At Goal & Successfully Maintaining. So Why Am I Doing This All Over Again?

Lietchi wrote: »

Hm, imposter... I recently changed jobs, so all the people at work have no idea I used to be obese, no idea I used to be a couch potato.
And I am hyperaware of the fact that when I talk about my exercise, they think I'm innately a sporty/athletic person. If only they knew... But in my mind as well, this is all still so recent (1000 day streak on MFP recently, and it did take that long to arrive at my current activity level) so I do wonder if this is a long term thing, if I will keep it up when hurdles get thrown my way.
So I do feel like a bit of an imposter, because I see myself as someone who does a lot of exercise, not someone who is athletic or sporty or active. I still have trouble saying I'm a runner, I 'just' do a lot of running.

And I feel like an imposter for another reason, I just realized.

Those people who did know me obese tend to be impressed with my weight loss for the effort it required. But it was easy. So easy I'm sometimes ashamed I ever got obese. Sure, I needed consistency, flexibility, some problem solving skills. But so few hurdles compared to a lot of people: no medical conditions making it harder, no kids to take care of, no financial obstacles, no busy life to juggle (just a regular full time job). If the circumstances had been different, harder, would I have been able to make it work?

springlering62 wrote: »

(snipperama of good content)

Am I alone? What’s your experience? Why are we (or, just me) so wrapped up in this? Is it culture? Upbringing? Self doubt? self hate? Why oh why is our weight so important to us when, really, it’s just a matter of fueling our body? With delicious, delicious food. *sigh*

You're not alone. In my case, I think not exactly imposter syndrome (a concept I struggle to understand in most contexts), but the doubt and fear that this can happen, have happened, continue - that's familiar.

Bizarrely, one thing I think has helped me was slowly, non-intentionally regaining around 10-15 pounds (over the course of around 4 years) . . . and then when my jeans got a little snug, thinking "OK, enough of this nonsense", and slowly, intentionally creeping weight back down (over the course of more than a year!).

In a way, it's like how I used to worry that if I took a few days off my workout routine, I'd derail and never go back to it, physically decline quickly as a result. Over literally years (I've been active much longer than I've been thin), I learned that if I take a few days off, I start feeling really cr*ppy - moody, tense, stiff, and more, and worse - so I feel driven to work out again to feel decent again.

In either case, it may take some time for me to reach that homeostatic self-correction stage, and I'm not saying nothing could derail me ever, but after a while, that kind of mechanism kicked in, on both fronts. YMMV.

I had more trouble, early on, on the activity front: I felt more imposter-ish as an athlete. When I rowed at masters nationals one year, there were like two truly fat people there competing (among many hundreds of people), and I was one of them. (Don't get excited: "masters" in rowing is just post-collegiate old people. Anyone could enter masters nationals.) It's one of those sports where the tech clothing doesn't come in truly fat sizes. (I was class 1 obese, for context.) Also, I'd never been athletic - one of those chosen last or near-last for teams in gym class.

What got me over the hump in terms of thinking of myself an athlete was two things. One, the biggest by far, was my first coach (then assistant coach of a very successful NCAA Div I women's rowing team, later head coach of one of the top in the US). Her academic field was sports psychology, so she was great at team-building and confidence-building. From day one, she called us "athletes".

At one point, she had us do a little exercise where she asked us to write down 3 things that would have to happen, in order for each of us individually to feel like an athlete. (I think she'd maybe gotten weary of our self deprecation?) So, we wrote it down, and I stuck mine in my rowing file folder. A year or few later, I ran across the paper. The things had happened. OK, hit me with a 2x4. I'm an athlete.

IMO, pretty much everyone who's ever said "I'm not an athlete, but . . . " is an athlete.

The second thing that helped me feel like an athlete was that after I suspended disbelief, worked hard and persistently, and followed training plans and such . . . I didn't s*ck. I didn't dominate and never will, but I objectively wasn't truly awful at it. Go figure!

Now, I always tell new people (to any kind of athletic thing) to suspend disbelief, seek out good training resources, follow them sensibly to gradually increase fitness . . . and they'll surprise themselves. I really believe that.

