I'm so aggrivated with myself. Twice now I have gotten down to 162, and the DAY that I do, I find an excuse to start eating crappy, to buy a quart of low carb ice cream, grab a handful of skittles, and start stuffing my face with crap for 2 or 3 days until I hit reality and realize that I've got up to 170 again.

Did this happen to anyone along the way?? Do you think I have a short circuit and something in me does not WANT to succeed?? What did you do if this did happen?? I'm just confused and dealing with a lot right now and when I wake up from my binging coma I wonder how it all started and ask myself over and over why I didn't just reach my goal like a normal person.

We all goof up sometimes. I think our brains are telling us "you lost all this weight, you deserve to eat like crazy to reward yourself" when really the best thing to do is KEEP GOING. Just go back on track and im sure youll be back at 163 in no time

Are you sure that you want to go 20 pounds lower than 170? I would think for your height that you are just about there if not there already.

If you decide to go lower maybe when you get close to 162 you should consider getting comfortable there and just see what happens as you contiue to live healthy.

Besides.. please don't say you didn't succeed.. look at your success already.

Congratulations on how far you've come!

I like Jayde's idea about getting comfortable for awhile where you are and then deciding if you really want to go lower. Perhaps you're just feeling burned out from the constant focus on losing, losing, losing? And you could benefit from shifting gears and focusing on maintaining instead? The funny thing is that some people start losing weight again once they take the pressure off themselves.

Or perhaps this weight is where you should be? My body pretty much decided when it hit goal - I would have liked to have gone lower but it said nope, not happening (keep in mind that I'm a lot shorter than you are) Over the next year, my body shape kept changing and body fat % got lower but the scale was pretty much stuck. So you can continue to make progress toward your goal body, even if your scale weight doesn't change much from here on in.

BTW, I'm sure you already know that you didn't really gain 8 pounds of fat back in a few days - it was mostly water weight.

I've had several large chocolate binges along the way, but its all good because I reached my target weight in the end.

Chocolate was damn nice as well mmmmmmm

ooooo I've just noticed I'm the same height as you nice to know there's a few of us "leggy birds" around

I started without a goal, lost about 100 lbs, then picked a goal because everyone else had one and so I thought I should too. Never got there, and turned out to be happy measuring my success by what I could do, rather than the rather dubious quantity that is a measure of my gravitational attraction to the earth. Maintained that weight, give or take, for a couple of years, and am now working my way back there after the birth of my beautiful daughter.

How do you feel? If that number on the scale was your goal number, would you be happy (reasonably) with your body right now? If you can answer yes to that, maybe your goal is wrong.

Anne

I'm soon gonna win a prize for bouncing up from goal many many times. It's interesting that I came upon your question today when I've been stewing about just that sort of thing.
I don't really have any advice for you, other than to read lots in the miantainers forums. But I did want to say that thinking about it is good. So much of our health and body is tied to the inside of our heads. You can never learn too much about how yours is all conected together.

Susan will have to fight me for that prize: The Bouncer Cup! Like Anne, I only picked a goal because every one else seem to have one. It turned out that my longertm goal was actually lower than the only I initially picked, because I really didn't like my body at my original goal.

But I bounce around that new goal. I have for almost 5 years, and I suspect I always will. Very few people stay glued to one body weight for most of their lives. Sometimes the changes are conscious, sometimes it's self sabotage, sometimes it's just the result of a lot of small actions taken without thinking.

Getting to a goal weight is not going to change your life. If you tend to self-sabotage with food, you still will do that. If you need a food blow out every once in a while, accept it as part of your life, dust yourself off and move on

Mel

Another contender for The Bouncer Cup over here!

Yes I see my lowest weight and think, "One little cookie/chocolate bar won't hurt, look I'm xxxlbs!!!" Then of course it does hurt!

Like in your siggy, I have to decide that I want to be xlbs MORE than I am afraid of being xlbs. I'm so freaked that I might bump into someone more attractive than the man I'm with, someone who's more "elligible" in society's views, someone who matches (or will match) me on the attractiveness scale. (That sounds harsh, but I've only got my eyes open ) And I'm scared that I will be tempted. I know in reality that I probably wouldn't be tempted, or that there really is no-one better than the man I have now, but I think this is just a personal issue. I'm also freaked about unwanted attention because I've had quite a bit of scary stalker men talk to me and follow me around and just don't have the word NO in their vocabulary! However when I tie my weightloss/fitness with being a black belt, then I WANT to be there and be slim and I'm not afraid because I have those defensive skills.

I also think some reason for bouncing around is that we get complacent (good thread about that!), for example this weekend I saw a lot of people who haven't seen me for a long time and it felt good and I got complacent. I KNOW I'm not at my slimmest right now, but I thought I could allow myself some bakery treats because EVERYONE ELSE thinks I'm slim. If only they saw me 4 or 5 weeks ago!

Just my take on things, I think self-sabotage reasons are worth working out. I found a book called "Why do you overeat if all you really want is to be slim?" I flicked through it in the book shop and I've ordered it from Amazon. I think it will be enlightening!

I'm really surprized that Ilene hasn't come up with a smilie that's a bouncing queen.

My question is this ... is there a reasonable amount we can expect to bounce? I'd like to keep my fluctuations to 3 or 4 lbs. But I'm not sure if that's reasonable.

I've been bouncing between 126 and 130 since January (pretty much tied to my cycle).

I vote for a five pound range. I think ten would be excessive. It might be hard to keep it smaller than 4 or 5 pounds. Heck, I can gain 3 pounds overnight just from eating sushi!

I think 5 is also good and 10 excessive. As I've been weighing myself everyday for a couple of months, I usually see a 2-4 pound difference from one day to the next. Up and down and up and down! But I've seen as much as a 7 pound difference a couple of times that seemed to disappear as quickly as it came.

I'm not really a bouncer (never been successful enough YET to get to a goal weight), but just wanted to comment that this discussion is still very helpful to me as I think long term about this issue -- both coming up with goals and how much to let yourself vary from goal...

okay, continuez!

I'm exactly the same as Glory -- I bounce between 126 and 130. Once I hit 125 but as long as I don't go over 130 I'm fine with it.