Break's over

[darkemeralds]

My weight loss habits went on hiatus the day I left on my vacation (August 18), and have been slow to come back.

I've spent the twenty days since my return home experimenting with "natural eating"--which is to say, eating without tracking--and the best I can say for it is that the weight I've lost isn't coming back on very quickly. I feel like I'm on the edge of a cliff and about to fall. It's too scary.

The break did me good. It bled some of the pressure out of the system, and I'm no longer so fixated on achieving a certain goal weight by a certain date. I now have an idea of what maintenance will feel like, and I've come to the realization that my original goal weight was too low by at least twenty pounds.

So, though the break was worth taking, I feel better returning to counting calories and recording my weight every morning, and generally wrapping myself back up in the safe blanket of the plan I committed to almost a year ago.

Comments

[pinesandmaples]

I had a really great Sparkpeople routine over the summer, but my campus network blocks SP. (WHY???) It's making me twitchy.

[darkemeralds]

I don't understand that kind of network blockage. It's silly. I hope you can get your routine back!

[just_jes]

The idea of falling off a cliff is scary, but it also doesn't seem very likely. It's true that a lot of people regain weight but I think that is much more often the case for people who lost weight rapidly through crash dieting or some other means and never developed the knowledge or tools to know how to continue/maintain. Which most definitely does not describe you. And you now know that your natural eating is only slightly off from where it should be and would result in a slow gain that could be stopped in its tracks rather than being so out of control that cliff/edge/fall would happen as soon as you stop tracking.

There are things you can't control. There are medical conditions and medications that pretty much guarantee weight gain, sometimes quite rapidly. A substantial change in mood or mental state or lifestyle or life situation could result in a radical change in what constitutes natural eating. But barring that kind of big change in something you can't control, weight gain is rarely a rapid fall. It's slow, it doesn't happen the second you take a break for a few days or weeks, it doesn't sneak up on you without warning. Even if you stopped looking at the scales, you know by how clothes fit if you were starting to gain. Instead of falling off the edge of a cliff, it's more like a slow roll down a gentle incline that has lots of speed bumps along the way. And, unlike falling off a cliff where you can't stop until you hit the bottom, you can stop at any point on the descent and you already know that you have the tools to start climbing again.

[darkemeralds]

I love that image of the gentle slope! It's much nicer than the cliff, and yes, far more accurate.

Thank you for the re-calibration!

[llaras]

Wishing you luck!

[karen_jk]

You are such a determined person! I am sure that if you go back to your plan you will continue on the path to your goal.

[darkemeralds]

I hope you're right! The trip--which was not without certain stresses--seems to have rattled my cage a bit, and I'm having a bit of trouble finding my center of gravity again now that I'm home. I keep working, though!