Quote:
Originally Posted by JerseysGirl
God, what is wrong with me? I did it again... completely sabotaged myself today ..one day before weigh in, after staying on track all week. I've been eating nothing but crap all day ... sugar, salt, processed foods. I KNOW it's because of that weird gain the other day. Like always, I figure "Oh well, you screwed up already, might as well enjoy yourself and start fresh after the weigh in."
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I followed this pattern for over 30 years, and I always thought "God, what is wrong with me? Why am I such an idiot? I know this doesn't work, but I do it anyway. Why?"
I finally figured it out (and with a masters degree in psychology, it shouldn't have taken me this long).
I followed the pattern, because I learned to. It's the way dieting "is done" by almost everyone. I did it, because it's the only way I've ever seen weight loss done. It's part of the "tradition."
It's almost like the Seinfeld episode when George Castanza suddenly starts succeeding in life, by doing the exact opposite of his first instinct.
There are a lot of different ways to become the "opposite" you. For me, staying off the scale wasn't it. For me, it was weighing myself a bazillion times a day to learn what normal weight fluctuations really looked like.
I weighed before and after getting dressed, before and after going to the potty, before and after meals. I recorded my morning weight daily, and I started seeing my TOM pattern (I learned that if I stay perfectly on plan, I still gain up to 8 lbs with TOM - but the weight comes on before the cravings. When the cravings hit, in the past I would have already seen the gain and decided "what's the use..." and I'd make the temporary gain, a permanent one. Now, knowing the gain is coming, I don't feel disappointed when I see it.
That was the really hard part, learning not to be disappointed or frustrated by a weight gain. I'd had it drilled into my head since I was 5 years old, that a gain on the scale HAD to be disappointing. If you weren't disappointed by a gain, there was something WRONG with you.
In fact, all the dieting "rules" I learned, meant that I was disappointed, frustrated, or angry at myself 90% of the time - and I was basically told that it wasn't only normal, it was virtually mandatory. If I wasn't disappointed, frustrated, or angry at myself, I wasn't "motivated" enough.
I was taught to use the motivation that I learned in my psychology classes, is the least effective (in fact, not effective at all... it's the very opposite of effective. If you want to fail at something, then make sure that you feel disappointment, frustration, and self loathing at every attempt. Make the attempt so unpleasant that even thinking about the tast fills you with dread.
We know this. We really do, but we do it "wrong" anyway, because we're taught it's the way we're supposed to do it, even though we don't do it with any of the other things we want to succeed at.
If you want your son or daughter to learn to play an instrument, you don't make sure that every time they touch the instrument, you tell them how much they suck at it. You don't make sure that it's absolutely never fun. When they do something better, you praise them you don't tell them that "you may have done a little better this time, but you still really suck, and don't you forget it!"
But we do that with weight loss, and wonder why most (up to 97%) weight loss attempts fail.
And one of the main reasons is that we don't recognize success when we see it. We have expectations that aren't reasonable. We think everyone else is doing WAY better than we are, so we must really be the most pitiful jerk on the planet. How on earth could we manage to be so incredibly stupid and incompetent?
What we don't know is that the person who loses at least 2 lbs each and every week without fail (even if the person has 200 lbs to lose) is the freak.
My doctor got on my case for complaining that I was "only losing 1 lb per month." At the time, I was extremely ill and disabled (I'm on disability, slowly regaining my health), but I said "at my size, I should at least be losing 2 lbs a week like a normal person," and my doctor reminded me that "Normal" people don't lose anything, because they give up. Just by not giving up, I was in the lead, not in last place.
It's as if we were running in a marathon - and we decided that we must be in last place because we see 1,000 people ahead of us, not realizing there are 25,000 people behind us (each convinced THEY are in last place).
You're not in last place, and realizing that can keep you motivated, along with refusing to be discouraged or frustrated (not just coping with discouragement that we consider inevitable, but actually refusing to be discouraged or frustrated in the first place)..
Discouragement and frustration are the enemies of success, and they're not inevitable, they're the result of expecting more than you get. You can only be discouraged or frustrated when you want more than you have.
And with weight loss, we're taught to want and expect the unreasonable, and even the impossible (only we don't even know it's unreasonable or impossible, because we don't know how everyone else is doing, so we assume we're in last place again).
I do wish that WW was like TOPS - in that they would announced the total gains as well as the total losses, and how many people weighed in - that way you'd get to see what "average weight loss" really looked like, and you could compare yourself to the average (which still would be high compared to everyone trying on their own).
In doing so at my TOPS group, I learned that "average" weight loss is usually somewhere around one quarter to one half pound per person. That's the average (and this isn't a group of slackers).
Every month, our group gives a prize of $10, that is split between all the members who did not have a single gain during the month. Of 30 members, it's rare to have more than 2 people share that prize. Sometimes no one gets the prize (and it rolls over to the next month and the next month's winners split $20).
That means that 90% of people have at least one gain every month. In 40 years of dieting, why did no one ever tell me this. I've been torturing myself for not being in the top 10% (feeling like I must be in the bottom 10%).
People don't quit when they're feeling successful. They quit when they feel like they're failing, and we've been taught to define success in such a way that it's virtually impossible to feel successful. We don't quit because we are failing, we quit because we think we're failing (and we're usually wrong).
Recognize the success and you won't even be tempted to quit. That's what I've learned "this time." I'm never tempted to quit anymore, because I'm proud of my success (even though I have to use a different definition of success than I was taught to).
You're not failing, you're succeeding (you just don't know it yet).
Stupid question
I know I need to stay off the scale between meetings.. but tell me.... staying on program, it's impossible to have an actual 3 pound gain, right? It must be water or maybe I need to, well, you know... poop. But that is NOT 3 pounds of actual weight that has somehow found it's way back onto my body in two days of staying on program, right? (Please say yes! LOL) 
There's no way if you stayed on program that you gained 3 lbs!!
