Eight years [long] [pic]

sweet_lotus · February 2011

In 2003 I weighed probably 50 pounds more than I do now. Because I have an apple type body shape, most of my weight collected in the stomach area, and even though I was in my twenties and I had elevated LDL cholesterol. Someone asked me if I was expecting (I wasn't!) Given a diabetic family history, my doctor warned of the risk for diabetes and suggested weight loss. Confounding the problem was a chronic health issue that made exercise difficult, if not impossible most days. I'd have to lose weight through diet alone. It seemed like a herculean effort.

I had never dieted before. I started by cutting back calories drastically for a few days and then hastily going back to my old ways, unable to bear the pangs of hunger. Next I tried Atkins, which was in vogue at the time. The restriction of entire classes of food was depressing - I really missed fruit and muffins. After stopping, the weight returned with shocking quickness. Next was Weight Watchers. While I liked the points system, at the time they emphasized high fiber, low fat foods. Stuff that made me feel full such as peanut butter cost way too many points, at the expense of overall calories. Again, I was hungry and miserable.

After two failures, I almost gave up.

It occurred to me that I had to come up with an eating plan that I liked enough to stay on indefinitely. Having watched my mother’s weight yo-yo throughout her life, I knew that losing a pile of weight just to gain it back was a heartbreak. I didn’t want to be forced to give up entire groups of food, so fad diets were out, and I couldn’t live with dramatic sleep disrupting hunger pangs.

A few articles I came across really inspired me. Unfortunately I’ve since lost the links so I can’t share them, but I’ll explain the gist. The first was about psychology, behavior and food. Because eating is such a strong survival drive, it stimulates a flurry of reward activity in the brain. Odor is linked to emotion and memory, and because a large amount of taste derives from smell, food can be not just a physical experience but an emotional one too. (That’s why it’s so hard to give up Mama’s pecan pie at Thanksgiving - there are multiple events going on in your brain - both drive based and emotional - compelling you to eat it.) One theory goes that as humans, we’re designed to overeat to compensate for episodes of food scarcity. I’m not sure how much evidence there is for this but it seems plausible.

So, with weight loss, the deck is stacked against us because our brains don‘t want us to under-eat. The article suggested that some of the time tested dieting tips actually work because they trick the brain. For example, if you want to eat smaller portions and you put a reduced size meal on your dinner plate, your eyes are sending visual signal to your brain that less food is incoming, thus making the meal seem less satisfying. By using a smaller plate, it’s much less obvious. Another method is the Japenese practice of hara hachi bu or eating until you are about 80% satiated. Because there is food in your belly, the appetite cues have softened, but you’re still eating less than you normally would.

The other article was not about diet but forming habits. The brain takes about three weeks to either break or learn a habit. During that time you have to consciously coach yourself to do whatever behavior you want to become a habit, and after that it becomes easy. When I sat down to come up with an eating plan I wrote down my normal daily eating for a week. A lot of it involved unnecessary eating like the food I ate watching TV at night, or junk food in the afternoon. If I could apply habit changing technique to eating, wouldn’t that help me lose weight?

Just cutting out habitual eating probably accounted for half of my weight loss. I did it slowly, one habit at a time. My first ten or so pounds were lost because I replaced nighttime TV eating with nighttime TV knitting, it was easy to do and best of all I didn’t feel like I was dieting. After those first few pounds I took a “break” for a couple of months, meaning I simply tried to maintain my the loss but didn’t actively try to lose more. This was a reward in and of itself - the success of losing and the confidence of being able to sustain the loss!

Next I starting working on cutting out some of the daytime junk food, then shifting meal calories to healthier fare, then portion size. Gradually, with several breaks, I returned to my early twenties size self. I never felt overwhelmed or ravenous. It took about three years. But I think the slowness worked in my favor. If my heavier self had contemplated the amount of food I eat now, she would have felt completely hopeless (and hungry!) But the changes in diet were so incremental that my brain could handle them without feeling inordinate deprivation. I also did it without exercising which was something I wasn’t sure was possible.

Like many dieters I struggled, and the first year I gained back about ten pounds. But, I lost it (again, slowly) and have been either on or within a few pounds of my goal weight for almost five years. It takes work and I’m always vigilant, still tweaking my meal plans here and there. At this point I feel confident that I can maintain for life. My LDL cholesterol dropped a lot as my weight did, but, unfortunately it’s been creeping up. So right now I’m experimenting with lower amounts of saturated fat to see if that has any effect.

So, in conclusion, dieting didn’t work for me until I took into account my natural strong drive to eat, and found a method that didn‘t force me to fight very hard against it. This isn’t typical dieting advice but maybe it will help someone reading this. Congrulations, by the way, for getting to the end.

Me, at my current weight. Thank god no one asks me if I'm pregnant anymore.

XPJdh