Most definitely, the stages of change come up quite frequently here, so a search would bring up very interesting conversations people have had about the matter.

Boy, this has been quite an interesting thread. It just shows that it's definitely not a one size fits all subject. I truly believe some people have overweight in their genes, and not just because they grew up eating a certain way etc. That hasn't really been addressed, for some people it isn't just a matter of eating less and exercising more, unless it's done drastically.

As someone who was thin for years and years and then gained 10 lbs a year for about ten years without taking it off, it's not always a thing of binging or eating massive amounts. Sometimes it's eating just that little bit too much for too long and not dieting. I never struggled to lose weight back in the 70s or 80s and I don't think it's just cause I'm in menopause now.

Anybody who is around my age bracket will realize everything changed from that era. Every restaurant began serving up huge portions of food, instead of a dinner plate everything is a platter. Food was not something to be eaten in the car back then, no cupholders in the cars, not that many fast food drive thru's. You couldn't walk around a shopping center and have food available every few feet like today. Not that many people had microwaves either.

Add all that into people rarely walking anywhere (when is the last time you have seen kids walking to school); many schools eliminating physical ed.; the whole advent of the computer age when people sit in front of a screen for hours and hours every day or videogames, and is it any wonder so many got fat? When we used to go to the movies people didn't sit down with a full course meal and munch throughout the entire movie.

I live in California, where the weather is pretty much perfect every day, and I can count on one hand the number of people I see when I'm out on my daily walk. Most of them are only out to let their dogs do their business too.

Yes, I do think everybody can lose weight, but the real question is how many can maintain it for any length of time. I have been quite impressed with those in here who have managed to do it. I know myself and I will never have the figure I used to have, nor do I want to never eat out in a restaurant or go to a party etc. That is not an option. I just can't get my head round the you have to be so restricted and planning every meal and weighing every day and having the natural way of eating to stay alive be something that is so all consuming. No offense to anybody in here, but that is no way to live. God bless you if you can do it, but I can't. So I just try and cut my food down slowly and have really boosted up my exercise. I know it took at least 15 years to get this big and I'm not going to be able to remove it in six months.

Thank you all for the input, there are clearly many differing views, for my own part I have not been swayed from the opinion that if you want something enough your brain will be programmed towards achieving the goal and you will ultimately get what you want. In business we have SMART objectives, which must be:

Specific
Measurable
Achieveable
Realistic
Timebound

It is relatively easy to place losing weight within those parameters, whereas the desire to sprout feathered wings is outside the parameters, because it is not realistic.

Yes, that is a reasonable approximation of what I mean when I say that you don't want it enough. If the objective is SMART, then who else is there to blame for failure? If you dream about an achievable goal without actually achieveing it, IMO you are culpable.

Hey PaulaM! :wave: I know just what you mean, being somewhat close to your age. I was not a binge eater, either--I just overate at meals and parties and so on. I didn't gobble down boxes of cookies, but I never passed on the cookies, either.

I, too, am hoping that in time, eating to maintain my weight (when I get there--I don't consider myself done at this point, although I've passed my original goal weight) will be natural enough that I won't have to use a calorie tracker or formally measure foods out. To some extent, after months and months of training, I pretty much don't have to measure or weigh most things anymore. But for me, it was really necessary at first to find out what those portion sizes were, to figure out "a serving" and what it contained, and to know how many calories were in the foods I wanted to eat. Because, I didn't know! I really didn't! I was shocked when I found out how many calories are in a small order of McD's french fries, for example.

I tried just cutting down my food also, but without knowing in a quantified way what I was dealing with, my cutting down just didn't work well. I tried upping my exercise, but I wasn't consistent with it, and I let other things get in the way. Three times a week is enough, right? Well... no. :no:

I hope your plan works for you! Don't get me wrong! You may have skills that I lacked! :broc:

And I do look forward to the TRANSCENDENCE stage, when I no longer have to either be strict and in a state of constant vigilance, or be worried about backsliding into old habits.

Jay

Kaploids, I thank you for posting those stages. Quite intreresting.

I really don't ever see me being in the TRANSCENDENCE stage. Ever. Or maybe I should say the transcendence stage for me will be different. It won't mean that I can "let up" and "relax". I think (know) I will always have to be super, duper vigilient. I will always have to be on guard. I will always have to want it "badly enough" and therefore make it a TOP PRIORITY in my life. Cause' it's all too easy to head into RELAPSE.

Well you are at your goal weight and I'm far from it, so maybe I'm just talking out the top of my hat! I do admire all of you who have done it and maintain it too, you are inspirational.