Big caveat on all of this, though: My weight per se isn't very important to me, i.e., not that important as a number, not that important from an appearance standpoint. I haven't much cared about my appearance since adolescence, honestly - I just try to keep it respectable. That's one of a number of ways in which I tend to think I'm not a normal woman (which I'm fine with, BTW). I'm team "no makeup, no hair dye (well, it was lavender for while, but mostly it's been gray for years), practical clothes/shoes" and eventually joined team "no breasts", post cancer. I'm just not appearance driven, to a potentially dysfunctional degree. I'm inside of here; I don't mostly need to look at me, so meh.

Why I thought I was naturally unathletic: History. Bookish = nonathletic, in my youth. Female, to a large extent = non-athletic, in my youth (quite far pre Title IX in the US). Of course I was non-athletic!

As far as why I thought I was naturally fat? I think it was the mythology that we get fat as we age, the fact that my mom was fat (but didn't damage me on the body image front, BTW - she was kind of extraordinary), the fact that I was fat in high school, the fact that I was unathletic, blah blah blah. I'd only ever been thin in my college years, and that was about my active job and bike/walk transportation on a huge campus, mostly.

In my mid-40s, when I got very active, trained regularly, stayed class 1 obese, I figured I had a "slow metabolism", and that was reinforced by my being severely hypothyroid by then, too (partly genetic - dad was hypo). In actual reality, my calorie experience suggests I might even have a faster-than-average "metabolism". Go figure.

Sorry. Another *baby-feline* essay.

Wow! I spent the whole day binge reading this thread. Even in the gym on the treadmill, I was scrolling through this thread. I recently moved over here from Noom because I was missing something in the groups. I just found what I was missing!

So many things I read here were reading out of my diary. Thank you @springlering62 for this .

I joined Noom last July and was set at 1200 cal per day. I became obsessed with that number. I lost weight -48 pounds. I also became obsessed with my Apple Watch goals. I travelled - my 50 year high school reunion - a week In Paris - family visits. I gained 2 pounds in Paris, but not on other trips. 1200 cal became my mantra. In January, my hair started falling out by the handfuls. But I kept to staying UNDER 1200 cals. By March I hit my goal of 140, which was a BMI of 21.9. My hair was still falling out, but I didn’t connect it to my diet.

Then I started to loosen up on my calories . Finally my hair stopped falling out, but I quit losing weight. I went into a kind of maintenance mode, albeit unintentionally. since March, my weight has fluctuated up and down the same 3 pounds, which isn’t a bad thing - it’s like maintenance. But I really want to lose another 10 pounds. I have a tiny frame , and I really should be around 130.

I work out ( not like Spring) but at least an hour a day. I will be 69 next month. I need to learn to lose weight, strengthen my body, but not obsess to the point the I lose my hair or other things. All of these issues were discussed in this thread and I am taking time to absorb it all.

As a side benefit, my wife has joined me in this journey. She will be 80 in September, has lost 25 pounds since last summer, and is getting as obsessed with exercise as I got with calories. We go to the gym together nearly every day, but she is sometimes doing twice a day.

Thank you everyone for opening up your hearts ♥️

I don't consider myself a runner. I'm just an old lady (62) who runs. I do many things: canoe, kayak, dragon boat, ski, snowshoe, hike, yoga, a bit of strength training, but because I don't excel at any of them, I don't consider myself an athlete.

When my son was starting out in his career as a forester he spent his days hiking or snowshoeing every day through acres and acres of trees, up and down the sides of hills and low mountain ranges, wearing a vest full of equipment (and their lunch and drinking water too of course!). The work was done mainly by young, fit men and women. His boss referred to the employees as "industrial athletes". A very fitting term.

So maybe if I can't wrap my head around being an athlete, maybe I can comfortably call myself a recreational athlete. I'm okay with that. Maybe.

I was telling a new co-worker that I am a gym rat. I do something cardio-ish for thirty minutes five days a week, and two of those days are in the gym, where I add some strength training. Progress is slow but consistency is pretty good.

Then I thought about it, and revised. I am a gym mouse. But I'm good with that.

SilverSage1 wrote: »

ridiculous59 wrote: »

Thank you everyone for opening up your hearts ♥️

I don't consider myself a runner. I'm just an old lady (62) who runs. I do many things: canoe, kayak, dragon boat, ski, snowshoe, hike, yoga, a bit of strength training, but because I don't excel at any of them, I don't consider myself an athlete.

Don't sell yourself short. You are more active and athletic than the majority of women your age!

Old? At 62? 😵 That must make my wife and I ancient! In our spare time, we lay flooring, tile, hang cabinets, install baseboards, build closets, etc. We refuse to call ourselves old - that's a word I'm not ready to own. (In case you missed that post, we are 68 and 79).

