11/22/09
It has been months since I last posted and about as long since I have taken my health seriously. But I'll start with the good. During my last doctor appointment, which was sometime this late summer/fall (August or September, I think), the doctor said that due to the amount of weight I had lost, and more importantly, my A1C result, I no longer needed to take my blood sugar at all and he would not need to see me for another year. I don't remember exactly what the reading was, but I think 5.4 or so and I think it has to be over 6.0 to be considered in the diabetic range.
Unfortunately, that positive news seemed to be all I needed to completely abandon any semblence of healthy eating and resume my previous habits of eating whatever I wanted without regard to how I felt or how it made me feel afterward. I resumed eating until I felt miserably full, snacking late into the night and consuming all the sweets I could. Even as I felt my pants getting tighter and tighter, I continued on this course, knowing that I was headed back to the same weight at which I had started, and probably surpassing even that to try and get back to the all time high something close to 260 pounds. I had reached a low, I think, of 218 pounds at some point and I felt it all coming back on. Yet, as bad as it made me feel, I seemed powerless to stop it. I seemed to be waiting, for what, I'm not sure. Some times I think I was waiting for the inevitable heart attack that must surely come and which would, finally, be the thing that would cause the miraculous turn around in my attitude that seemed to be necessary. Instead, I just felt worse every day. Full all the time, constipated, mad at myself, knowing that I had failed yet again. And I keep going. For a while after I stopped the blog, stopped weighing myself and stopped tracking what I ate, I at least pretended to still care. I didn't snack like I used to, at least all the time. I wasn't eating like a crazy man until I was stuffed. I put some limits on being out of control. But as the weeks past and I got through the doctor's appointment, bolded it seems by the good news, all control was gone. I THOUGHT about what I was doing, and then did it anyway, time and time again. In October, I traveled for business and so had to pull out some clothes that I don't typically wear, slacks instead of the usual jeans. These were pants I had bought in the late spring or early summer when things were at their best. But one pair was slightly loose even then and the others had a stetch waist. It wasn't a struggle to get them on, but as they day wore on, they felt tighter and tighter. By the end of the day, I could barely get in the hotel room before taking them off and it was like being freed from some menial torture. That was confirmation of what I already knew from the occasional weigh in over the past few months; it was all coming back. Then as November came on, the belt I had bought when the old one got too big started to feel tight, even on the last hole. But I knew I still had the old belt and I continued my same behaviors.
This morning, I weighed myself for the first time in weeks. Over 236 pounds. I started last January at 242 pounds and had gotten down to 218. 25 pounds lost and 18 of them are back, all within a year. Almost all the effort put in from January to May lost. I'm scared that I may never be able to truly change my lifestyle and live a healthy life.
I remember feeling better just a few short months ago. That I felt better phyisically I assume, but truthfully that seems fairly minor and I can't even really say it for sure. But mentally and emotionally? That I remember. I felt like I was doing something good, that I was more in control of my life and that I was good. Not lately. Lately I have felt like a failure and that last spring was just a fluke, a fad and I will never be able to sustain it. I will always be fat and out of shape, winded by a run up the stairs. I was proud of myself and I hadn't been that in a very long time, and now it is fading away just as quickly as it came.
So I've got a new plan and I fear that it is destined to fail again, but what else can I do? I'm trying to come up with something that is more sustainable, that will weather the upcoming holidays and their focus on eating lots of unhealthy food. I understand that diets don't work and that I somehow need to change ME, change what I want and the choices I make every day, every hour. But I'm not sure it is possible. The last few months I've been thinking that maybe I'll just always be fat, will never 'do what I need to do', but instead, indulge what I want to do as soon as I want to do it. Ignore the little voice that tells me what I'm doing is wrong, that it hurts me and barely feels good even while I'm doing it.
But fortunately, (or unfortunately-because I haven't hit that 'bottom' that I seem to think I need) there is some small part of me that doesn't quite believe it. Some part that thinks I do have what it takes to make the change, to live the life I've always wanted and to finally, let go of feeling bad and start to feel good again. Its work, every day and every meal and every hour and sometimes every minute. It's decisions every day that seem little or that I try to make seem little, but each one of them is really a big decision trying to hide out. Its a battle between the little voices; the one that says that 'it doesn't matter' and the one that says it does matter, it matters alot and those little battles add up for either the good side or the bad. For a while, the good side was winning more of those little battles than it was losing, and so direction of the war had changed for a time. But lately, there have been few if any victories for that little voice and the direction had very clearly changed back to the direction it had been going for many years. Now that little course change seems more like a little bump in the road.
I had been shooting for a goal, and was on a timeline and I think that both of those things can be useful tools in a weight loss and healthy lifestyle plan. And I knew, at some level that while I had those goals in mind, I would never really 'win'. I would always have to keep exercising, keep eating right or I would slide back to where I started and probably worse. But somehow, it still seems like I was thinking of the whole thing as something I had to do to get to a certain point, that though I knew it wasn't true, somehow I could still win. I don't know if that went in to my failure this summer or whether that is just my mind trying to find a reason, or whether maybe I never will be able to sustain the healthy lifestyle I crave. But somehow, I have got to understand that I am trying to make a permanent change. That stopping, even for a day is surrender to the bad voice. Taking a day off for a holiday is the same as taking the months off that I have since June. I need to understand that if I really make this my lifestyle, I won't WANT to take off even a day, because that means I'm doing something that I really don't want and I will never be able to sustain that. Maybe through will power and goals and whatever else, I could sustain it for even more than the four months I did this year, but I wouldn't be able to sustain it for ever. I'm either choosing to make this my new life, or I'm just playing at something I think I should do to please something outside of me.
Yet, the nature of my personality is that I need to have a plan. Even if the plan is flawed, I KNOW I have no hope without having a plan. And what I was doing WAS working as long as I did it. So here it is.
- Weigh in 1/week. The ups and downs of a daily weigh in were hurtful sometimes. It was depressing to be working hard and for it not to show some days, or for it to go down one day and up the next. By doing it only once/week, I should see at least some loss each time I weigh in, and I think it will be frequently enough that I will anticipate it and look forward to it to help maintain my drive.
- Track calories for everything I eat. I need to understand what I'm eating and how many calories at a detailed level. This helps me to stay on track, to have the occasional indulgence and make up for it in another meal.
- Exercise Daily, starting with walking/jogging and adding strenght training soon. It has to be every day, no skipping.
- Writing at least 3 times/week. I need to be really thinking about the change I want to make, talking to myself about how I feel, what I'm doing and the progress I make and challenges I'm having. Writing forces me to really think about it and not avoid the difficult thoughts.
- Have a goal. This is the one I'm most scared of right now. I feel somehow that there may be danger in this because it seems so short term and that once I reach the goal, I may think I can stop. Or that if I get close, I can relax. Yet everything I have been taught is that you can't get anywhere without setting a goal. Perhaps the goal should not be weight, but something else? Is it something like running a marathon, or having exercised every day for a year? I'm not sure. So for now, I will think about what the goal should be. The more I think about it, the more I beleive that the goal should not be a weight. That isn't what I really want, what I want is to live a healthier lifestyle, but how do you set a goal around that?
This is something I need to think about and work out in the next few days.
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