Am I ready?
 

I have like everything I need to start losing weight. I have the WW at home kit, a very nice scale. Tools to make healthy foods...ect.. and I still am not really doing what I need to do to lose the weight. I'm very much so an emotional eater. I'm in a relationship with a heavy guy, I have a three month old baby, I have plenty of excuses. I just don't seem to be ready to lose weight. Anyone else ever have this problem? How did you stop with the excuses and get the weight off?

It helps me when you have a partner. Also I personally do better when I get some books on weight loss from the library and health magazines, helps pump me up a little. I make a list reasons I should lose weight and stick to my plan and look at it everyday.


Good luck!! You have our support no matter what! Just keep coming back!

:dust:

For me, I just had to make the decision to do it. I could make all the excuses in the world ... I'm tired, I had to work late, I will start on Monday ... etc. And I realized that I can always make excuses and justifications. So eventually I just had to say "ok, this *is* something I'm going to do" and do it.

I can't explain it better than that. I wish there were some magic bullet or golden moment that I could pinpoint, but there just wasn't.

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What would it hurt to try? I would strongly suggest talking to your guy and letting him know how much his support would help you (ie, letting you pick restaurants where you know you can order healthy options, helping you keep junk food out of the house, not bringing home ice cream/chocolate/donuts as a "surprise I love you gift" - that's what cleaning the bathroom is for).

What really helps me is meal planning. You just can't eat healthy by accident. If you're hungry and you don't have a healthy snack ready and with you, it's not easy to find one. If you're hungry, it's much easier to eat what's convenient - fast food, chips, portable, take-away, junk food culture stuff.

You definitely need to work on the emotional eating stuff, losing weight and keeping it off is forever and there will always be stress and unhappy times, you have to be ready.

This is a great time to start - you have a gorgeous 3 month old baby and the opportunity to model healthy eating behaviors to set a good example. Weight problems sometimes runs in families - not necessarily because of genetics, because of behavior - learned behaviors. What kind of behaviors do you want your child growing up with?

You can do this, you have a far better reason than I did when I started.

Like the others said, but you may want to address the emotional eating part as not too far along the road. White-knuckling it and 'just doing it' will work for a time, but as Glory mentioned, there'll always be stress etc., which means that if you don't have other tools to cope with these, the eating will come back as well at some point or the other. (And I wouldn't put it in the 'excuses' category. Excuses would be "it's a little cold today so I won't go to the gym". Emotional eating is really something else altogether.) Ways of coping can be anything, though--maybe exercising will become your way to relieve the stress, maybe reading or meditating will...

Thank you all for your replies. I lost a pound this week even though I didn't really put my all into it. At work I am able to maintain. My home life is a bit of a mess right now, the momment I clock out, I'm stuffing things into my mouth. I am going to be honest, I'm a control freak. I can't stand it when I don't control a situation, and at home, it seems I'm in control of nothing, but what I stuff in my mouth. You all are right though, there's going to be stress for the rest of my life. Its just all about how I choose to deal with it. I can say that this time I really do want to lose this weight. And this is the most honest I've ever been about the subject. Thank you guys for listening. I'm going to continue to come back to this forum. I think I'm going to get some psych help for the emotional eating part too.

This is a hard thing to do. I know that before this last time, I flip flopped on losing weight and getting healthy for the past year or so. I think getting some help will be a good thing. You have to feel good on the inside too. All I can say is, for me, I just had to get into the right place in my head and do it. Until I found that place inside that decided that enough was enough I was going to keep going back to old ways. Good luck to you!

You say you are a contol freak. As am I. I finally used that to my advantage. Since you are a control freak, why not start controlling your food intake? I know it sounds crazy. But it makes perfect sense. You said that you control nothing but what you stuff in your mouth. Well what you stuff in your mouth or DON'T stuff in your mouth IS under your control. Now just switch it up. Put only good things into you. Elminate the junk. Add in healthy, low cals food. Track your calories. Set some boundaries, some limits. Once you REALLY start controlling what you put in your mouth, you will discover what an incredible controlled, satisfactory feeling you will have. You will see once and for all, that this (your weight) is the one thing in life that you really and truly have TOTAL control over. :hug:

This might sound silly, but I had two "mantras" I use (and sometimes still use) to defuse binge scenarios.

