Seriously struggling

88olds wrote: »

Step back. You sound to me like you need what I think of as a look at yourself in the mirror moment. Are you going to do weight loss or not? Weight loss is a set of things to do. It’s a lot different than just going around wishing we weighed less.

I found discipline in the gym. It took me by surprise. Like most guys, I’d been in the gym before. But for whatever reason, for once I stuck around past the second week. Then, seemingly out of nowhere I could feel it working. Suddenly it was obvious, keep showing up and doing basic sets and reps and it would work. That was the foundation of discipline- belief that the system would work. In fact, it couldn’t not work, it was the way my body was designed. It was science.

The same thinking can be reverse engineered into weight loss. Stay in a calorie deficit long enough and it will work. But a problem we encounter is we have to live with it. And since we aren’t on Biggest Loser, we have to live our lives in the real world. Then “the struggle” everyone talks about isn’t so much losing weight, most of us can figure that out, the tricky part is living with it.

I think the most helpful response to most weight loss problems starts with a food diary that we keep no matter what. Never give yourself an out from logging. Blow up your number? Log it. Don’t really know how to count something? Make a good faith estimate and keep going. If you are losing weight week to week, your estimates are sound. If not, you need to find a better way to estimate. Use a food scale whenever possible. Control the things you can control.

All that said, you raise a particularly vexing problem- the parties/family get togethers. Going into someone’s home to eat is tough. It just is. People in our family knew I was trying to lose weight, but I never expected a bit of help. Good thing, because I never got any. They just fixed what they were going to fix and ate the way they were going to eat. I had to work around it. Some days were just difficult.

But difficult is not the same as hopeless. Plan a menu, use a food scale to crunch numbers and control the things you can when you can. When you are out just remember that when you reach for the chips or wine or cake, its going to get recorded in your food diary. Keep trying to problem solve around the difficult situations. If you eat in a calorie deficit long enough you will achieve your goals. It may take more time than you’d like but it will work. It’s science. Good luck.