Obesity and Me

One thing I’ve learned from this diet is that when something goes wrong, everyone knows why and is ready to explain it to you! I’ve hit a plateau hard and everyone but me seems to know why. Problem is that every new thing I try based on everyone’s explanation doesn’t work.

One of the major problems with my diet is the people who love me. Always offering me something out of love, but which compromises my diet. This is a problem of an extra special nature for me.

FIRST - I grew up with parents and grand parents who lived through the depression. Food was important to them. It was a marker of their love and their success. “Clean your plate.” … “Don’t let the food go to waste.” … “Eat this, eat that, eat everything.” I heard that over and over again while growing up and it’s hard to break the habit learned as a child which says I must not let food go to waste!

SECOND - When I was young, food was equated with love in many ways. Good food, tasty food, LOTS of food was always a sign of love. Rejecting food hurt people’s feelings. I still find it hard to say NO when someone offers me something out of love.

It’s so easy to say YES. It makes people happy. It makes my conscience comfortable … EXCEPT … it opens up a buried feeling that I ’shouldn’t oughta’. I know I need to lose weight, but unless I give it conscious thought, I can easily lose my way.

A key for me is to keep my head in gear and keep my focus on the goal. I know how much weight I want to lose, but it’s not something I think about every moment. I DO need to keep it more in mind though whenever I’m offered something that I know I shouldn’t have.

My holiday total comes to 5 pounds up. I’ll have to work harder now to get rid of it, but I’m pleased it wasn’t more.

The holidays are always bad for any diet, but I seem to have come through OK. I picked up only 3 pounds, so I feel pretty good. It’s time to get back to being completely focused.

I’m stuck a bit here … floating up and down a few pounds every time I check my weight. It’s happened before, so I’m not worried, I’ll get over it, but it sure is discouraging.

I saw the doctor yesterday … I’m dealing with a small infection, but I need to be careful since an infection almost killed me several years ago. However, the highlight of my visit was being weighed in at 42 pounds below the last time he saw me. He wants me to keep doing whatever I’m doing and keep up the good work!

The doctor was impressed … pants falling down because they’re all for the heavier me, weight lost on their carefully calibrated scale, insulin requirements halved …. it’s all going in the right direction.

My only concern in this is that the measurement wasn’t real. Could there have been a mistake in their scale? It was much lower than my home scale. I’ll have to see how I can confirm it.

I spent some time checking out my scale and found that I could get different readings by stepping on it several times in succession. Looks like I need to check it’s calibration more carefully and verify it’s accuracy.

After several so-so days where I allowed myself to participate in what I’ll call ‘non-diet’ eating, I weighed myself and found that I’m down 32 POUNDS! Now, I’m sure there’s some daily variation in that and that all the factors probably came together on the same side to make the number larger, but even accounting for normal variation, I’m feeling REALLY good about the number!

I’ve turned around now and I’m losing weight again after the parties. I’m sticking close to my diet and I’ve lost 4 pounds again. It give me confidence again.

After the party day, my weight was up a little, but well within daily variation which is normal for me. I’m sure I MUST have gained a bit, but now I’m back and serious about Nutrisystems. Over the last several days, my weight is back to going down slowly. We’ll have to watch and see if I keep going down.