Quote:
Originally Posted by Lori Bell
My original goal was 175 and when I got there, the weight was still coming off fairly easily, so I decided to go for a normal BMI. Once I hit 158 I declared GOAL. Then for the next 6 months I still lost weight ever so slowly down to 140. I've remained there every since with a few blips along the way.
NOW, if I would have got to 175ish and continued to work my program and stayed faithfully within my "losing" calorie range, day after day with no cheats and total dedication and not a pound dropped for months, I probably would have called goal (or dropped my calories if they were not too low already).
Lori Bell,
Well, I can't say that I've had no cheats and total dedication since July 30th when my weight loss stalled out. September and October were a little rocky for me-- I moved to a new city, moved my whole family, changed jobs and changed my whole routine. All of those things affected my ability to focus and while I was pretty good, I was not perfect. Still, in September and October I managed to shed a couple more pounds. But then in November, I got perfect again, and then got frustrated when I not only didn't lose, but started to bounce up. Now, that has happened to me in the past, where I bounced up for a while and then eventually bounced down, but this time, I used it as an excuse to eat off plan for Thanksgiving, and the fake bounce turned into a real bounce of several pounds. But on December 1, I really ratcheted down again, and here I still sit. I guess how I feel is that even when I put in my maximum effort for weeks at a time, nothing seems to happen, and that gets me frustrated and makes me less motivated. It's like the things that have always worked for me don't work for me anymore.
Regarding the nutritionist, I met with her a couple of weeks ago. It was a free employee benefit offered at my workplace. She was very smart and not a nut at all, and basically I went through what I was eating every day and discussing that it wasn't working, in hopes that she would suggest where to trim calories, and instead, she told me that she didn't think I had room to trim more calories given my exercise level, and that I might want to think about eating a little more-- the old "starvation mode" theory, I guess, but this was a very educated woman (I work in a university medical center so we tend to get the creme de la creme for this kind of thing...) She told me my best bet to lose more was to increase the amount that I lifted weight in order to rev up my metabolism, and possibly to add back about 200 calories....so I didn't up my calories and then stall, in fact, when I first stalled, I dropped my calories to 1000 a day and stayed there for a month. I lost zero pounds that month. Still it is possible that I'm primarily stalled because of the on and off days especially back in September and October, and I may just have gotten unduly discouraged about my plan continuing to work...one to two pounds a month is so little that one good bloat and I feel like I've accomplished nothing, but still two pounds a month, over the course of a year would be 24 lbs, which would get me to a normal BMI.
Maybe I'm just not patient enough.
Loser Mom,
I know what you mean about support friends IRL. I have plenty of friends, but no one who can relate to my journey. Part of my problem is that I moved, and so all of the people who knew about my weight loss are no longer around. The people who I spend my time with now have always known me as more or less normal weight. I do talk about weight and nutrition with the "skinnies" in my office, but they don't know anything about morbid obesity and they don't know that I was morbidly obese just eighteen short months ago. I feel like I depend on the people here because they really get it.