Do you ever ask yourself what you're losing in multiple choice format? I'm not going to lie, I do. The optional answers might be:
a) my mind
b) weight
c) bad habits
d) my sedentary moments
e) my motivation
Ally and I have been talking a lot about motivation lately. We live in a culture that needs a quick turnaround. Without fast results, motivation starts to slip. But is that right? And are we missing the point to think that way?
Losing weight requires so much change.
1)You have to change your relationship with food. Yes, your RELATIONSHIP with food, because it is so easy to make it about everything but nutrition. (Emotional eating, social eating, need I go on?) And you have to learn to nourish yourself with food. (Not letting yourself get to that overwhelming point of hunger so you have more control over your eating, choosing foods daily that give you energy, etc.) That’s a constant education. Yeah, you can glimpse the USDA recommended food plate, or you can grab guidelines from a diet plan, but it’s a constant learning curve that requires you to find new recipes and cooking methods so you don’t get bored. And, let's face it, that takes major effort. Not every recipe you try will be wonderful or even edible. You just have to keep going and find as many as you can so you have a ton of great choices.
2)And then there’s exercise. That’s tough when you’re out of shape, but it doesn’t get easier if you keep avoiding it. You just have to start and stick with it until you get better then until you’re actually in shape then keep yourself fit.
3)Ugh. The psychology of losing weight. You have to be ok with a really hard truth: losing weight and keeping it off requires a continuous effort, for life. You don’t arrive at a destination and *BAM* it’s over, you can stop all your effort and relax. That’s hard to deal with. That’s why diets fail so often – you can’t stop the diet or you lose your results. And that’s why we’re not dieting, we’re editing our lifestyles.
4) Stress management. This is so important. If we don't learn to pull our own exhaust valve we will be in terrible shape QUICK! If your mind isn't right, it's hard for you to make the best decisions for yourself, but it's easy to want to find relief in dark places. There ain't no relief on the end of a fork, y'all!
We can just get so down. And that’s understandable, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to get results as if it should be easy. (Uhhh...see list above, not so easy.) But maybe the results we should be focused on aren’t going to be provided on our scale. Maybe there is our success managing those lifestyle components listed above. Because if we could just improve the way we live, our bodies would adapt to those healthy choices and change for the better. But we don't give ourselves credit for those really big accomplishments, do we? We could celebrate those incredible healthy meals we've perfected! It's absolutely amazing to commit to working out! There are a million solid choices we make that go unnoticed, but let that scale go unchanged a couple weeks in a row and we're in a tailspin, aren't we?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the scale is not important at all. I’m just saying it’s not the only concern. It’s a tool for making sure you’re doing the right thing, but it isn’t the only tool. You can also:
1)Measure your body fat and gauge how much muscle you’ve built (BIA) – that’s a good indicator. You can know you’re building muscle and losing fat, which improves your metabolism and causes you to burn more calories on top of making you stronger and leaner.
2)You can actually take your own measurements to show how your body is changing as you progress. Sometimes you lose inches even when the scale doesn’t budge.
3)And you can look at your workouts. Measure how long it takes you to walk a mile, look at that log and see how much faster you’re getting as time goes by.
**There are a million signs you’re getting healthier, it’s not all written in the number on the scale!** And the main indicator is how you live. How do you eat? How do you strengthen your body? How do you enjoy life? That all directly contributes to your QUALITY of life, yet we are so much more interested in the QUANTITY of fat we're carrying around instead.
So what I’m saying is, don’t get caught up. Bad habits, bad choices, that’s what got us here to begin with. Until we can deal with ourselves and find a way to create better habits we don’t stand a chance of being different people let alone being thinner long-term. So deal with the things that make you want to quit or overeat or sabotage your best self. Find out what you’re thinking during those times and try to work through it. That's where the real issues are anyway.
And here’s the biggie: make goals that have nothing to do with a scale. If you can work through building good habits and keep growing stronger and healthier then you’ll show it by what you do off the scale. So make a few goals that are just about how you can enjoy your body/mind and take steps to improve it.
I’m taking my own advice. This weekend, Ally and I decided to make three nonscale goals each. Mine are:
1) Get outside and move it. Whether I rent a canoe or hike or just go for a long walk, it’s going to be outdoors, weather permitting. I’ve been in gyms all week.
2) Look up two healthy recipes. It’s so easy to get in a food rut and get burned out. I’m going to try to expand my recipe collection over the next few days and avoid that.
