What's Your "What If..." Weight?

I heard Christmas music in Wal-Mart last week. And yesterday, there was a 20-foot Christmas tree near the front door.

Tis the season, my friends. The Season of Food.

I’ve come a long ways from my early days of weight loss and my “Thou shalt not eat __________” mentality. Adopting such a hard-core view was necessary at the time, but through the help of time and my weight-minded friends (particularly the WW 100+ board alums), I’ve learned a bit about discipline and balance since 2005. But food is still a challenge and always will be.

Walking hand-in-hand with that challenge is the way I view and live within my body. I’ve been feeling bulky lately, and when I walk, I don’t “glide along” quite like I used to. I feel more like a gorilla. That’s why I laughed out loud while packing my office yesterday and came across this cartoon:

I remembered I’d posted it on my original website, Lynn’s Weight-Loss Journey, so I went back and read the post that went with it. What I wrote still speaks to me nearly three years later.

When I was 16, I weighed 150 pounds. That was about 20 pounds more than would be considered normal for my age and height, but at a size 12/14, I was hardly ginormous. Yet that’s what I thought I was. Self-conscious, I avoided walking past certain boys in school because I was afraid they’d “moo” at me or call me fat. They did that to a lot of girls who I felt were my size.

My negative body image caused me to make a lot of poor choices when it came to sex and relationships. Although I had some nice boyfriends in high school, the kind who really did like me for who I was, I always felt there was a “catch,” that somehow they were lacking because they liked me.

When I was nearly 300 pounds, this cartoon’s sentiment was most certainly true for me. I always dreamed of “that day” when I’d be 150 again. All my problems would disappear, I’d have self-esteem to spare, and life would be the way I always knew it could be, all because I weighed 150 pounds again.

I’m well below 150 now and problems still arise and I often lack self-esteem, although I admit not to the extreme of nearly 170 pounds ago. My weight, while definitely an important factor in my overall wellbeing, cannot define my life. I am (and so are you) more than weight, and yet I still base a good deal of self-worth on the number on the scale, the size on a tag, and the width of my hips.

How to undo that? Talking with friends who understand weight loss and maintenance, journaling, meditating, and reminding myself daily that I’m OK just as I am right in this moment.

My question to you is this: What do you think your life will be like when you get to goal, or even when you lose 5, 10 or 20 pounds? How do you stay balanced? And has your definition of “normal” weight changed since you were younger?

View the original article here

Time To Face The Change. Or Is It?

You don’t have to be a Weight Watcher’s member to know that change may not always be welcome, but it might be for the best.

The new Weight Watchers PointsPlus program puts protein and carbohydrates on the center stage with fiber and fat, and calories are not technically factored. It’s the company’s effort to encourage members to eat more fiber-rich whole foods. I pretty much figured out how to do that as I was losing weight on the old program, but I can see how this new program makes it even easier to do.

As I began tracking all the individual foods I ate yesterday, I thought about the question I posed a few years ago: Which do you prefer: eating a full portion of one thing or eating small portions of several things? Or does it usually depend on what day it is, how creative you’re feeling, and what foods you must use up in the fridge before they grow legs and walk away?

I tend to eat several little things all day, and I also think of food in terms of time. I like to eat slowly and in volume. How long will it take me to eat soup or salad or to drink a latte? It takes me two minutes at most to eat a tube of manicotti (which is the same number of Points as my big salads or hearty soups), and that’s savoring it. It takes me 15 to 20 minutes to eat the salad or soup.

When people ask why I became a vegetarian, I tell them it’s because I get to eat more. And at the end of the day, by eating more I’ve eaten less and I feel better. Of course there are always times when a small piece of something sweet or carby or a half-cup of real ice cream is just the right thing – satisfying and eaten in a matter of a minute. It’s the memory of the taste that lasts so much longer than the actual flavor in your mouth.

