Hi Norah, so good to hear from you!

Last year you had a goal and a time table--your wedding--and you ROCKED that dress. SO beautiful.

Maybe you need a new goal and time table. Are you thinking about having babies? How healthy do you want to be for that? Or maybe it's time to switch from "hitting it hard" to a slower, gentler weight loss, a lifestyle you can sustain. I'm using our ten day challenges to try to build lifetime healthy habits, like logging food so I am accountable.

Hope that helps, honey!

K.

Oh, Norah! Reading that whole "spoons" article literally just brought me to tears. As did all of your post, really. Personally, I think you pushed yourself really hard to get ready for your wedding, and you did things that weren't sustainable long term because you had a very finite goal. Sorry this is so long, but apparently I needed to share as much as you asked to hear.

I found myself doing something similar but different when I did a challenge for work last year. It started out innocently enough, but I had to have someone watch me weigh in, so I couldn't do it at work. I started gearing everything in my life around those weekly weigh ins (without even realizing it). The clothes I wore, the workouts I would or would not do, the food I would or would not eat, all of my life activities revolved around that damned scale and the challenge. It went from February to May. In June, I hit the lowest weight, and then my brain imploded. (As point of reference, I started at 319 in 2010. This was June of 2014, and I think I was at 248.)

I gave up on challenges. Realized that I was "learning to the test" not "learning for life." I could teach myself to a finite goal. I had to look at this all as my life. I utterly stopped thinking in terms of losing weight and challenges and goals and plans and all that crap. Because it was all finite and based on things in isolation. In real life, losing weight is not a simple math equation. Our bodies are doing calculus and physics while we are trying to do arithmetic.

When I started thinking about gaining health and stopped thinking about losing weight, the whole gravity of my universe shifted. I spent 6 months (roughly mid-to-end-June to mid-January, so I guess that's closer to 7 months altogether) logging in here every day, not logging my food, gaining back 5-10 pounds loosely, and maintaining in a range for that time. I didn't log my food. I stopped working out. I didn't care. Luckily, I'd learned enough that I was loosely maintaining, but I was getting lumpier and gaining back fat and losing muscle and NOT CARING.

So, after a few months of wallowing in my misery, I started thinking. I realized that if I ever wanted to come back swinging, I had to get the goofy crap in my head to make sense. I had to stop making excuses. I had to remember how to care again. All of it. I had to find some spoons, any spoons to at least have something to "spend" on "me" again, if that makes sense. I was completely and utterly lost.

I started blogging here, mostly. I started with the most raw and painful memories. I started with that first spark that got me deciding I deserved health. I wrote about EVERYTHING. The good, the bad, the ugly, the painful, the boring. I read. A lot. I found people who inspired me and read and reread everything they wrote. And I let it make me think. And I wrote. And read and wrote ad infinitum.

I think my turning point came in October. I wrote this: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/KnitOrMiss/view/motivation-versus-determination-699445 in response to something a friend had posted. And I kept writing. My blog is full of crap I wrote for me, to dump it onto a page, to explain it to someone who could understand and care (I love my fiance, but having never suffered through what I have - he is the master of willpower -- and of justification - he truly is from the position of the friend in the spoons story - he tries to understand, but he just can't get it. I haven't found that example that clicks for him...and his demons are almost as foreign to me as mine are to him...). I just needed to know that someone spoke my language.

So, I kept writing. And making plans I didn't implement. And researching. I'm the master at planning. And even at getting started in things, but executing? HA! I could be the ultimate start-up person if I didn't have to keep things going. So I kept writing and thinking and planning and learning and studying...but I wasn't doing.

I finally found a plan that made sense with my own health issues. I was dancing around the idea of it. And then I bought some chocolates after the holidays on 80% off clearance or something. I ate a 17 oz box of chocolates in three days all by myself in hoarding it (I bought my fiance his own box because I didn't want to share!) and gorging on it. While this isn't a classic binge, I ate enough by the second day, I had to stop eating because I felt sick to my stomach. Yet, the third day for breakfast, I was still dying to eat some more. With the first piece, I promised myself that I was going to be good and make it last all week. And the habit of thinking about things kicked it. I thought why prolong it? Why gorge? What did I want? What did I feel the compulsion of? Etc.

