When I first started this journey, I decided that the most important thing was to establish healthy eating and exercise habits that I can maintain for the rest of my life. I would be content to lose weight at a slow and steady pace, no more weight yo yoing. I was determined to not set any time related goals and to lose weight at whatever pace it happened. I have been doing well with that philosophy until about 2 weeks ago.
I have been bitten by the green eyed monster, jealous of those of you who are losing weight faster than I am and impatient to get below 200 pounds. I remind myself that I am 53 years old and that I am doing just fine. My weight loss has been consistent. But…. I started calculations today. I calculated that IF I increase my steps to 7,500 per day and eat a maximum 1500 calories a day, I should be able to lose 2 pounds a week. I would be below 200 by ……….
Then I caught myself, I am starting to obsess on the weight loss. Not that there is anything wrong with increasing my steps and watching my calories a little more closely. But if I obsess, losing 1 pound or 1.9 pounds in a week is FAILURE. I know from experience that I can get discouraged and give up.
So I have to get a grip and control this obsession. I am not exactly sure how. Kaplods has the attitude that I want so maybe I should read through several of her posts.
I thought that writing and posting this will help me. I have lost 43 pounds in a little over 6 months. That is not bad for a 53 year old who has been obese all of her adult life. My goal is to get to a healthy weight that I can maintain the rest of my life. Speed is not important. I am healthier than I was August, 2008 and by August, 2009, I will be in even better shape. I can do this one day at a time.
I can relate to how you feel. I am 45 and have lost at about the same rate you have. Just keep plugging away, it comes off, maybe slower but we still get there. I am trying to focus on habits I can stick with and I think that is a huge part of my success this time. I still have to remind myself of this since the weight loss is soooooo slow now that I'm closer to goal. I get jealous of the fast losers too, but don't let it derail you. You are doing Great!!!
Are you sure you're not me? That is to say, Deep Empathy from another 62" 53 year old!
Where I am at the minute is - my clothes feel so much better - but
I still have 70lbs to go.
I still can't get into the next set of clothes down.
I'm still severely obese.
Looks are the most important thing to me (I know it should be my health but hey) and I know that however better I feel, to everyone else I'm still a great fat lump
No-one has noticed yet
IT'S NOT FAST ENOUGH! I've done it before, I really, really repent of allowing myself to re-gain 80% of what I'd lost, I've been punished enough, I've learned my lesson, I want to wake up tomorrow slimmer again.
I think I want to say that for both of us, we just ('just'? ha!) need to keep on plugging. These little voices of impatience and jealousy are so seductive, and can lead so quickly to just abandoning it all together. I think we can just acknowledge the feelings, then lock them in a box and refuse to open the box. If we can.
I think a lot of things come into play... you'll notice that some of us that are losing weight REALLY quickly started at well over 300 lbs... so we CAN lose weight a bit faster.
LOOK at far you've come! At this rate you'll lose over 80 lbs this year. 80 FREAKING LBS!!!! Do you see how awesome that is?????
I am SO FREAKING PROUD of you. So proud. I wish you would be too!!!!
For me the only thing that cured it was time. Sometimes the green-eyed monster still rears its stupid head, but I am much better at ignoring it these days. I'm only 36 and it's taking me FOREVER to get to goal. Two and a half years and counting! (Longer, really, but I round down to make myself feel better.) The doctor hasn't been much help, though she's trying, so I am resigned to my fate.
The one plus is that I've discovered throughout my many, many plateaus that I can *maintain* like a dream. So I worry less about regaining everything than I probably would if I'd lost 100 pounds in a year, you know?
