wrecks-everything gets me every time too.

Rockin' Robin, I do veer off course all the time, but the reason I lose very slowly is because I'm hypothyroid, and even on medication, I have a hard time losing more than four or five times pounds before my weight starts going back up again. It gets discouraging.

I'm having a difficult time getting motivated right now because this month has just been SO hot that all I want to do is sit in a chair as much as possible. I couldn't imagine going out to walk in this heat, even though, when I was much lighter several years ago, I did it every day.

You know how I realized it was an excuse? It was my students (I am a teacher). Every year, I'd have kids come up a week before the end of the grading period and ask if there was any way they could pass. One day I realized that they were secretly relieved if I said "No, I think this six weeks is hopeless"--I mean, they'd get upset, and cry a little, but after that they were off the hook, which is what they really wanted. They wanted permission to quit trying.

Truffle, how can we help you? Help you get started, help you stay on tracking and off of the gaining track? What are you doing, eating etc?

For me, my highest weight was 292 lbs. Whoever said the first 20 is the hardest was correct. I always looked for a quick fix, what could I do to 'jump start' my weight loss. Ah yes, this fad diet promises I will lose 9 pounds in 11 days. I didn't have a clue as to what it took to lose weight. My knowledge came from God, literally, He ordained my weight loss journey. I incorporated The Prism and that was truly my 'jump start' into weight loss success.

Perhaps we can give you pointers. For me, I had to start with my fridge, freezer and pantry. It needed a complete make-over. I thought I was doing okay, fat free this, light that, low calorie this - ALL PROCESSED FOODS!!!

Food got us to that pinnacle turning point of life, where enough is enough and food will get your weight down. No matter what, just breathing everyday can constitute weight loss and calorie deficits.

Wow, what amazing responses you have gotten on here already! I dont feel like I can weigh in (no pun intended, haha) yet as I am just starting the journey as well...again. But I wanted to say that yes, I have played the "whats the point" game MANY times, and every time I come back to the conclusion that there is always a point. No matter how many times I have failed and how many times I have wanted to throw it all in for good, I have always come back to the fact that deep down, I WANT to do this...for my kids, for my husband, for me. And I think deep down you do too...and like rockinrobin says, willingness is KEY. You CAN do this (as can I)!! As for the thyroid issue, is it possible you might need your meds adjusted??

This has been a terrific thread with a lot of good advice, and very heartfelt encouragement. I'm getting ready to do one more restart and it's so helpful to read those who have overcome defeatism. Thank you.