Musings on weight gain triggers, and keeping weight loss going long-term

jaymary1's blog about a friend's granddaughter has led me to thinking about certain things that have been known to trigger weight gain for me. The psychology of it all is so...uncertain, I suppose. I wonder if us fatties in general have certain psychological traits in common?

All I can tell you is, that if someone had said to me 'You'll never fit into any of our wedding dresses, dear, you're far too large', no matter how well-meaning (or correct!) they may have been, I would have been devastated. And I'd have drowned that devastation under a mountain of crisps and chocolate and cake. In other words, it would in no way have been the kick up the derriere I needed to lose weight in order to perhaps fit into a wedding dress, it would have had the complete opposite effect.

Losing weight is such a personal journey, and we all come to it in our own time and in our own way. It has to be the right time for each of us - and it has to be our decision. That's very much my experience of it, anyway.

For over a year, I have been messing around, more often off a diet than on one. The weight has gone up - presently I'm three stone or so heavier than I was when I completely lost the plot after the awful plateau and gave up altogether, though I have been up and down within that period of time. I've been anywhere from 17 stone something to closing in on 20 stone, if not just above it (I possibly was two weeks ago, we shall see how much I've lost this week when I weigh in on Tuesday). But I've never had that impetus, that burning urge to get on and lose weight that I had at the outset.

Until something reached out and grabbed my attention. It seemed too simple, too easy, to be true, but on the face of it it has worked for other people. Interested, I gave it a try. Whether I lose lots of weight following the 1-Day Diet or not, I have at least finally been able to string together almost two weeks of following a plan.

So many of us have hit a plateau, lost lots of weight and just stuck. Some of it is about being at a weight where we are happy: we look normal, we can shop in normal people shops instead of shops for fatties; we move more easily, breathe more easily. Some of it is about the boredom and frustration that entails when you realise you have spent eighteen months to two years slogging away to get to this point, and there is still a long way to go, the weight loss has slowed right down or stopped altogether and it just isn't easy to carry on any more.

There's a feeling of resentment that you can't eat what you want to in the quantities you want to. Okay, ProPoints is supposed to mean you CAN do that, but even the restriction of pointing and tracking and having to be reasonably sensible becomes irksome. One day off track can be planned for, and when your head is in the right place having a blow out can actually be good for you: in point of fact, I used to advocate that very thing! Point is, if your head ISN'T in the right place, getting back to it the next day can seem like more trouble than it is worth.

You start thinking that another day or two won't hurt. Taking a little time off to relax and enjoy where you're at won't do any damage. Problem is, it's never just a little time. No matter how legitimate the reason, you fall off the wagon for longer than a week, say, you're pretty much stuffed. Good habits disappear, and before you know it you've regained a big chunk of what you'd sweated blood to lose.

This is where mixing it up becomes important. I am at the point now where my frustration with WW is such that I prefer to try something different. Perhaps if I'd tried something different a year or so ago, I'd be closing in on goal now, not looking at seven stone to lose. Then again, I wasn't in the right frame of mind to keep on losing, because I tried other things! I bought in to the hypnosis recordings, the think yourself slimmer hype, I tried SW, I tracked via calorie counting sites.

I couldn't sustain any of these alternatives, no more than I could continue to follow WW. I'd lost it, lost the drive to lose and continue losing. It had just...gone.

I'd been in the zone for so long, never doubting that I could get to goal. I was seen by some as being very likely to get to goal, I had the right mindset, I was psychologically ready to lose the excess weight and I was doing the right things to get to goal. Losing that spark, that drive, that headspace, was a huge shock.

If there were a magic bullet, a way to keep that weight loss magic, an easy way, wouldn't it be wonderful? That is the secret, I think, for those of us with many stones to lose.

While I appreciate the efforts WW has made to rejig ProPoints, there's something about it that for me just plain does not work. What, I don't know. I can't analyse that sufficiently. Yes, it works for lots of you. Congratulations. However, I lost most of my weight on the previous plan. I've actually never followed a WW plan that worked less well for me than ProPoints! What is with that, anyway?

