Yay! We're back again! Hi MaryBeth -- so glad you found your way back here after the Crash.
DBI — distorted body image — wow, I’m sure we all had it when we were at our heaviest and I’d bet that most of us still have it now, one way or another. I’ve had the same experiences myself that you describe when you looked at those old pictures. At the time mine were taken, I couldn’t acknowledge to myself how big I was. I thought I looked fine, "carried it well", was "big-boned", no one would ever guess how heavy I really was, etc.
It was only after I lost the weight that I looked again and said oh my God, I was
enormous — why couldn’t I see it at the time?
I guess it’s some sort of denial or protective device. Same thing with the scale — I either wouldn’t weigh myself or if I did, I say “the scale must be broken; I couldn’t possibly weigh that much.” How crazy is that???
And now you’re questioning your perception of yourself again — if you were wrong before, could you be wrong now? I think a lot of us still have trouble seeing ourselves accurately now —- for me, I think that I still look fat. I’ll catch myself trying on pants and thinking that my hips look huge in them and then realize — reality check — I wear a 4 and my hips are 35”. Probably not fat by most standards.
Or it sounds like you’re questioning whether you really look slim now that you’ve lost all the weight. Well, you’re 146 pounds, my dear — it’s safe to assume you’re not fat anymore!
! If you can’t trust your eyes (and I think you can), then you have to rely on what people around you tell you and the objective evidence, like what size you wear and what the tape measure says and the scale. And I'm sure they're all good.
Jif raises a really good point -- we're not going to regain 100 pounds overnight, though I really was worried about doing precisely that in the first few months after I reached goal. I'd go to bed and worry that I'd wake up a lot heavier and it would keep piling on regardless of what I did. Very scary. Now that I've lived here for 18+ months, I'm convinced that I'd have to change what I'm doing in order to regain the weight. If I keep doing what I know works, the weight will stay off. If I ever go back to my old habits, I'd regain in a heartbeat.
And on the pants! Have you ever pulled a pair of jeans out of the dryer and held them up and said: these will NEVER fit! They look WAY too small. And then they fit!
If I recall, we were having a nice little chat abut ironing (Karen doesn’t own an iron!
) and the Discovery Health program “Heavyweights.” I think you were talking about the hormones that the doctors and researchers were citing for putting weight back on (leptin, I believe). Another I’ve read about is ghrelin. There’s still a lot of research going on about hunger and weight loss/regain, especially with regard to the “reduced obese” (that’s us — our bodies apparently are biologically different than those of people who have never been overweight). See if you can find the book The Hungry Gene (Ellen Ruppel Shell) for a good discussion of these questions.
We also were discussing the notion that only 5% of people who lose weight keep it off. I know we were all questioning where those numbers come from, though you hear them cited all the time. I remember that I was saying, though, that even if only 5% keep it off for the long-term, we can be part of that 5% with thought and planning. Let’s see, I think I said that exercise is something that I know I need in order to stay in the 5% club and others agreed (gee, I wish we still had the old posts!).
Kind of on the same topic, I sat down this morning and started making a list of Things That Work (dumb title but I couldn’t think of anything better
). I felt like I was in a rut of focusing on what I
shouldn’t do — don’t eat this, don’t do that — all negatives. So I was brainstorming and trying to get down on paper the positive new behaviors and habits that I’ve developed that got the weight off and will keep it off. My (perhaps lame) idea is that if I focus on doing what I know works for me, I can maintain (or lose a little more weight) with less thought about what I shouldn't do. More "yes's"; fewer "no's". For example, I know it works if I do cardio every day. I know it works if I drink a gallon of water a day. Etc. It’s starting to look kind of like a checklist for the ideal day! Anyway, maybe when I finish the list, I’ll post it and others can add in what works for them and we can share some ideas.
I'm really so sad that we lost most of the Introductions and other posts that so many of you put time and effort into. I hope you can take a few minutes sometime and repost anything you'd like to. This forum can be anything you want it to be, in any way that will help all of us stay slim for life.
. I hope that everyone who had posted here comes back and posts an Introduction and starts the ball rolling again. I think we have a really good thing going here, so let's keep it up. 
healthykelly03 , 01-08-2004 02:44 PM