I’ve counted Points using the old program for nearly six years. It made sense to me, it worked, it sustained me. Now I’m learning the new PointsPlus system, and while the plan makes a lot of sense (even though it’s going to take me a long time to convert six years of recipes), I wonder if maybe I’m relying too heavily on someone else’s plan rather than the one I’ve morphed into my own. I’m comfortable with how I eat and it won’t change just because a corporation tells me fruit is zero points. I know me, I know my body. If I eat more than two or three fruit servings a day, I will gain weight. Having a glass of wine or two doesn’t derail me. I know that at certain times of the month, simple carbs really are necessary for my mental health. We all learn our needs and our thresholds through trial and error.

Having said that, I still believe in WW and I give the new plan a great deal of credit for encouraging people to eat a more clean, healthy diet. Still, in the end, we all have to do what is right for ourselves, to walk out on the edge and use any plan as a guideline and not the absolute truth for our body mechanics.

Whichever plan you’ve chosen to use, how, the further you get into weight loss or maintenance, has your eating plan changed from the time you started?

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Weight Maintenance: A Second Chance For Vigilance

As you know from my last blog (see “Mathilda”), our dog Mathilda woke up lame in her hind legs on Wednesday. After our vet treated her conservatively (because of her age…she’s 10) with large doses of steroids, we took her home from the animal hospital on Friday. She’s still a little wobbly, but she can walk short distances fairly well and can go down the front stairs with a little help from us supporting her with a beach towel around her middle.

(Mathilda enjoying her nightly treat last night.)

I feel like I've been given a second chance to appreciate Mathilda. While it’s never easy to put a pet down, I wasn’t “ready” to do it right now. Not that I’ll ever be ready, but at least I’ll have more peace with it when it comes because I was given a second chance.

Second chances don’t come around every day, and often when we’re offered one, we don’t recognize it as such. We take so much for granted, or we allow things to happen to us without fighting back – a sort of “Oh well” approach to life – which leaves us blind to those second-chance opportunities.

Since reaching my goal weight in 2007, I recognized this time (because I’d been to “goal” before) as a second (or more accurately, a tenth) chance to figure out the right way to maintain my weight and appreciate my body unlike I’d done before. But just how does one maintain? What are the emotional mechanics involved? Lori at Finding Radiance (she’s maintaining a 100-pound weight loss) got me thinking about this in her blog last week about our impulse to eat (see “Deep Thoughts On Will Power”).

Here's a portion of what she wrote (the emphasis is mine): “There are still those days where I feel driven to eat – absolutely driven, even if I am not hungry. It’s not really emotional, either. The thoughts pop up while I am working, or watching TV, or while biking. That’s just not what genetically ‘normal weight’ people are like. It takes an enormous amount of control to not chow my way through a box of cereal or use a spoon in the nut butter jar. Sometimes I give in. I wonder why is it that I have control over this impulse (at least for now) that not a lot of people have. And how long will I have it? Will it just get to be too tiring after a while, like it does for the majority of people who lose weight? The vigilance can really be tiring at times as it is 24/7/365.”

There are a LOT of great responses on her post, so I urge you to read it in its entirety. But what about those questions: Why is it some people who are losing weight or in maintenance have control over that eating impulse and some do not? Is vigilance the key (and if so, what else is involved)? Or does vigilance stand in the way and get tiring after awhile?

As I commented on Lori’s blog, what makes one person more likely to maintain than another is like pondering the beginnings of the universe. There are so many possibilities, and the combination of success-inducing factors for each individual is endless.

In my case, I didn’t keep weight off in the past because I hadn’t learned or accepted that the way I eat during and after losing weight MUST be different than before, and it must stay that way forever and ever. I credit stubbornness and my teenager-like positive response to reverse psychology for being able to maintain. If you tell me that 95 percent of people who lose weight will gain it back, therefore I probably will, too, I’ll tell you, “No way. Not me.”

It’s a quasi-obsession, and not such a bad one to have as long as I stay mindful of what is realistically possible – for instance, maintaining around 130 rather than 125, and being open to changes in my body that might take my weight a little higher due to circumstances beyond my control.

I am also convinced that at some point, the kind of vigilance to my food environment and impulses that I’ve adopted will become second nature, like knowing intuitively that in order to walk I must put one foot in front of the other.