I suspect that the secret to the 1-Day Diet lies in that it is very much like having the ability to Wendy. (If you are new to the concept, you eat less one day and more the next - you could carry points over to the next day, you see, or later in the week, whereas now you would have to do that with your weeklies). Time was, if you fancied a treat, you either saved for it or you splurged and then made up for it over the next few days. Because you could only splurge or save 12 old points, you were less likely to over-indulge, and naughty treats were just that, treats.

ProPoints doesn't work like that, to me. It encourages the daily consumption of treats, rather than teaching you to treat them as occasional things. You have X number of daily points that you MUST eat, and the weeklies are hived off for you out of the total amount of points you have for the week. I dislike this. I can't see it in the same light as before - I used to think it was much more flexible, but actually I think it isn't, in a way.

I can't undereat one day and have more the next; I can only have my usual dailies, which I must eat and use weeklies if I choose. 49 weeklies equals 7 extra dailies or save them for one big splurge or have more one day than another. I think that gives less sensible flexibility and encourages over-consumption of cr@p.

The idea of fruit being free is another bad thing. If you have two bananas, an apple and an orange and some grapes, you're talking about 450 calories or thereabouts - roughly 11 ProPoints if you were accounting for them, assuming a basic value of 40 cals per PP. Do that every day and you've eaten an extra 3,150 calories - that's almost enough to gain a pound, or prevent loss of a pound.

When I had to count points for fruit I'd have one, at most two, pieces a day. I ate far more vegetables and salad stuff instead. Fruit leads to insulin spikes, it's a source of concentrated sugar and your body responds just as it would to any other form of sugar. Glycaemic index based diets probably work because they balance sugar intake and insulin response; Atkins and South Beach do it by reducing carbs right down, with Atkins banning all fruit initially and discouraging high intake later on.

Anyway. Just some thoughts about various things that have been wandering around my brain for the last few months!

Hello, Blog, how have you been? Best get caught up, eh?

Well! Where to begin, where to begin....

I suppose, given that this is primarily a blog about my weight loss, I should start there.

Haven't weighed myself in months. This time last year, I'd gone up from the low 16s to the low 18s and was wandering up and down between 17 stone 12 and 18 stone 4. I did indeed come down with the lurgy after my last post and was sick for almost a month. Actually last year was pretty grim as it started with flu and ended with bronchitis in late November (which I had again in March of this year!) Anyway, while I was sick I didn't bother with pointing and tracking at all, and just kind of slid out of the habit. And so the weight went on. And went on. And went on.

At one point I saw 19 stone 10 on the scales. I got it back to the high 18s but then wobbled up and down past 19 stone.

In August last year, I decided enough was enough and started exercising my ass off again. I was out walking every day, anywhere from 3 miles to 7 or 8 miles, depending on how much time I had and how I was feeling.  I did an 11 km walk in early September in a little over two and a quarter hours, which I was very pleased with, especially as it was in Heidelberg and took us up and down some hills.

And then, on September 17 last year, my husband had a stroke. It was sudden and out of the blue and very frightening, but he's still here and pretty much back to normal. There's some residual difficulty with movement on the left side but that is getting better all the time; he's still having therapy four times a week and that helps, though he does grumble about it and at times can't see the point in it as it often leaves him feeling sore. He's back at work full time after four months off and a phased return over two and a half months and looking forward to retiring in August.

Anyway, he was in a local hospital for two and a half weeks immediately afterwards, and then spent another six weeks in a rehab clinic a half-hour drive away. Nursing levels on hospital wards at charity-funded hospitals in Germany are on a par with NHS wards in the UK, it appears, so I was spending ten to twelve hours a day, every day, at the hospital with him. I took on the bulk of his personal care and made sure he ate and drank enough besides. I ate a lot of canteen food - salads some days, sandwiches on others, occasionally a cooked dinner at lunchtime if I fancied something on the menu and got down there in time. There was chocolate from the shop or a vending machine, or a cake in mid-afternoon some days if I was flagging; often it was an excuse to get away from the ward for even five minutes.

