I read a comic called Mousewax. The artist, Brandon Lewis, is participating in the Biggest Webcomic Loser. It’s a contest in which webcomic artists are taking pledges on their weight loss for Unicef.
I just finished reading all the comics on the site and some of them are weight related and pretty funny. Here are some of my favorites:
I enjoyed skimming all of these comics and laughing to myself. Sometimes we need just a little levity to make it through the day.
Cheryl Koch, R.D. has some great tips on how to eat healthy when you are in social situations where you might feel pressured to eat.
Here is a quick list of her recommendations:
The most important of these items is to plan ahead. Asking what will be served so you can save your calories for it or eat at home instead is the key to success. Go over the event in your head before you arrive and visualize yourself eating healthy.
This postcard from PostSecret really struck a chord with me. I have been blaming my bingeing on lack of self control lately when really I haven’t cared. When I am dedicated, I have no problem eating healthy. It’s not about no self control. It’s about caring.
PostSecret‘s beneficiary is the National Hopeline Network. It is a 24-hour hotline (1 (800) SUICIDE) for anyone who is thinking about suicide or knows someone who is considering it.
What motivates you to eat healthy?
What motivates you to exercise regularly?
Give me a list of five to ten things that make you want to pass by the unhealthy food and get on that treadmill every day.
The Question of the Week is meant to be an Inner Workout for you. Find some time during the week and allow yourself to write the answers to the questions posted. You can write them on paper, on a word processor or here in the comments section. Whatever works for you as long as you do it.
Keep writing until you find out something about yourself that you didn’t know before. I’ve also heard that it works to keep writing until you cry, but that doesn’t really work for me. Whatever works for you. Just keep writing until it feels right.
I had figured out the reasons in my head why I kept gaining and losing the same 10 pounds for two years, but I still ran into trouble once I was able to get that under control. The second element of the Hidden Plateau was just as difficult for me to find, even though it was right under my nose:
I was lying to myself.
We are at our worst when we lie to ourselves, because we can’t even see it when it happens. I can tell if a diet pill advertising lies to me, but when I lie to myself, there is no one there to point the finger and yell, “Baloney!” Here are a couple of ways that I lied to myself.
Portion Control:
I had stopped measuring. Cereal in the morning was the worst. I had been following the program for over two years, so I thought I knew what 3/4 cup of cereal looked like in my bowl, but when I actually got real with myself and pulled out those measuring cups again, I was shocked at how much I had actually been eating. Sometimes it was twice the serving size, which had doubled my caloric intake. No wonder I was having trouble losing weight.
Risky Restaurants:
I would purposely go to restaurants that didn’t have published nutrition facts so I could estimate the calories for the meals. These estimates turned out to be hilariously less than they should have been. Even I could see through this lie, but it didn’t stop me from continuing the bad habit. For the longest time, my favorite restaurant only had minimal nutrition facts posted on their website. It wasn’t until I downloaded the full list that I found out the the bowl of pasta that I estimated at 350 calories was actually 550 calories. That sort of difference was what was stalling my weight loss.
Shoddy Exercise:
When I started exercising, I wasn’t able to do much without overloading myself. I had gotten into a routine of running the same course on the treadmill (or around the neighborhood) every day. I would “forget” to wear my heart rate monitor, telling myself that I could tell how hard I was working. It wasn’t until I started using my heart rate monitor religiously that I realized that I had been slacking. Exercise that used to be in the high intensity range was really in the moderate or light range now, but I had been counting it as high. Now, I wear my HRM every time I exercise, no matter what. If I’m going to spend time working out, I want it to actually do me some good.
Re-evaluate yourself. Have you been lying to yourself at all? If you are, that might be the reason behind your weight loss plateau. Truly looking at myself with eyes wide open helped me far more than the pat and easy answers that were handed to me by gurus.
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.
A weight loss plateau can be really discouraging, especially when you are doing everything “right”. The Diet Blog has some ideas to help you get beyond this problem.
This article lists five ways to get beyond the plateau:
What this article doesn’t talk about is the hidden plateau. You aren’t losing weight and you know exactly why you aren’t. You can’t follow the program that was working before and you don’t know why.
Check Starling Fitness later today to see what you can do to get beyong that hidden plateau.
The Olympics provided us with a lot of inspiration for physical activity, here is an inspirational story about a competitor who turned to skiing instead of other ways of dealing with hard times.
United States Olympic skiier, Julia Mancuso, had a childhood that was difficult. Her father was accused of crimes and even spent time in jail. Skiing was Julia’s way of coping with it.
From 1989 until his guilty plea six years later, the family lived under a legal cloud. For Julia, who was on skis by age 2, the sport was her passion and perhaps an escape. She was racing by age 8.
”Looking back now, it’s just times when maybe skiing was the only thing for me to do,” she said. ”I just spent most of my time on the hill with my two sisters, chasing them around.”
Next time you’re tempted to turn to food when you’re having an emotional time, think about Julia Mancuso. Instead of turning to food, she relied on skiing to keep her healthy and help her beyond the stressful times in her life. Find something athletic that you can do to keep you healthy in times of stress.
I have been trying to think of what to write for Valentine’s Day and I can’t say it any better than I did last year.
You deserve a healthy and happy Valentine’s Day. Go ahead and have it and don’t believe those lies you tell yourself.
Wouldn’t it be great if every time I ran a race I had this much of a lead on the other runners?
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