I think everyone has a touch of the ol' green eye now and again. It will pass and so will the time it takes for you to loose the weight. You seem like you are doing amazingly and I think you know that to
I've lost weight relatively rapidly so far, 31 pounds in a little over 2 months but I'm still terribly impatient. Doesn't seem to matter how fast it comes off, I want it to come off faster. I've made this committment to eat better and excercise and I just want to see the results now lol. Makes it much more discouraging when the scale goes up now but just have to keep plodding away. You've done awesome so far and you will get there
time2lose, It has taken me almost 2 years to lose 70 lbs. The first bit came off really quickly, the last part not so much. I am sure these last 30 are going to be harder still. But I am 70 lbs happier, healthier, cuter, and more energetic than I was 2 years ago! I do get impatient too, but then I think about the journey I have taken, and all the things I have learned that I didn't even realize I would need to learn. I feel like I had absolutely no clue what this weight loss thing was really about when I got started. The journey is about way more than just removal of pounds. My head is changing, and my healthy habits are becoming so ingrained that I know they will stick with me forever! I fear that lots of the quick weight loss is not permanent weight loss because there is no time to learn those lessons and instill those habits. You are on the same journey, although it is uniquely your own. You are doing so well! Do not let yourself get hung up on that silly number. Just keep going. If the scale becomes a negative rather than a motivator, find a different way to measure your progress.
Wow, thankyou. My current attitude was hard-won. I spent most of my life (since age 5) trying to lose weight, and mostly feeling like a failure doing it. No weight loss was enough, and no mistake ever felt like a small one.
It would still be very easy (if I didn't choose to talk myself out of it, when my brain starts going down those familiar dark alleys) for me to get impatient and jealous, not only of those who can lose faster, but also jealous of the "younger me," who could lose faster too.
But I finally realized that those feelings usually led me to giving up. Feeling as if I constantly wasn't measuring up to my own expectations, made dieting miserable. Who wants to live that way? And eventually, I wouldn't. I would give up, not because I had failed, or had not made great progress, but because I wasn't satisfied with my success. Talk about turning a party into poop.
One key to my success this time, is taking failure out of the equation. Maintaining my weight loss is not failure, it's success so even a no loss week is success (even a small gain is success, because I don't know if it's just "water weight" or some other fluctuation, so staying within a few pounds of my lowest weight is progress. Progress, not perfection (or the slow, lazy way to weight loss).
It's helped me to make only behavior-based goals (goals I have direct control over). Weight loss isn't a behavior, it's a result of behavior - it's a result of success, not success itself. Success is eating and exercising according to my plan. Even if I do not lose a single pound, if I've followed my eating and exercise pan, I've succeeded at what I set out to do (if I am following my plan and still not losing weight after a few weeks, maybe I have to change my plan, but it doesn't mean I've failed).
I "only" lost 43 lbs last year. There were times in my life when I could lose that in a month (but not in a sustainable way), but this new slow way, has been the easiest, most pleasant, definitely most fun weight loss I've ever had. My weight loss was pretty small, but the physical and health improvements and abilities I've gained have been phenomenal. If I focused on weight lost, and not strides made, I could choose to be very disappointed and depressed right now. Instead, I am prouder than I have ever been that I have not had a significant gain in four years. FOUR YEARS of Mainteance, it's a not just a record for me, but a situation I would have told you was impossible only four years ago. Four years without a stomach-bursting binge. Four years without hating myself, even a little (I'm not saying there aren't moments when I make mistakes and wonder "what the heck am I doing, this is stupid" but I don't let it turn into "I suck.")
I don't know how to teach anyone to learn to do this. I'm not sure how I made the transition, except that I started treating myself as I would any one else in my situation. I finally realized it was assinine to condemn myself for something, when I would be sympathetic towards anyone else in the same situation (even someone I didn't like very much). In fact, often I was treating myself far worse than I would even imagine treating the most despicable person on the planet - did I really think I was the most despicable person on the planet because I was eating too much? Is overeating really worse than deliberate acts of cruelty?
Treating myself with the same courtesy I would extend to others, learning to think about myself the way I would want other people to think about themselves.... Sometimes the inverse of the Golden rule applies (do unto yourself, as you would do unto others).
I'm 26 and I"m losing about the same rate as you - and I'm pretty sure that all of us can say the same thing. If anyone out there is saying to themselves everytime they step on the scale "Wow, this weight is just flying off, I feel like I'm barely even trying! I wish I were losing weight slower" I'd be surprised.
I was the same way a year ago when I tried it. I obsessed over what the scale said, and if I didn't lose my 2 pounds per week I was bummed out. I ended up getting so bummed out, I gave up.