FWIW, just a different perspective: I call myself a "li'l ol' lady" at 66, and proudly so.

Impaired abilities, sadly, become statistically more common with increasing age, but they aren't synonyms of age. Treating them as synonyms, IMO, reinforces stereotypes and encourages low (self-)expectations.

My mission is to underscore that "old" can be energetic, lively, curious, strong, active, sharp-minded, . . . . etc.

Even the impairments one may have, at any age - and I do have a few, thankfully mostly minor so far - are better thought of as things to work with, around, over, through or generally past (in some wily way) on the way to goals, as much as possible.

"Old" is good stuff, especially so in my personal world as a cancer survivor and cancer widow.

JMO.

springlering62 wrote: »

We’ve come up with a new plan so we can treat ourselves to something nice every week.

We enjoy the occasional pizza, shawarma, or Mexican meal out, but it’s hard to make them fit.

We’ve started having “early dinner” on Fridays.

We will either skip lunch, or have something super light (a few slices of deli meat on a piece of bread, a pimento cheese sandwich, or a light bowl of soup).

Then we have an early dinner around 3 pm, somewhere we love. Today it’s a local Middle Eastern restaurant.

It’s filling enough to hold us to well past our usual dinner time, and then we’ll have a little extra something something for dessert, which is special, too. I’m debating baklava, but am probably going for pita and baba ganoush. It’s not dessert, but I love it so much, it might as well be.

This gives us the flexibility to have something “heavier” than we usually would. It’s not genius or anything, and not something we’d do every day, but it’s given us a new option so we don’t feel so tied down to what can sometimes feel like a calorie grind.

Thi works particularly well on days when we have an evening event. I’ll be a volunteer cashier for an event this evening that’s catered. Another plus is arriving with a full tummy, and knowing I’ve got a big (and eagerly anticipated) snack waiting when I get home, keeps me out of the hors deouvres in the next room.

Got any similar techniques?

That's pretty much why I calorie bank: I eat a small number of calories under maintenance most days (usually 100-150ish), to have calories to spend on an indulgence later. This is my practice in maintenance.

Some people do this in a pattern, like banking on weekdays, spending on weekend. But for me, as a retiree, it's more variable.

I wouldn't think of eating so far under daily calories that it would have an impact on energy or nutrition, but that small amount seems to have negligible impact.

During weight loss, I didn't bank, since I was already in a reasonable calorie deficit. Since I had that deficit, what I usually did instead was manage the frequency and magnitude of indulgences. If they were rare, it didn't matter: I was just delaying reaching goal weight by a day or two. If that 1-2 day delay was triggered once a month (say), it was no big deal.

Because I'm a geek/nerd, I'd actually do the arithmetic, calculate the estimated probable impact, using the "3500 calories over current maintenance calories is at most a pound of fat gain" concept. Most often, this calculation would be after the eating (though I'd typically decided in advance to indulge, as a generality). That after-report would give me hints about how often I could do this (or how much I could indulge in one event), and still stay on a timeline I'd find psychologically satisfying.

Since it's consonant with my nature to have treated weight loss as a fun science fair experiment for grown-ups, this was a natural approach, for me. It wouldn't be so for everyone.

I also do/did what you describe, sometimes, for planned events: Eat more lightly the rest of the day, manage the eating timing differently from usual.

During loss, I did occasionally bank a bit for 3-4 days before a planned event, or maybe fit in some extra activity, to create some compensatory deficit in advance. I'd never try to "make up for it" the day(s) after, unless I was simply not hungry. "Make up for it after" can easily turn into overeat/restrict cycles. With banking in advance, the event balances the books on calories, and there aren't those consequences, for me.

Similarly, for me, extra workouts after "to make up for it" tend to cause fatigue and the usual effects of fatigue on appetite and willpower. If I felt extra energetic after an indulge-y day, I might dial up my routine a little, but not disproportionate to the energy spike. I wouldn't do lots or extra or unusually high-intensity exercise before an event to create extra deficit, because that can backfire for the fatigue reason

Fatigue from over-exercise can be counterproductive for weight loss, generally, I think: We move less in the rest of life when we're tired, perhaps not even noticing that; and it can spike appetite so risk compensatory eating. That's one reason I push back on the myth that punitive, ultra-intense exercise is important for either weight loss or fitness improvement. It isn't.