squealcat wrote:My goal continues to be to get into the 180's
I listened to a YouTube today of Jen Howk. It was just what I needed to hear. I need to really work on my environment more and embrace wet starches (oats, potatoes, grains ) and eat to feel good. I must also realize that this is a slow way to lose weight and not to get impatient. That is my downfall. I want to be done with this weight loss thing and make it go faster. Where has it gotten me???? Nowhere ! I am in the same place I was in two years ago ! I must accept slow
Ahh, Squealcat, I
SO-O-O-O get this! I don’t know how many times I was up and down out of the 170s and 180s and 190s! And I really wanted to be done with the whole weight loss thing too.
But what finally worked for me was figuring out that I was never done. That isn’t a bad thing. I also listened to a lot of Jen Howk and a lot of Doug Lisle. The idea of structuring your environment, very important. The idea of "channel factors" (making the desired behavior easy and the undesired behavior hard) as a part of structuring the environment. Jen's "potted plant" analogy (structure your environment to best suit your personality, like giving a potted plant its best possible growing conditions). And Dr. Doug's teaching that weight is simply a matter of equilibrium between food and body.
So if you lose weight and go back to your former way eating, you gain the weight right back. Yep, been there, done that, over and over. Another maxim of Drs. Jen and Doug: only make those changes that you can live with permanently. Translation: doing something drastic to crash off 20 pounds just leads to more frustration, and you end up right back where you started.
If you would have told me 5 years ago that I would be eating pretty much MWL-style, for good, I would have run screaming. But that’s how it worked out, and honestly, it just feels right. That may not be how it ends up for you. The thing is, it really helps to start thinking in terms of what you can live with, more or less permanently. Make a few of those changes and see what happens. Follow the MWL guidelines. Get yourself out of the Pleasure Trap for a good 3 months. Then see where you are.
Slow is OK. There’s not much difference, in terms of total time, between going fast 10 times and still not getting there, and going slowly. The tortoise approach works better in the long run. Doug Lisle says tortoises also need to be very nearsighted, just concentrating on what’s in front of their noses and never looking too far ahead. Get absorbed in the process, let the results take care of themselves.
Goose