Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnP
Hopefully Kaplods will take a break from her book writing to come take a crack at this...
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My take on this is that the only thing you're doing "wrong" is wasting your time with shame.
You gained 30 lbs, you didn't kick a baby. You didn't poke out the eyes of a puppy. You got off track, you neglected your body, and once you started backsliding, you procrastinated instead of getting back on track and then you procrastinated some more.
That'n not crazy or evil, that's just human nature.
You fix it by deciding that you are a priority, and by getting rid of the shame altogether, and by creating habits that prevent the backsliding.
I'm a terrible procrastinator. I've "only" lost 105 lbs in the last six years, and I've lost almost no weight at all this year. If I felt like this was a failure, I'd probably be regaining right now, but instead I decided that "not gaining" was going to be my first and foremost goal, and I was going to weigh myself every single morning no matter what, and I wasn't going to let the scale determine whether or not I felt good about myself.
Those for me were my non-negotiables, and I've not done any serious backsliding in all that time. I did gain weight during my visit to my family in September/October, but I didn't let it become more weight only because I didn't give up my non-negotiables. I had weighed myself daily at my mother's house, and I didn't intentionally eat everythhing in sight, but I still gained. The only reason I didn't keep gaining when I got home was because I didn't abandon my non-negotiables.
Decide what your non-negotiables are, and ditch the shame. If you ditch the shame, you never have to be embarassed about posting, about asking for help, about being less than perfect... Just keep up the good fight and know that everything counts.
Don't beat yourself up for mistakes, just endeavor to do the best you can, whenever you can. And most of all, do not be fooled into thinking that if you've gained one pound, you might as well make it two before "starting over."
That's an ingrained social belief that most of us don't even realize we have, but we act it out. When we know we've gained weight (or even that we've not lost as much as we think we should have) it can be tempting to think "what's the use, if I'm not going to succeed, I might as well not care how badly I fail. If I'm going to screw it up anyway, I might as well screw it up spectacularly).
I suck at this weight loss thing, but I refuse to be ashamed of that. I'm a terrific person who just happens to suck at weight loss, but instead of being ashamed of it, and deciding that if I suck at it, I shouldn't even bother trying - I've decided that I deserve to do the best that I can, and love myself for it. If I screw up, it isn't because I'm lazy, crazy, stupid, worthless or foolish - I'm just human. And just because I suck at something doesn't mean that I shouldn't do it, because anything worth doing is worth doing well if you can - however anything worth doing is worth doing poorly if that's all you can manage.
So do well when you can, and do as well as you can when you can't. If you can't put in 100%, then put in what you can, whether that's 99% or 2%.
Too often we decide that if we can't put in 100% we might as well exert no effort at all (or should beat ourselves up for our failure to put in 100%).
So that's my 2 cents.
