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darkemeraldsGiven that ninety-eight percent of "successful" weight loss becomes weight re-gain within a year (I don't actually know if that's still true, but it's a figure that has entered legend), and given that I set out fourteen months ago consciously and deliberately to become part of the other two percent, I think an update is in order.
In a nutshell: I started to experience the creep of bad habit, and over three months I've regained four of the sixty pounds I lost between October 2010 and September 2011. Here's the great thing: the toolkit I put together at the beginning of this journey still works. When the weight trendline began to slant upward undeniably, I was able to take all the tools back out again and use them to get myself back on track--and it wasn't very difficult.
In fact it was much, much easier than starting the diet in the first place. This surprised me: my dread of falling off the wagon and never being able to get back on again was significant.
My toolkit consists of
All these tools were critical to my initial success, but EFT tapping was the paradigm-shifter, the game-changer, the One Big Thing that let me put all the other tools to use. So when I recognized a couple of weeks ago that no, my sixty-pound loss was not a magical, permanent, no-maintenance achievement and was in fact beginning to dissolve, EFT tapping was the first tool I got back out. And once again it started the stalled engine. It's an amazing technique.
What made me stop dieting at sixty pounds? Several things. First, I was actually pretty satisfied with a sixty pound loss and needed some time to live in that new body before deciding whether to go for more. I've since determined that a total loss of eighty pounds will be about right. My original estimate of being 100 lbs overweight was high. My doctor concurs.
Second, I took a big trip late in the summer and gave myself permission to go off my plan for those three weeks. I stand by this decision, but if I had it to do again, I would make more of a point of resuming my efforts as soon as I was fully back in my own time zone. I let one week of recovery time bleed into two, then three. The scale showed no sign of budging upward, and I became complacent.
Third--and this was a big oversight on my part--about a month after my vacation, my job became extremely stressful. The big work push was predictable, on my calendar, and well-known in advance, but I failed to plan for it. I won't make that mistake again.
Not only did I genuinely not have time to go to the gym for almost two months, but the physical stress was enormous, leaving me weak-willed around comfort food and actually slowing my metabolism. Simple daily practices like tracking food and weight would have been a stress reliever, but I had no mental energy to re-establish habits that had drifted away.
It's not like I went binge-crazy. The creep back towards poor eating habits was very subtle, incremental, and gradual. The weight trendline was flat for the first half of my diet hiatus. It edged upward very very slightly--plausible-deniability-slightly--for a few weeks after that, but I began to feel it in my clothes about three weeks ago. It took another week of work stress and recovery for me to pay attention, and a further week for me to remember my tools.
I used tapping to clear the plausible deniability, deal with fears of deprivation, cement my new goals, and generally dissolve my resistance. Then I rolled up my sleeves and started afresh.
I'm fully back on track again, but I'm aiming to lose only a half pound a week now. That means that it could take me seven or eight weeks just to turn the trendline downward and get back to where I was in September. I'm not thrilled about that, but it's a valuable lesson.
On the other hand, I caught it. I caught the problem before my clothes stopped fitting, before I lost the health and mobility benefits I'd gained, and before I fell into the 98% trap that I've promised myself I will never again be part of.
In a nutshell: I started to experience the creep of bad habit, and over three months I've regained four of the sixty pounds I lost between October 2010 and September 2011. Here's the great thing: the toolkit I put together at the beginning of this journey still works. When the weight trendline began to slant upward undeniably, I was able to take all the tools back out again and use them to get myself back on track--and it wasn't very difficult.
In fact it was much, much easier than starting the diet in the first place. This surprised me: my dread of falling off the wagon and never being able to get back on again was significant.
My toolkit consists of
- daily weight logging using principles from The Hacker's Diet
- daily food tracking (with intent to keep calories below a specific bar)
- daily exercise
- breakfast at least five days a week
- certain outright food restrictions (I just don't buy stuff I crave to excess)
- stress management
- EFT tapping
All these tools were critical to my initial success, but EFT tapping was the paradigm-shifter, the game-changer, the One Big Thing that let me put all the other tools to use. So when I recognized a couple of weeks ago that no, my sixty-pound loss was not a magical, permanent, no-maintenance achievement and was in fact beginning to dissolve, EFT tapping was the first tool I got back out. And once again it started the stalled engine. It's an amazing technique.