This time - I can feel that this time is different. I'm not worrying about the numbers. I'm eating healthy, I'm going to the gym, and my clothes are fitting better/getting too big. I have yet to lose over 2 pounds in a week, and I've only hit 2 once - but I remind myself that I'm going to the gym, and the number on the scale is not telling me everything (like how much muscle I've built, how much water I'm retaining because I had salmon last night or my time of the month is coming up, etc. etc. etc.) All that really matters is that I'm feeling better and have more energy - and suddenly I don't feel as dragged down as I did when I was picking up fast food on my way home from work, or getting out of work and coming home to the couch. And I'm not giving this feeling up for anything.
I get jealous, too, when I read of people who started their journey the same time as me (early January) and have lost twice as much weight as I have. I realize that I'm doing pretty well but it makes me think that I'm probably capable of doing it better, faster, trying harder, etc. It's hard not to be envious, but many of these people are half my age and are starting from a higher weight and those are all factors. Could I be watching more closely and exercising more? Yes, of course. But like many others, I need to do what I feel I can maintain over the long haul and I know me--I'm just not someone who is going to say "never again" to fudge or pizza or beer. So while I'm really cutting WAY back on that type of thing and counting all my calories, I'm not giving them up. Many evenings I will exercise, but sometimes I just want to sit and sew or watch TV. So it's a tradeoff that I've chosen to make, I suppose.
But I still feel jealous when people say, "I've lost 10 pounds in 2 weeks and now I'm down a dress size!" I know I should be happy for them and I am, but ...... grrrrrrr!!!
Thank you everyone. I have decided that this is one of those times where my brain needs to rule my emotions. I have to listen to my mind so that I do not set myself up to fail. In several of Kaplod's postings she said that she was not willing to do anything that she could not do the rest of her life. I am taking that attitude. I am tempted to bump up my weight loss by restricting myself to 1200 calories a day and increasing my exercise to 7500 steps a day. However, I know myself well enough to know that I can not do that for very long. Therefore, I will be sticking with 1500 calorie daily average. I will continue to increase my daily step count by 200 - 300 steps a week. Gradually I will work up to a standard of 7500 steps a day.
For the most part, I have avoided time related goals but I have expected myself to lose at least 5 pounds a month. I have changed my mini-goal from 5 pounds in March to 5 pounds period. I only have to be concerned with losing 5 pounds at a time. I have lost 5 pounds 8 times. I can lose 5 more!
On this journey it is amazing how much we have to deal with.
For me, my tendency to "move the goal posts" after I've staked them clearly gets me into more trouble than anything else.
I start out with a sensible, attainable goal, but somewhere along the way, just when it looks doable, I start thinking I haven't asked enough of myself. I don't respect my own accomplishment enough. I change my goal, to something that is more difficult, and that's when self-doubt & discouragement really kicks in.
Here's an example of my moving the goal posts. Maybe you can relate. When I was still quite heavy & also unhappy, my therapist suggested yoga, not just as a form of exercise, but also a way to calm my mind & center myself. I enrolled in a beginning yoga class. That was a big step for me. I was remembering gym class traumas from high school, when we rolled around on mats & I was made fun of. I went to class thinking I'd be the fattest person there. I wasn't, not quite, and I liked the class. I kept going. I kept losing weight. (From cardio & eating right more than from yoga.) Eventually, I got better at many of the asanas. But I started noticing the thinner women in the class. And I started seeing yoga videos online & "Namaste Yoga" on TV at my parents' house on a cable station. Suddenly, I wanted, not just to be healthy, and to be competent at yoga, but to have one of those yoga bodies. (I stopped short of wishing for the long blonde ponytail, at least.) And I became discontented with my yoga class, which I'd liked before then. Are these natural growing pains, or self-defeating ways of looking at one's life?
I ought to think of exercise & weight loss/maintenance the way I do about saving money. Some weeks, I put just away a little; sometimes, after my bonus comes through or my tax refund arrives, I put in more. I don't seem to get discouraged on the weeks when I'm only able to put away a miniscule amount or nothing at all (like around Christmas & just afterward). I mean, I don't give up saving entirely, saying it's futile, I'll never have anything.
Yeah, I know: It's all-or-nothing thinking. I know that's bad. I wish I could stop. I can't yet, but I can try to see it for what it is & work on it.
Dealing with impatience and jealously