3) Clean my room, at least try to start organizing it better. When I have a messy space, it stresses me out. Got to control stress or it will have nasty effects, right?
So let’s all take pride in how we live and remember that’s what counts. When we get our lifestyle in order and take care of ourselves a lot of good things start happening!
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Keeping The Faith (Erin)
Guess what I want to talk about? Frustrations. Yep, I'm frustrated. My focus is off lately. It's like I'm doing the right things, but I'm bitter about how slow the process is. Sad thought, isn't it?
There are things that are very superficially motivating when you start to lose weight. For me, the list includes:
**Being able to kick Lane Bryant to the curb and shop in the stores I lust after!
**Speaking of, I wish I could hit Forever 21 for a cheap Saturday outfit.
**Ok, and...I would adore buying the entire business casual section of The Limited.
**While I'm at it, can I please have a pair of trouser jeans that do not have signs of wear from my thunder thighs?
**Let’s not even TALK about rocking a little black dress...
**Not being paranoid about airplane seats.
**Going on a date without wondering if he is staring at my butt...which is not a good thing right now. ;)
But I know I’m getting ahead of myself. All those things will be great one day, but they’re not the things that keep me hanging on when I want to stop struggling and just walk away. In fact, focusing on those things makes me bitter (as mentioned above).
The thing about weight loss is you can’t focus on results; you have to focus on changing your lifestyle. That’s the only way you have long-term success. You have to create habits you can follow FOR LIFE. And that never leads to a quick fix. It makes you develop all those qualities that are really painful to build up -- like patience and persistence.
So I think the problem with my perspective is that my focus has been on superficial outcomes lately. If I could keep trekking and focus on learning new healthy recipes and finding new ways to manage stress and trying different workouts to shake things up I’d probably be better off all around.
And besides that, focusing on some long-term, far-away goal is depressing. It starts to wear down even the strongest person. We should probably spend more time celebrating the victories we have under our belt when those topics come to mind. Ally reminded me of this today, and I’m very grateful she did.
So here’s a new list, the benefits I’ve seen so far:
**I don’t feel so crappy. Is there any other word for it? I don’t eat myself into a stupor. I don’t eat so much bloating, mind-clouding food anymore. My meals nourish me and give me energy, and I eat often enough to keep cravings at bay.
**I’m more assertive. Part of the battle is dealing with food socially. Everyone wants to go to lunch or bring a piece of chocolate cake to work for you or have dip day. That’s tough. To be successful I’ve had to learn to stand up to that.
**Someone gave me an interesting compliment recently. “Erin, you carry yourself so well now that you’ve started working out. I can’t explain it, you just stand a little taller.” I love it.
**My double chin is receding!
**I can do an entire hour of Zumba now. At first, half an hour was really hard.
**My friendships have changed. We do more active hang out sessions now, which is good for all of us, and we make better restaurant choices. Some restaurants have more readily-available nutrition information. And I’ve just discovered the site eatingrules.com. It’s helpful.
**I’m way less of a couch potato. I used to come home from work and plop down. My roommate and I have nests on our respective ends of the couch. It feels good to run out the door to the gym now. And I don’t mean this as an slight to her, but usually when I come home she’s still in the same spot on the couch as when I left. I think to myself, “That used to me.” It’s amazing how much strength you can build in 40-60 minutes at the gym. I don’t feel like the same person.
**I can outdo my skinny girlfriends. Yep, you heard that right. When we work out I have more strength (from my circuit workouts) and I’m sore less often.
**I have my family thinking about healthy decisions. When I go home for visits, I try out recipes on them and we talk about nutrition when we eat out. It’s really nice to do that and really necessary to build up that kind of support system.
**I don’t have some of the aches and pains that I used to.
**I have more endurance doing even the smallest things.
**There are people around me at the gym or even in the grocery store (amazing how you can bond over buying the same healthy product) who give me great tips. I feel more educated and savvy.
**I recently hiked a trail I couldn’t finish just a few years ago. Guess what? I made it to the top! That was an amazing feeling, and a good reminder that I am changing by incredible leaps and bounds if I’ll just step off the scale long enough to see it.
**I’ve started cooking for friends more often so I can control the nutrition of the meal. It has been really great to have people over and kick back over nice meals. Much more intimate than eating out so much.
I feel so much better at the end of this post than I did at the beginning. It really helps to shift focus from the far-away goals to what is better NOW! I hope if any of you get to a dark place with this adventure of changing lifestyle you will take the time to remind yourself of how far you’ve come.