What made me stop dieting at sixty pounds? Several things. First, I was actually pretty satisfied with a sixty pound loss and needed some time to live in that new body before deciding whether to go for more. I've since determined that a total loss of eighty pounds will be about right. My original estimate of being 100 lbs overweight was high. My doctor concurs.
Second, I took a big trip late in the summer and gave myself permission to go off my plan for those three weeks. I stand by this decision, but if I had it to do again, I would make more of a point of resuming my efforts as soon as I was fully back in my own time zone. I let one week of recovery time bleed into two, then three. The scale showed no sign of budging upward, and I became complacent.
Third--and this was a big oversight on my part--about a month after my vacation, my job became extremely stressful. The big work push was predictable, on my calendar, and well-known in advance, but I failed to plan for it. I won't make that mistake again.
Not only did I genuinely not have time to go to the gym for almost two months, but the physical stress was enormous, leaving me weak-willed around comfort food and actually slowing my metabolism. Simple daily practices like tracking food and weight would have been a stress reliever, but I had no mental energy to re-establish habits that had drifted away.
It's not like I went binge-crazy. The creep back towards poor eating habits was very subtle, incremental, and gradual. The weight trendline was flat for the first half of my diet hiatus. It edged upward very very slightly--plausible-deniability-slightly--for a few weeks after that, but I began to feel it in my clothes about three weeks ago. It took another week of work stress and recovery for me to pay attention, and a further week for me to remember my tools.
I used tapping to clear the plausible deniability, deal with fears of deprivation, cement my new goals, and generally dissolve my resistance. Then I rolled up my sleeves and started afresh.
I'm fully back on track again, but I'm aiming to lose only a half pound a week now. That means that it could take me seven or eight weeks just to turn the trendline downward and get back to where I was in September. I'm not thrilled about that, but it's a valuable lesson.
On the other hand, I caught it. I caught the problem before my clothes stopped fitting, before I lost the health and mobility benefits I'd gained, and before I fell into the 98% trap that I've promised myself I will never again be part of.
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(no subject)
20/12/11 11:21 (UTC)How long have you been using it? Did you have any resistance to EFT that you overcame? Why do you think it's been so important to your success? I've heard more than one person say it has worked for them, but I find myself feeling really silly when I try it.
(no subject)
20/12/11 19:55 (UTC)Heh. "Even though I feel silly when I try EFT..."
I'm not sure why that's not true for me, but I have a long and colorful history of using alternative therapies and oddball practices, particularly in pursuit of trauma healing. I've known of EFT for probably ten years, and have used it intermittently over that time with profound results in trauma-related nervous system activation.
(In English, that means that EFT is an instant cure for inappropriate fight-or-flight states, intrusive self-shaming thoughts, the voice of the inner brow-beater, and other trauma symptoms that kept me on or over the edge of depression all my adult life.)
I've intensified my use of EFT in the last couple of years, as more and more techniques and information have become available on the web. Hundreds of clever practitioners have developed all kinds of fascinating uses for it.
Belief change is one of its most powerful applications, and that's where I've gotten such value from it in weight loss. "Even though I don't believe that lasting weight loss is possible for me..." was one of my starting points. Getting back on track in the last couple of weeks, I've done a fair amount of "Even though I'm terrified that I can never stop this back-slide and I'll become a failure statistic..."
I'm surprised by your use of the term "skeptical," and it's taken me a moment to consider why skepticism might be a response to EFT. I suppose EFT does seem a bit hocus-pocus, founded as it is on theories not accepted by western medicine. EFT's chief proponents don't know specifically how it works, though a couple of theories are out there. It certainly works for me.
I can recommend all kinds of resources. Be aware that EFT's biggest proponents are making money by marketing books, videos, and seminars. You will encounter some hype as you click around.