The SMART objectives may apply well in business, and may also apply to a lot of goal setting and effective weight loss. I don't disagree with most of that.

But I can't help thinking that a lot of weight loss goes beyond the simple formulas we try to force on it. For instance, we say that weight loss is "calories in vs calories out" as if it is a simple formula. And yet, eat too little food and strange things happen in a body that is trying to do its best to keep us alive. If it were just about cutting more calories to lose more weight, we could starve our way to thinness, but it doesn't work that way.

And as a former morbidly obese person, I'm fascinated by the research that indicates that my body is different from the bodies of people who never became morbidly obese. There seem to be a lot of hormones and chemicals that work differently in the bodies of people who have lost a lot of weight, and a lot of those chemicals seem to act to encourage us to gain the weight back!! We are just beginning to identify these systems, we certainly don't seem to understand them.

So in my mind, many of the issues we're discussing have added layers of complications dealing with bodies that seem to have minds of their own, on some level.

How do we account the real complexities of weight loss and weight maintenance with simplified formulas?

Most "fat people" are expert dieters and have lost and regained weight a number of times. I think fat people must actually have a lot more will power than a thin person who never had a weight problem. Will power is not the answer because the will is easily broken or corrupted.

Excellent point thesusanone,

I think alot of my failure as a younger person can be directly linked to my thinking (as I'd been taught, directly and indirectly) that "willpower" was they key, and I just had to keep trying HARDER, not understanding the complicated factors that go into weight loss and maintenance.

In many ways, weight loss, for many people, can be like a tar pit, or one of those chinese finger traps, in which the harder you struggle at your bonds, the more tightly bound, you become.

Without knowledge or a strong system of social support, desire often isn't enough. Working as a probation officer, I so often met people who seemed to sincerely want to change, but the concept was so foreign to them, they had no idea where to start. One of the strangest cases was a young man who told me that he thought the judge had "set him up." When I asked what he meant, he said "probation is a setup, NO ONE can be expected to stay out of [legal]trouble for two whole years." Immediately, I was struck by the thought that this had to be the dumbest remark that I had ever heard issue from a human mouth (and as a probation officer, I'd heard alot), but it got me to thinking. I thought it was a crazy statement, because in MY world, I didn't know anyone (amongst my aquaintences, friends and family) who had gotten in trouble with the law in the last two years (and maybe only one or two who had ever). But, in looking at this guy's family, friends, and even aquaintences, it wasn't actually such a stupid statement, as most of his famiily, friends, and even casual aquaintences HAD gotten into some type of trouble in the preceding few years. In HIS world, staying out of legal trouble for two years, didn't seem to be a "reasonable" goal, and many of his peers might have agreed.

Even when working in probation and substance abuse treatment, we emphasized working to make will power less crucial. We told people to do what they could to set up their environment so that on their weakest days, abstainance was "easier" than relapsing. Not easy to do, especially if in their home, work, and leisure times, the people around them were engaging in the behavior they were trying to avoid.

"Peer pressure," is powerful. I remember when I was working with substance abuse and psychiatric patients in a hospital. In a couple of my counseling groups, I asked the patients what was the "normal" direction to stand in an elevatior (generally, facing the doors, everyone facing the same direction. o if it's a two door elevator, generally people will all face the same direction, even if "their" door will open to the other side). Then I told them of a study in which people when encountering people facing the "wrong" way in an elevator, nearly all chose to follow the crowd instead of standing the "correct" way. I was intending this simply as an illustration of peer pressure.

I actually upset the doctors and nurses with this one, because it inspired several groups of the patients to run their own little experiment. Facing the rear of the elevator or the side of an elevator, they watched and found that even the doctors and nurses responded as the study predicted. They did not ever ask "why is everyone standing this way," they just got in, looked a bit confused for a moment, and then got into line facing the direction as the experimentors.

When told of the reason behind the experiment, the doctors and nurses were a bit miffed at me (because it had embarassed them), at first. But later, the treatment staff voted to add it to the official curriculum, because it had been such a positive experience for the patients. Some of them, for the first time, feeling that they could change, ironically from seeing how easily "peer pressure," influences even the "best" of us. Many said something to the effect that they had thought that there was just something fundamentally wrong with them that they were unable to "resist" peer pressure, and now they understood why the counselors were pressing them to change their environment, and surround themselves with people who weren't users.

Weight loss is very similar, though even more difficult to find a positive peer group to "surround ourselves" with. Yet, many of us have found ways to do so (coming here and/or joining other weight loss support groups on and offline).