There are things that are very superficially motivating when you start to lose weight. For me, the list includes:
**Being able to kick Lane Bryant to the curb and shop in the stores I lust after!
**Speaking of, I wish I could hit Forever 21 for a cheap Saturday outfit.
**Ok, and...I would adore buying the entire business casual section of The Limited.
**While I'm at it, can I please have a pair of trouser jeans that do not have signs of wear from my thunder thighs?
**Let’s not even TALK about rocking a little black dress...
**Not being paranoid about airplane seats.
**Going on a date without wondering if he is staring at my butt...which is not a good thing right now. ;)
But I know I’m getting ahead of myself. All those things will be great one day, but they’re not the things that keep me hanging on when I want to stop struggling and just walk away. In fact, focusing on those things makes me bitter (as mentioned above).
The thing about weight loss is you can’t focus on results; you have to focus on changing your lifestyle. That’s the only way you have long-term success. You have to create habits you can follow FOR LIFE. And that never leads to a quick fix. It makes you develop all those qualities that are really painful to build up -- like patience and persistence.
So I think the problem with my perspective is that my focus has been on superficial outcomes lately. If I could keep trekking and focus on learning new healthy recipes and finding new ways to manage stress and trying different workouts to shake things up I’d probably be better off all around.
And besides that, focusing on some long-term, far-away goal is depressing. It starts to wear down even the strongest person. We should probably spend more time celebrating the victories we have under our belt when those topics come to mind. Ally reminded me of this today, and I’m very grateful she did.
So here’s a new list, the benefits I’ve seen so far:
**I don’t feel so crappy. Is there any other word for it? I don’t eat myself into a stupor. I don’t eat so much bloating, mind-clouding food anymore. My meals nourish me and give me energy, and I eat often enough to keep cravings at bay.
**I’m more assertive. Part of the battle is dealing with food socially. Everyone wants to go to lunch or bring a piece of chocolate cake to work for you or have dip day. That’s tough. To be successful I’ve had to learn to stand up to that.
**Someone gave me an interesting compliment recently. “Erin, you carry yourself so well now that you’ve started working out. I can’t explain it, you just stand a little taller.” I love it.
**My double chin is receding!
**I can do an entire hour of Zumba now. At first, half an hour was really hard.
**My friendships have changed. We do more active hang out sessions now, which is good for all of us, and we make better restaurant choices. Some restaurants have more readily-available nutrition information. And I’ve just discovered the site eatingrules.com. It’s helpful.
**I’m way less of a couch potato. I used to come home from work and plop down. My roommate and I have nests on our respective ends of the couch. It feels good to run out the door to the gym now. And I don’t mean this as an slight to her, but usually when I come home she’s still in the same spot on the couch as when I left. I think to myself, “That used to me.” It’s amazing how much strength you can build in 40-60 minutes at the gym. I don’t feel like the same person.
**I can outdo my skinny girlfriends. Yep, you heard that right. When we work out I have more strength (from my circuit workouts) and I’m sore less often.
**I have my family thinking about healthy decisions. When I go home for visits, I try out recipes on them and we talk about nutrition when we eat out. It’s really nice to do that and really necessary to build up that kind of support system.
**I don’t have some of the aches and pains that I used to.
**I have more endurance doing even the smallest things.
**There are people around me at the gym or even in the grocery store (amazing how you can bond over buying the same healthy product) who give me great tips. I feel more educated and savvy.
**I recently hiked a trail I couldn’t finish just a few years ago. Guess what? I made it to the top! That was an amazing feeling, and a good reminder that I am changing by incredible leaps and bounds if I’ll just step off the scale long enough to see it.
**I’ve started cooking for friends more often so I can control the nutrition of the meal. It has been really great to have people over and kick back over nice meals. Much more intimate than eating out so much.
I feel so much better at the end of this post than I did at the beginning. It really helps to shift focus from the far-away goals to what is better NOW! I hope if any of you get to a dark place with this adventure of changing lifestyle you will take the time to remind yourself of how far you’ve come.
Iced White Mochas
Still here. I am horrible at keeping up with a blog, but at least I'm better at keeping up with calorie counting. That's not to say it hasn't been hard, but it's easier than blogging! :D
Erin and I had the amazing priveledge to go to NYC. It's been a favorite of ours since our first visit in 2005. It was such a fun time! If you ever get the chance go see The Lion King. I was floored by how perfectly everything played together. It was beyond spectacular. I also saw Wicked, which as also insane! I loved everything about the plays. Something else wonderful about NYC, the food. :) We went to Lombardi's pizza. Some of the best pizza I've ever had. We went to a little diner, I forget what it was called, but it's been in a couple movies. They had the best french toast and fresh squeezed orange juice! And as you may have guessed, not very many things were waist friendly. Especially not my Starbucks twice a day habit. Ugh! I love iced white mochas! Had waaaay to many of them. I could tell when I got home.
