The MakeMeThinner Support Forum

[Carrie]

Hi Gang,

It has been a long, long while since I’ve posted one of my ‘what’s on my mind’ ramblings, basically because I’ve been busy out there living my life in a way I haven’t in years and years.

I started MF on March 1, 2004. Since then I have been through 2 weight loss periods, followed by 2 hiatus’s and am just now embarking on my 3rd weight loss phase. It pans out sorta like this:
Mar – June : Weight loss = 40 pounds
July – August: Maintenance
Sept – Oct: Weight loss = 25 pounds
Nov – Dec: Maintenance

I can’t seem to do it all at once, so I have committed myself to this slower, if not less arduous route. And when I’m on hiatus I maintain my loss. When the scale starts to creep up, I immediately compensate and get it back down. To me this is indicative of lasting change taking place in my life.

I have been hanging around this forum for 10 months now, sometimes silent, sometimes VERY loud. Some days are easy, and others I scrabble to pull myself and my inner ‘food grubbing’ child through the day kicking and screaming in frustration. It always takes me a few false starts to get back on the program, and this is what I have been experiencing the last couple weeks. I knuckled under this weekend and got through days 1 & 2.

What surprised me was that I can still obsess over food just as strongly and desperately as ever. On Saturday night at about 6pm I started thinking about food……and couldn’t stop. For the next 6 hours, I was in a full-fledged tug-of-war with myself. Food would not leave me alone. I caved in several times and got out my take out menus and decided what to order. Then I looked at them again and asked myself if this is really what I wanted. I put them away. A few minutes later I took them out again, and around and around I went like this all evening. The thoughts that seemed to help the most were:

>What do I really want? What’s my real goal here? What I REALLY want is to lose more weight.
>I can eat some of this stuff later, after I’ve lost some weight.
>Do I want to finish this week having lost some weight or failed at my restart?
>How will I feel in an hour after I’ve eaten this food and negated the progress I’ve made?
>What is best for me? What action would serve my highest and best intentions?

Honestly, it seems there is only one way for me to get through this – by forcing new thought patterns to supercede the old ones. And it is very difficult to tell that old voice (my unconscious) to shut up – frankly, it’s still convinced that eating is the answer to my problems. The only way I seem to be able to defeat it is to insist over and over again if necessary that the old way doesn’t work and I need something different now.

I see so many member’s come and go. Some disappear forever, some come back and say they’ve gained weight back and need to start over. Certainly we have many more of those than we have of people who made it to their goal. It’s because this is hard, probably the hardest thing we will ever do. I don’t want to be one who disappears in failure.

There is no finish line at which magically we can eat the way we used to again. There is only today and moving towards our goals, not away from them. I have come to believe that this is a lifelong process. This is not an easy, one time decision. It is a decision that must be made daily, and sometimes moment by moment. I had no idea when I started out on this journey how hard it would be. How much work and inner self-reflection and change would be necessary. I really had no idea. But. It is all worth it. It is worth every moment of the struggle. There is no way to express what it means to me to be able to shop in the regular size section, or to feel like a ‘normal’ person in a crowd – not the one everyone’s looking at thinking how fat I am. My self-esteem is growing, and I feel good about myself for the first time in I-can’t-remember-when. This makes it worth it. And sometimes it’s too easy to forget that.

We are all worth it. Keep trying, don’t give up. Each one of us can win this battle if we only don’t give up.

Carrie

[24KaratGold]

I hope you aren't thinking of yourself as a failure, Carrie, because I think it's terrific that you have been able to do this twice and to keep the weight off during your hiatuses (hiati?). I think you are right, and that this means that once you do finally achieve your goal, you will know how to keep the weight off, and will be able to do so.

I have often commented that I'm very good at gaining weight, and very good at losing weight. I just don't know how to stay at the same weight. You seem to have been teaching yourself that on your "times off," and that's something to know.

I remember once when I did Weight Watchers, and got to where I had lost over 50 pounds (this was the second time; the first time I went off WW when I got pregnant, after losing 62 pounds). I was bored with WW at that point, and tired of the process of losing weight. I wanted them to put me on maintenance for a couple of months, just so I could have a bit more freedom in eating but also see how to maintain the weight. They wouldn't do it, because I was not yet at "goal." I dropped out, and well, here I am, a few years later.

I think it's awesome to have lost 60+ pounds in less than a year, and to be keeping it off. You GO, girl. You are one of the voices that has been inspiring me around here, and I thank you for it.

[Sylvia]

You are both so right. And 24K, you hit the nail on the head - we can gain, we can lose, but most of us have never mastered staying the same.

This time I got to my goal and it is really important to me that I stay here but it is a struggle! My biggest single problem at this point is that I still eat when I'm not hungry. I make better food choices and I don't let one bad eating day turn into a bad eating week/month/year, but I still overeat and still have a food problem. I don't believe I will have this really mastered until I can get past this last hurdle.

To me, that is the magic potion. If you eat the right things most of the time and eat only when truly hungry most of the time, viola - that is maintenance. If one of the factors in the equation is off, it puts things out of balance and you are in seasaw mode up a bit then (hopefully) down a bit.

I have actually started watching how my kids eat. They're quite little but it's pretty instructive. When they're hungry, they'll eat. When they're not hungry, they won't - even if the meal is something they really like (with the possible exception of candy - that they will always eat). They eat small amounts at frequent intervals and maybe one large meal perday - not always the same meal - just the one when they happen to be hungriest. So this is how we were all born until we somehow screwed our natural ability to eat to fuel our bodies up.

I try every day to get back to being able to eat only when hungry. Some days are better than others - today is a really good day so far - but I need to be able to do this on a more consistent basis. I know this will be a lifelong struggle but am hoping that if I can start stringing more and more good days together it will become a good habit that replaces my years of bad habits. I also hope that this can become so second nature that sometime in the future I can start obsessing about it...

Thanks for posting - I think it helps a lot to discuss these things!

[Carrie]

24K - I don't feel like a failure, in fact sometimes I am *astonished* by how far I have come. But, I guess I do feel some compulsion to psuedo-apologize for not making it to my goal in one fell swoop. <shrug> don't know why.

It's funny you both say you are good at losing weight. I never was. As a matter of fact for years I didn't even bother to try. And I told myself that I 'couldn't'. Now I'm a regular champ at gaining it! I'm not really sure why I'm making it happen this time....I do wish I could figure that out. It certainly started out as an act of desperation, at 266.5 my size 26 jeans were too tight to wear. I was going to a John Prine concert and had to wear sweat pants because none of my other pants would fit. I was misery personified.

Sometimes I think I'd be happy to stay at this weight, but that is the voice of delusion. I am still obese, and want desperately to drop that label from my BMI. I want to reach a healthful, happy weight and set about it keep it.

I believe for me that this process is 99.9% mental. When my head is in the right place, I do well. When my head reverts to it's old 'fat self' I do poorly. But I'm learning everyday to minimize that, and if possible completely override it. At one point over the last 2 months I got on the scale and it said 210! I about keeled over, and where before this would have set off a stream of self-abuse "You're a failure, you're always going to be fat, accept it, etc etc" What I heard in my head "Oh No, we're not going back there again. Get over it and do something about it." So I did. I guess one behavior is defeating and other affirming, and after having been self-destructive for years, I refuse to go back to it. I was my own worst enemy for all that time - breaking myself down, heaping verbal abuse on my own head. Now that I've stopped, it's amazing to me how I ever let it go on for so long. And it's amazing what a difference it makes in my life to actually 'be my friend' for a change.

It's a lot better place to be, and I have no intention of going back.

Carrie