Complicted problems, complicated solutions, and each component will have a different degree of difficulty and importance for each individual.

Peer pressure, environment (and oh so many other things) are all obstacles in our way very often. All the time in fact. I mean there will always be obstacles. And they will certainly, CERTAINLY make things more difficult - but not impossible.

At some point, and for everyone that point will be different, you just have to say enough already. It doesn't matter anymore. Nothing matters anymore. And as difficult as it may be, you find a way around those obstacles. And every other one that is thrown at you. Because nothing, nothing matters as much as getting the weight off. Nothing.

It comes to a point where you can't "excuse" it away anymore. Because if you want it, you'll find a way, if not, you'll find an excuse. Thanks Meg. :hug:

LOL - interesting about the elevator thing. if I get in a two-door elevator I will nearly always stand side on, with one door on my right and the other on my left. I resist peer pressure whenever possible - I love to go against the flow. Provided it doesn't make me unsociable that is - I don't push to the front in queues or anything like that.

However I am sure there are examples where I unconsciously do do what others are doing.

In my personal experience, a lot of what made me succeed at losing nearly 100 pounds (so far) was changing my attitude (and behaviors) about weight loss. A lot of people I know think they could eat whatever they want if they would just exercise--I thought the same. I thought, when I was very young, that I could lose weight, and then go back to eating the same (high-calorie) food I always ate. I wanted a way to lose weight fast and with minimal discomfort. I heard, too, that the key to losing weight was to lower my calorie and fat intake, and up my activity level. I'd do this for awhile and grow tired of it, for some reason or another, many times. All I could figure, this time around, was that I had to change the way I thought about things...it would take a long time, because I had a lot to lose....I had to reduce my calories and be careful of what I ate....I didn't ban high-calorie favorites, just started eating them as a few-times-a-year treat rather than as a few-times-a-week staple. Exercises and activities I thought were "too hard" and abandoned, I looked at as a challenge and worked my way up to (I certainly couldn't do jumping jacks when I started, but I can now). Walking a few feet used to be hard and got me out of breath; now I'm doing "Couch to 5K" and can run half-an-hour without stopping. I had to change my habits: when I used to watch t.v. at night, I'd often get up during commercials and get something to eat; now, I keep a catalog open and thumb through it during commercials and I admit, looking at clothes in the regular section and realizing they fit now gives me a feeling of pride. As for exercise, I had to make it a habit I followed every day and did it even when all I wanted to do was veg out in front of the t.v.

And of course, being human, I'm far from perfect. Usually I can pass up cookies and pie people offer me, but occasionally I don't. I expect my TOM this week, and find it especially hard. I got home late last night and didn't exercise all day. Happens occasionally, I just pick myself up, dust myself off, and get back on the horse.

Sorry to make this so long, just wanted to get in my two cents. I've been reading this topic and it's been really interesting...everyone has such good points.

Great job! I hope to be able to make the changes you made. They are the key to success because it has to be a lifestyle change. It takes the willingness to get up and persist every day. I see that now. But it's not an easy thing to face. Once you get past that reluctance to change your viewpoint about it...then you can just start doing it every day. I think of it that way now and it helps me to cope with the reality of it. In other words, it is not an easy thing to grasp but once you do, then you are more than half way there. There are also challenges along the way. I have been "dieting" for a few months now and recently I have been feeling hungrier than usual. I'm not letting it stop me. I am just getting back to basics and dealing with it by eating more low calorie foods. But it's hard. There is something very real about the things you go through on a physical level, concerning hunger and energy level.

No prizes for guessing that I agree with Meg all the way on this. Great post Meg!

It's interesting to me to note the positivity and determination that shines through Meg's wording and phrasing, it's also particularly interesting to me to note just where Meg's attitude has got her to, i,e, currently maintaining.

I have a somewhat cynical scenario to place before you for discussion. I apologize in advance for any offence I may cause.

Think of the person (or one of them) you love the most in this world: it could be your children, spouse, a parent etc.

Now imagine this:
A crazed gunman captures your loved one and sends you a demand: "Unless you lose 60 pounds in the next six months you will never see [loved one] again. If you can lose 60 pounds in that time, I will return [loved one] unharmed.

Now, honest answers please, who thinks that they would not be able to lose 60 pounds in six months under these circumstances?

I could, but I'd have to go to drastic lengths to do it. It would not be healthy, and I'd probably lose muscle and bone density. I might not fully recover from this, and I'd probably gain weight back.

Jay