The founder of the technique, Gary Craig, has an informative and hype-free video, and it's a great starting point. Other videos will line up there on the right, and there are tons of basic how-to tutorials.
Nick and Jessica Ortner, who made the documentary "The Tapping Solution", offer tons of free videos, ebooks and audio interviews (you have to sign up, and you WILL get lots of emails from them, but they're good). The Tapping Solution.
I'll be interested in your further thoughts if you decide to pursue the technique. One thing's for sure: it can't hurt.
(no subject)
20/12/11 12:41 (UTC)(You may have shared this before, I realize, but it seems to pre-date my reading of your journal and a cursory search didn't turn it up. *g*)
All and all, it all sounds very positive - you're going to have setbacks, they're inevitable, etc., but this is a setback that's not out of hand, you caught it, and you can recover (are recovering) from it. Excellent!
(no subject)
20/12/11 20:38 (UTC)I encountered EFT years ago--can't remember exactly where. I was studying hypnotherapy and NLP. Psychology-based therapies were beginning to recognize that maybe the so-called "subconscious mind" really was the body itself, and new somatic therapies were popping up all over the place--Rapid Eye Therapy, BodyTalk, Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, Thought-Field Therapy--which seemed to do the impossible: relieve PTSD, depression, and mood disorders without drugs.
EFT, because its founder Gary Craig insisted on giving it away for free, has taken off and developed robustly the way most open-source systems do. It works, it's free, it's easy to learn, and thousands of healers, therapists and entrepreneurs are contributing to the knowledge base.
I'll cut-and-paste from my comment to
The founder of the technique, Gary Craig, has an informative and hype-free video, and it's a great starting point. Other videos will line up there on the right, and there are tons of basic how-to tutorials.
Nick and Jessica Ortner, who made the documentary "The Tapping Solution", offer tons of free videos, ebooks and audio interviews (you have to sign up, and you WILL get lots of emails from them, but they're good). The Tapping Solution.
Let me know if you explore further!
(no subject)
23/12/11 14:35 (UTC)(no subject)
21/12/11 08:19 (UTC)It's interesting about your the change in your goal weight. 80 or 100 pounds are both so far away from the start weight (and comparatively close to each other) that it'd be hard to visualize the difference in how you'd look at one weight vs the other. But I wonder... if you were basing the initial goal off of how you looked when you used to be 100 pounds lighter than your start weight, I wouldn't be surprised if you ended up reaching about the same size somewhere between now and the 80-pound goal. I would imagine that 100-pounds-from-your-start-weight ago, you had less muscle mass and a higher % body fat than you do now. At 80-pounds-from-your-start-weight ago you might have had 20ish pounds of fat to lose, but that doesn't translate at all into meaning that there'd be 20 more pounds to lose when you hit your 80 pound goal now. Your body composition is probably in such a different place than the body composition that your initial goals were based on.
Getting back on track, knowing that you have the ability to get yourself back on track, and discovering that getting yourself back on track is not the huge undertaking that you thought it might be... seems to me these are all made of win!
(no subject)
21/12/11 19:58 (UTC)Defining a diet goal was surprisingly tricky. A hundred pounds (besides being a lovely round number) represented my weight at 18--adult height, pre-diet-roller-coaster. (To put numbers to this discussion, I started at 255 and was aiming for 155. I'm 5'10.)
But 155 was almost 40 years ago. As you say, what I'm after is a size, rather than a weight.
I have another reference-point that reflects your comments about BMI: about 20 years ago I got down to 175 with a body fat ratio (measured electronically) of 19%, and I wore [what was then] a size 10. I'm very heavy for my size. My doctor says that for best hormonal health in post-menopause, I should aim for a little higher body fat now.
So, in short, yes to all you've said here. I don't have the inclination to work out like a 35-year-old anymore, so 175 (which would be that 80-lb loss I've been aiming for) would probably put me at a slightly larger size and a BMI closer to 22%.
And that would be about perfect.
Oh, and I did a careful analysis this morning of my Hacker's Diet trendline, and my actual drift upward in the last three months has been only 2.5 lbs. So yay for the reality of numbers!