The first is "dripping water can eat through stone" - just to remind myself of the hundreds of little things I do every day to stay thin (stopping at the store to buy berries, even if I don't feel like it, taking the stairs at work, not the elevator etc). The second one is "my hand, my mouth" just to remind myself that eating/being overweight is not something that happens TO ME but it is something that I control. Even recently, it has stopped me from eating foods I didn't want to eat by just whispering "my hand, my mouth" a few times until I was able to throw it away (I'm sure anyone that heard me would have thought I was a kook!)

If home is the problem, I have a few suggestions.

1) Get rid of everything that might sabotage you. Fill the frig with healthy foods (baby carrots, chopped up vegetables in pretty tuppereware), put fruit in pretty bowls on the counter. I made weight loss ATTRACTIVE by making all my tools pretty - I have lovely stackable measuring cups in pretty colors, for example.

2) Menu plan for at least one week. Sit down TODAY and plan 3 meals, 3 healthy snacks for every day (it's okay to eat a lot of the same things if it doesn't bother you, makes shopping easier). Go to the store. Buy only the foods on your list. When you get home, do as much in advance as possible. Make a huge pot of soup, baggie up veggie snacks to be ready to go, chop fruit.

3) Think of a system of rewards :) I shamelessly bribed myself - pretty sandals, fancy haircut, pedicure, massage, new clothes. Nowadays, I would probably let myself buy an iTunes song everyday that I ate onplan and worked out!


4) Take before pictures and before measurements. Chart your weight loss. As you start to lose weight, it's so nice to see the chart start to go down. It's so nice to compare measurements (I weighed every week and measured once a month). I really wish I had some candid before pictures as a comparison, I was terrified of cameras - it's very sad, I would guess that less than 20 pictures of me exist for the 5 years I was really heavy (and I'm including work IDs and driver's license!) Now that I'm maintaining, I LOVE to look at my weight loss chart, my measurements chart and my old pictures - it's fascinating. I also kept a big pair of jeans that I like to try on and watch them fall off me still buttoned, hugely motivating and satisfying.

5) Figure out strategies for fighting nighttime overeating (a LOT of people have this problem - personally, I'm an afternoon snacker, which I trace back to long boring afternoons as a latchkey kid, not allowed to go outside, nothing to do but watch TV and eat). Some tips I have used/heard other people suggest:

A. Plan a healthy snack after dinner that is really yummy, you look forward to and is easy to portion control. Like, a baked apple with a few walnuts. Takes a while to make so you can't immediately eat another one!
B. Declare the kitchen "closed" after dinner. Do NOT go in the kitchen if you can help it.
C. Brush your teeth, rinse and floss. I don't like to eat things when my mouth is all minty.
D. This one might be tougher since you have a 3 month old, but try to leave the house.
E. Pick up a hobby that keeps your hands busy - if you're a control freak like me, wow, counting crossstitch is appealing! Oh, you have a new baby - make them a cute felt Christmas stocking - you know the ones, with lots of little pieces to cut out and lots of sequins. When you get done with his, make one for you and one for your man!
F. Keep a food journal. This may sound silly but it WORKED for me, I was able to figure out when/why I usually overate (afternoons because I was bored). Record everything you eat and what you were feeling when you ate it.
G. Lots of herbal tea. Lifting the hand to the mouth can be soothing. I like Stash blueberry!

These are wonderful tips. (All of them.) I'm going to specifically incorporate your mantras. Thank you for sharing them.

Wonderful advice. I'm actually going to print off your reply so I can put it to real use.

Thanks GLORY87 for your post and words of advise and encouragement. I really needed that today too.

I can so very much relate to this. I lost the most of my weight last year when it seemed my life was falling apart in other areas. Business, personal, family, friends - last year was a disaster that just kept spiraling out of control for me. I think that for me, it was that my eating and exercise was the one thing I *could* control that made the difference. It was really odd for me, because I've always been an emotional eater - binging on "comfort" food when I felt the worst. But last year I desperately needed soemthing that wasn't going wrong that I could look at and say "At least this, I can do right." And that's what motivated me more than anything.

I planned my meals and my food.
I planned my exercise and trips to the gym.

And I lost weight and got in shape. I'm still working on it, and although things are better this year and my progress isn't as fast, I've made enough progress and enough changes that I know I'm not gonig back to the old way of doing things.

So maybe, for you, this is the time to say "THIS is something I am 100% in control of." And go from there.

Good luck!!

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Well What I found was I was not ready for a very long time... I thought I was but I could not stick to anything... all of a sudden a switch flipped in me or something cause I am now more dedicated than ever!!