I know this tide of change is well under way because of how I responded to food after my knee surgery in June. I was sad and frustrated many times (still am on occasion) and could have chosen to comfort myself with all my old favorites, but that didn’t occur to me. I just kept on eating the way I always had, adding a few more calories when I was hungry (healing from an injury, I’m convinced, revved up my metabolism).

Sometimes those extra calories came from adding a whole egg to my otherwise egg-white omelet or throwing a tablespoon of mini chocolate chips into a dish of fat-free strawberry ice cream. A far cry from dollops of butter on a half a loaf of French bread or a chocolate chip cookie and a not non-fat latte from Starbucks, as per the other times I’d made “goal” because I felt that somehow I was “safe” to eat whatever I wanted.

Recovering from this surgery, I didn’t stray from my normal food plan, partly because my stomach simply can’t handle the calorie load anymore, but mostly because I never want to feel that kind of fullness that I experienced after third helpings of dinner when I was 300 pounds. This time, there was no reaching for Tums or regrets the next morning over any of my choices the day before. Thanks to this vigilance-turned-second-nature, the scale has held steady and my clothes still fit.

Now I find comfort not so much in the food but in my food plan. It’s like the towel we wrap around Mathilda’s hind quarters to support her when she goes down stairs.

Can everyone who loses weight adopt this kind of vigilance? I really don’t know. Everyone’s physical and psychological makeup is different. Stubbornness isn’t something you learn and obsession isn’t something everyone sees as a positive attribute. Succeeding in maintenance requires each of us to find our own way to that second nature. But we won’t get there without first seeing it as the second chance that it is.

View the original article here

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Does It Get Easier?

I've had an interesting email exchange today with my friend Melissa, who has lost 116 pounds and wants to lose another 70. She has a great attitude, but she asked me a question that I'm sure a lot of people wonder as they lose weight. I know I did. Still do sometimes. 


I thought I'd open up her question for discussion here in the comments since we each lose weight with a myriad of attitudes, emotions and experiences. I'm just one person with one answer. 


Here's what she wrote: "I am feeling a lot better about myself, and I am still learning every single day how to better take care of my body. It's kind of scary to realize that even after losing all of this weight, I am still officially obese.  But those are the facts, and they make my drive to keep moving forward even stronger. 


"Does it ever get easier? I have to say that sometimes the stress of constantly working to lose can be overwhelming at times. I know that I can never go back to eating like I did. In fact, I don't even want to. But, it is the constant pressure of trying to lose that weighs on me at times. Does that make any sense?" 


Makes total sense to me. How about you? Does it get easier? 


Thanks for considering this. Leave a comment or send me an email. I look forward to what you have to say about this. 

View the original article here

Good, Better, Do You Wants the Best Booty?

I have always taken pride in my butt cheeks. They’re genetically modified enhanced because my momma gave it to me. But here lately my weight loss and toning efforts have caused an anomaly to occur.

My booty is getting nicely-rounder. And firmer. And more lifted.

Newsflash! Cardio + targeting toning = reformed butt cheeks.

It is longer myth to me.

And since I consider my butt cheeks an ASSet of great value, I’m ready and excited to focus on the booty s’more. Plus it will make Health-hater’s eyeballs extra happy for booty-gazing at his wife.

Enter my next exercise DVD purchase: Brazil Butt Lift (and yes, you can get it in my Beachbody Shop for yourself or for holiday givin’).

I thought my booty was good (and it was). And then I made it better (like it is right now). But I’m gonna make it the BEST.

When I first saw the Butt Lift commercial on TV, I thought it was gimmick’y. The ass-ologist of a fitness trainer, Leandro Carvalho, obviously enjoys his job as a butt lifter to celebrity stars, and now he wants your booty, too.

So I took a closer look at the exercises in the video. And I like the moves… a lot.

Snippets of the Brazil Butt Lift workout.

(video length: 2 min, 58 secs)

Whether you choose to go Brazilian with Leandro as your DVD trainer, or if you choose to do some butt lifting on your own, I can attest to the phenomenon that your ass cheeks WILL respond to your bootyfication efforts.

So are you ready to focus on your ass, people!? Check out Brazil Butt Lift.

Fitness-farting and wedgies are allowed.

View the original article here