Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

It wasn’t so hidden to the rest of the world. I had lost weight. I lost about fifty pounds and then everything stopped… for two freakin’ years. I couldn’t lose more than 10 pounds without having a binge relapse and gaining back the 10 I had just lost. I bounced from 180 to 170 so many times in those two years that I began to think that I couldn’t get lower than 170 pounds. To say I was frustrated was an understatement. The truth of the matter was, I was at my wits end.

The articles and weblog entries that I read in magazines and online were bloody useless. USELESS! They talked about mixing up my calorie intake and starting weight training. I was honest with myself and I knew that the problem wasn’t my body’s fault. I knew that it wasn’t an issue with my body trying to maintain some sort of equilibrium. When I followed the program, I lost weight. It was as simple as that.

The problem was that I couldn’t folow the program for more than a month or two.

That hadn’t been the case when I started. For the first five months after I joined Weight Watchers, I followed the program to the letter. I didn’t feel a sense of deprivation. In fact, I was surprised at how much I could eat and still stay within the bounds of the program. No, it wasn’t Weight Watchers fault that I was bingeing, but I felt helpless against it. I was on a hidden plateau because the reason for it was hidden to me.

Here’s a glimpse into what might help you past something like this if you run into this problem.

The Scales Tipped:

When I first joined WW, I was motivated to get healthy. Once I lost about 50 pounds, I suddenly found myself with a healthy body. Sure, I wasn’t to goal, but my life was a lot easier than it was before. It was like my mind tipped the scales and even though I wasn’t even close to where I wanted to be, my mind thought I was finished with the job. I had a scale in my mind. On one side, I had HEALTHY BODY and on the other, I had all the things that I had missed while I was eating healthy. Once my mind thought I had achieved the Healthy Body status, it came off the scale and it tipped dramatically and my bingeing returned.

Questions to ask yourself:
What goals do you think you’ve achieved by getting as far as you have?
When you started losing weight, what did you want? Have you basically achieved it?

Getting the Scales Back In Balance:

In order for me to move forward, I needed to re-evaluate my goals. I knew I was healthier at 180 pounds than I had been at 235 pounds, but my stomach still hurt and my body didn’t look like I wanted it to. I had to add new goals on the balance to outweigh the allure of bingeing. I started imagining what my body would look like when I finally got to my weight goal. I researched what I would have to do to finally wipe out my stomach pain. Once I got some more goals on the opposite side of the balance, staying away from bingeing was easier.

Questions to ask yourself:
Am I happy at this weight?
Is this really what I want?
What else can I achieve and how would I look like and feel when I get there? Is it worth it?

These things were able to clean up my head and get my bingeing under control, but there were other issues during those two years. There were ways that I was lying to myself. Log in to Starling Fitness tomorrow morning to find out how I got the rest of me on board with the program.