And so, I finally thought, "That's it. This crap is for the birds." So, I decided I was going to finish that box, eat what I wanted the rest of the day, and tomorrow I was going to tippy-toe into getting healthy on a new plan that my endocrinologist and PCP had been harping on my to be on for months and months and months now.

And instead, something just clicked. On 1/15/15, I just leaped into the deep end of the pool on my new way of eating and way of life. It wasn't hard. I had some days I didn't feel well while I adjust, but I'd studied. I knew how to minimize most of the adjustments. And goodness, my body SANG to me. Something finally fit and worked and made me feel good. I thought surely that was a myth, a fantasy, and fluke!

But it wasn't.

Here it is, 7/1/15, and I'm still going strong. My overall progress has slowed because I got to a good mental place. I'm not as aggressive now as I was at the beginning. I realized that this way of life was sustainable for me. I will get to that mysterious goal land that I don't really think of as finite eventually. I know that in the depth of my soul, so why should I kill myself getting there? I'm not falling backwards. I'm just progressing slowly, because I know where I'm going.

For the first time in my life, I'm on a real path, and I swear I know where I'm going.

It is downright surreal, to be honest.

But, if I hadn't spent all that time figuring out what was wrong in my head, where I wanted to be, how I wanted to live, and all of that, I could NEVER be where I am today. I did this backwards and wrong and differently from what we are told. I didn't set a goal weight. I didn't make a plan. I don't have a dream board. I don't have anything set and fixed. For me, all of those things undermined my determination, my progress.

I am gaining health. I feel better. I have improved ALL of my health markers. I'm living.

I am losing weight, but I see that as a bi-product of getting healthier. I am restoring my metabolism, my body's inner voice. I didn't know my body had a voice. I am ME in a way I didn't know was possible. I'm encountering the shocking truths that there are things about me than can be "normal." Like mainstream normal. I always had 8.5" or larger wrists. I had to wear anklets for bracelets and necklaces as anklets. I'd never been skinny - not even as a kid. So I figured, I'm Polish, I'm just big-boned. I will never be normal. I had just accepted it, because accepting it was one of the only things that kept me sane.

Today, my wrist is 6.75". I'm still not sure how the heck that happened. It just did. I'm not anywhere close to the level of health that I dream of in that nebulous fuzzy dream. I don't know what it is I'm going for, just to be better. And now, all the sudden, my wrist is NORMAL.

Strangely enough, realizing that fact shifted things for me yet again. I realized that I believed in the theory, "Lose your weight as you will maintain it, or you will never succeed." So I'm taking it slowly. I'm loosely tracking, and I'm slowly shrinking... I can't be a strict food diary person, because I've no intention of keeping a food journal for the rest of my life. I can't exercise like a crazy person, because I'm focusing on some physical therapy right now. I want to get back to enjoying my exercise or rather activity. I don't want to be a person who "works out." I want to be an active person who lives. I can't restrict foods permanently, but if I don't want them, that's fine with me. But I'm a stubborn PITA, so if I tell myself I CANNOT have something, I'll obsess until I binge on it. So loosely, that's my plan.

Losing as I'll maintain.

If I slide and stop losing, I'll touch base with tracking more closely and such to get back on track. But for now, I'm living, and I'm living healthier, and if I ask myself the truth about that, my answer is, "It's about damned time!"

This is a nutshell is my struggle as well. I know what to do, I know that I have and can lose weight...I just always hit a wall and go off the rails....and then the guilt...and then the gain...and then another start date.

I know that it isn't about perfection, that it needs to be sustainable.

But knowing isn't the same as doing....and that continues to be my struggle.

I want to focus on overall health, not weight...and in my head today...that is the focus.

But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried about my ability to stay in that head-space.

This is a good read for me too, so thanks again, Carly.

I have also been struggling to get and stay in the right head space lately.

K.

KnitOrMiss wrote: »

To me getting straight in my head is the first step, or everything else will unravel!

Same here