Frustrated and a little worried.

suzannekatherine

Maybe I'm being over sensitive about this right now because I need some caffiene or it's that time of the month. Don't know. But this is starting to really get to me.

I have been struggling with my weight for the better part of my adult life. Never in a really serious way but enough to bother me. Typically I would reach a weight that was both cosmetically unattractive to me (I do not carry weight gracefully, at ALL) and also kind of scary because of how out of control I felt my eating was. And then I would buckle down and loose 25-30 pounds and feel good. And then eventually gain it back.

Two years ago something finally snapped, I discovered online food calculators, and I just decided I wasn't going to do that any more, EVER again! My mother is overweight and I think it has always terrified me the idea of getting to a point where I could just no longer come back from it.

So I counted calories, as I had always done before, but this time not on paper (much easier to keep up and more appealing for my obsessive, type A sensibilities), and tracked my weight every single day and I lost the weight over about 6 months or so. And got down to (at some points) a weight I had not seen since I was 16 years old. And I maintained it pretty closely for about a year. Which is a milestone so incredible I can hardly comprehend it. I NEVER maintain weight.

But to do it, since I felt I could not really trust myself to free eat and not gain the weight back (as I had always done in the past), I continued to weight myself every day (mostly) and count calories. My strategy, as I have decided I need to have a few days a month to just eat whatever I want, to keep myself from completely loosing my sanity, has been basically to eat to lose for all the days I am not "cheating." And it worked pretty well for about a year. Certain times of the year, I would end up cheating more often and I could tell my weight was creeping back up and would have to reign it back in a bit.

But as time goes by, it seems my body has become less forgiving. Maintaining weight has taken on a bit of a treading water-like quality. Not that the counting is any more difficult. In fact, it's become so part of my life that I feel like it's my security blanket. BUT, just on principle alone, it's kind of freaking me out the possiblity that staying on a mostly 1200 calorie diet for 2 and a half years may have screwed up my metabolism. That or I'm getting older. But either way, the net result (or at least what I fear) seems to be that, in order just to maintain my weight, I will have to remain on a low calorie diet for the rest of my life. I do still allow myself cheat days once a week, sometimes less often. And maybe that's where my problem is. Maybe I need to cut out cheating entirely.

But I have this dream of one day being able to just eat intuitively and trust myself. But I really don't know if that is realistic. Both because I can still tell that that demon inside me is still stratching at the door waiting to be unleashed and also because I'm afraid, if I ate what my body told me was enough, I would end up gaining weight.

In that past it has seemed that, this strategy that I am currently employing worked perfectly. And I was maintaining at about 2-4 pounds below where I am now and would loose a pound every so often, maybe gain it back on my bad days but then loose again. I felt in control and happy with myself.

But then I felt like things started slipping. My weight was creeping up and it became harder and harder to get it to go back down. I am now at a weight that, if it stayed here, it would be fine but part of me wants to loose a little more and get back to where I have been in the past. Or even below. I probably don't need to. And my pants would probably be too loose for me if I did. But, again, the principle of the thing is knowing that I could. And proving to myself that 1200 calories is NOT maintenance eating for me. Just thinking about that idea makes me want to cry and feel sorry for myself.

I know that for some people that is a reality. Maybe it is for me. Maybe I'm just getting to that age where the body stops wanting to play.

But in the past 4 weeks, exercizing 7-8 hours per week (mostly figure skating), eating my recommended net calories to loose 1 pound per week, and taking a total of, I think 3 days off (in which I TRIED not to completely over do it), I have basically lost zero pounds. I have maintained my weight. Doing all of that... At a few points I dropped down about a pound but then it went back up.

I have been diagnosed with hypothyroid but I actually lost all of my major weight before I was medicated and I just recently had to decrease my dosage because my levels were inching the other way.

So what the heck is wrong with me?? It's not like I'm not trying to push through the plateau. I just feel like I'm stuck.

And really, this website is just AMAZING, so if I had to continue like this forever, that would probably be fine. I just want to know if I am doing something really wrong. Or if all this low calorie stuff has actually messed me up, in the long run. Just now I went in and changed my settings to "sedentary" and am going to start under counting my exercize calories to see how that works.

Like I said, I don't really need to loose more weight, per se. I just want to know that this is not my prison forever. As nice a prison as it really is.

tashadauphine

Hi Suzanne
My guess is you are in starvation mode. I say this as I'm pretty sure I have managed to do the same thing. I have come onto this board to try and eat to the recommended calories for me. Last week for the first time in a couple of months I finally got my cals to 1500 net per day. I actually had a loss. Yay. After 10 weeks of meticulously counting cals and being down 900g I decided I had nothing to lose.

There are heaps of great discussions here about starvation mode. Just keep reading them till you convince yourself it's the right way to go. I might read one a day.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/175241-a-personal-view-on-exercise-cals-and-underfeeding

suzannekatherine

Thank you, Tasha (?). I was a little worried (relieved) that this little explosive rant had passed into obscurity without anyone reading.

It has always been my theory that this whole weight thing probably started in the first place because of starvation mode. An entire childhood of not taking in enough calories followed by relative freedom and access to all the naughty foods I could never have before.

I will check out that link but I'm wondering, setting aside the issue of whether I am correctly accounting for my exercise calories - I always was under the impression that as long as you never go below 1200, all is well. Are you indicating that I might find this not to be true?

Ironically, I lost more weight in the last two days, laying in bed 24/7 and eating nothing but (literally) chocolate, ice cream, cereal, pop tarts and gatorade, than I have in the last month working out almost every day and watching everything I eat. Weirdness.

Thanks again!

P.S. Do you also figure skate? I saw skating on your feed a few times.

suzannekatherine

I wanted to thank you for the link, by the way. Very enlightening! I read the entire 7 pages.