The rehab clinic was much different in some ways. The food was very good, similar to the hospital though the salads weren't as good (who'd have thought it!). The problem really was the cakes. Oh my word, the cakes. Lots of cakes, different cakes, fantastic cakes. I had cake most afternoons, in fact. Sometimes I would have a nice big dinner and then have a cake at tea time with my husband. The food on the ward wasn't so good...German hospital food is grand if you're used to how Germans eat, but if you don't enjoy cold meat and hard rolls for breakfast and tea and oddly sauced stews or unidentifiable lumps of meat with funny kinds of pasta or mashed potato, you're out of luck. So there was a fair amount of 'let's go to the café and share a pizza or grab a couple of pretzels and a cake'.

Before he went into hospital, my last recorded weight was 18 stone 4. I saw 19 stone 10 when he came home. As I say, I haven't really weighed myself much since then (I'd been 19 stone 10 earlier in the year, too!)

What I can say is that I have gone up two dress sizes if not quite three. I've not been exercising and I haven't been following WW in ages. I had a brief flirtation with Slimming World last year but that only lasted two or three weeks. It was a faff, really, and I hate faffing with anything.

So! Why am I blogging about weight loss again? Well, I'm not following WW or SW, but I have for the past week been following Jennifer Jolan's 1 Day Diet. For those who do not know of it, it's a more extreme form of intermittent fasting (you've likely heard of 5:2 and so on) which involves no food on alternate days. Instead, you drink seven to nine protein waters over the course of the day, 90 minutes to 150 minutes apart. You add half a scoop of protein powder to ten ounces or so of water (450 mls or so) and drink it. That's it. No coffee, no diet Coke or other diet drinks. If you get thirsty between PWs, you can drink black tea or green tea sweetened with a little Stevia if you wish. No caffeine, though.

It's reckoned that you can drop twenty to thirty-five pounds in the first month, depending on how much weight you have to lose. It's fast, it's easy, and drinking the PWs is meant to retain lean muscle tissue while you lose fat. On the days when you don't drink the PWs, you eat whatever you like, though Jolan suggests that you eat sensibly. If you want chocolate or chips or burgers, eat them, just not every food day and not to excess. Moderation is key. You don't have to count calories, follow a particular weight loss plan in conjunction with the PWs, or exercise, but you will likely lose a little more if you do.

Does it work? Well, it will be a week tomorrow. This is my fourth day of PWs, having started on Monday, and I can see a difference in the appearance of my tummy already, and feel a definite difference in the tightness of my snuggest pair of jeans. I decided that weighing myself at this point would do nothing but make me miserable, so I am going by how my clothes fit. My aim is to get back into my US 16s at the moment. As I couldn't fit comfortably into my US 20 jeans after Christmas, that's some way off. Or is it? *g* We shall see. I have two pairs of Capri pants that I want to be able to wear when the weather gets really hot. They are both German size 50s. I am currently wearing a pair of German size 52 jeans which are the snug pair, and have a couple of pairs of UK 24s which are too big but don't quite fall off me without a belt. Or didn't, that's changing over the course of the week. I can almost fasten one pair of the Capris; the other pair don't even meet across my tummy or go all the way over my bum, so as you can see the range in size even across one size varies wildly. I reckon the bigger of the two should fit by the end of the month, pretty comfortably, if not before then. When I can get into the smaller of the two, I shall be quite delighted.

Hopefully both pairs will be too big for me by the end of August and I will be wearing my smallest clothes again, as I have lots of warm weather tops and shorter pants (though no short shorts as I still hated my legs). You see, we'll be moving to Florida then. Permanently. I'm about halfway through the US Visa application process; almost ready to move on to part two. I had my medical on Thursday and the vaccinations I was missing on Friday (which involved lots of Valium and Emla cream and co-operation from nursing staff at the clinic in Frankfurt and my doctor's surgery. I am very lucky that both are sympathetic to those of us with phobias).

In the meantime, I have a house and garage full of stuff to go through. The movers will pack everything, but it all needs going through and stuff we don't need or want needs getting rid of. Husband is talking about hiring a trailer and hauling off the junk to the tip, which will be a huge help. I need to take photos of the stuff in the attic and basement as it is not all ours and send those along. Lots to be done, but it will get done. It has to, now!

I think that that gets us just about up to date. I may decide to weigh myself in the morning, I don't know. I think I'd rather wait until I am back in my smallest clothes as then the news is likely to be better than it is at the moment! Mostly though the scales have done nothing other than play with my head since August 2011.