I gained...5 POUNDS! OMG. It was not a fun weigh in day when I got home. But I am proud to say I've lost all of them already. But it made me re-evaluate my weight loss approach. I was very disapointed in myself for gaining, but I also had a blast and tried some amazing food. I don't think I want to have to go on vacation and count every calorie (although next time I will not have as many Starbucks visits). I want to be able to enjoy food and enjoy my time away from the norm of life.
I have a few friends that are also on weight loss journeys. One of them has lost 28 pounds in 29 days! They only eat an average of 500-1000 calories a day, only eating 700 most days. I could not live like that. I could imagine that if I did eat those many calories a day, then decided to treat myself to a cupcake I would gain a pound a bite. I am really proud of the way Erin and I are approaching our weight loss. We are eating enough calories to get all of our nutrients in and I know that for the most part I stay full and satisfied. And if I want to treat myself every now and then, I do.
I get very frustrated sometimes that I haven't lost more. I get very discouraged that I am struggling so much. But this is not an overnight thing, and I've lost that quickly before, and when I started eating normal again I gained back double what I lost. (On Atkins I lost 40 pounds in a month and a half, and gained back 80 by eating one bowl of pasta!) :) Okay it was more than one bowl, but I want to make a change that I am willing to live with forever. No carbs is a no can do for me. 700 calories a day is a no go. But I can eat like I am now forever. Even this week I treated myself to ice cream and still lost weight at the end of the week. And I am talking real ice cream, not the Skinny Cow kind! (although I do love almost anything Skinny Cow!).
Good luck to any of you trying to lose weight. It is hard, but it will be worth it. And do what works for you. Hopefully I'll be back before next month!
--Ally
Erin and I had the amazing priveledge to go to NYC. It's been a favorite of ours since our first visit in 2005. It was such a fun time! If you ever get the chance go see The Lion King. I was floored by how perfectly everything played together. It was beyond spectacular. I also saw Wicked, which as also insane! I loved everything about the plays. Something else wonderful about NYC, the food. :) We went to Lombardi's pizza. Some of the best pizza I've ever had. We went to a little diner, I forget what it was called, but it's been in a couple movies. They had the best french toast and fresh squeezed orange juice! And as you may have guessed, not very many things were waist friendly. Especially not my Starbucks twice a day habit. Ugh! I love iced white mochas! Had waaaay to many of them. I could tell when I got home.
I gained...5 POUNDS! OMG. It was not a fun weigh in day when I got home. But I am proud to say I've lost all of them already. But it made me re-evaluate my weight loss approach. I was very disapointed in myself for gaining, but I also had a blast and tried some amazing food. I don't think I want to have to go on vacation and count every calorie (although next time I will not have as many Starbucks visits). I want to be able to enjoy food and enjoy my time away from the norm of life.
I have a few friends that are also on weight loss journeys. One of them has lost 28 pounds in 29 days! They only eat an average of 500-1000 calories a day, only eating 700 most days. I could not live like that. I could imagine that if I did eat those many calories a day, then decided to treat myself to a cupcake I would gain a pound a bite. I am really proud of the way Erin and I are approaching our weight loss. We are eating enough calories to get all of our nutrients in and I know that for the most part I stay full and satisfied. And if I want to treat myself every now and then, I do.
I get very frustrated sometimes that I haven't lost more. I get very discouraged that I am struggling so much. But this is not an overnight thing, and I've lost that quickly before, and when I started eating normal again I gained back double what I lost. (On Atkins I lost 40 pounds in a month and a half, and gained back 80 by eating one bowl of pasta!) :) Okay it was more than one bowl, but I want to make a change that I am willing to live with forever. No carbs is a no can do for me. 700 calories a day is a no go. But I can eat like I am now forever. Even this week I treated myself to ice cream and still lost weight at the end of the week. And I am talking real ice cream, not the Skinny Cow kind! (although I do love almost anything Skinny Cow!).
Good luck to any of you trying to lose weight. It is hard, but it will be worth it. And do what works for you. Hopefully I'll be back before next month!
--Ally
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