Is This a Weight Loss Blog?: Some Thoughts on My Half-Blogiversary

Image via incurable_hippie on Flickr

As of this week, I have officially finished HALF of my year-long experiment in getting my act together! Woo hoo! I haven’t posted because I’ve been hard at work on a series of three “big picture” posts to discuss some of the things I’ve been thinking about in conjunction with this Half-Blogiversary, starting with this one about weight loss.

You could say I am a bit conflicted about weight loss as a blog topic. You could say I have been going through a bit of a Blogdentity Crisis. Over these past six months, I’ve posted a lot about healthy eating and lifestyle change, but much less about weight loss. Everyone can see from my toolbar that I want to lose weight, yet I deliberately avoid posting my weight loss results on any sidebar, link, or cutesy little ticker with a happy bunny bouncing his way down the scale.

Several months ago, I posted about the fact that I wasn’t doing a lot of the traditional weight loss activities because I was afraid of falling into patterns from the past associated with trappings of “Being on a Diet.” All those old activities had led me to diet burnout, weight obsession, and ultimately, weight re-gain. Since starting my blog, I hadn’t been following a certain diet plan, I wasn’t counting calories, I got rid of my bathroom scale, and I wasn’t restricting any foods per se.

In the interest of taking a different and potentially healthier approach, I instead tried to focus on acquiring new and pleasant habits like cooking, learning to run, and lifting weights. Accordingly, I tried to focus my posts mostly on these activities. I was trying to eat healthily and sensibly, in reasonable amounts. You could say I have been trying to eat intuitively (though I had never heard that phrase when this all began).

At the time that I started my blog, I recognized that this strategy might lead to minimal or very slow weight loss. I acknowledged at the time my deep ambivalence about ignoring calorie counting in particular:
“When I served as a therapist on this research study, I counseled my patients that not counting calories is akin to trying to save money for a Mercedes without paying attention to how much anything costs, how much you’re spending, or how much you have in your bank account. In other words: crazy and doomed to fail. I meant it, and I saw plenty of examples that confirmed what the research data show”.

But I was afraid to do things the way I used to do them—even when those things worked—because I know previous weight loss attempts did not stick. There was always a backlash, always an immediate falling back to all of my old habits.

Okay, Miss Smarty-Pants, you might wonder, How has this plan been working out for you?

My second pic in the Dream Jeans. They've moved up about an inch since last month, so that's something

Let’s get down to brass-tacks, weight-loss facts. I do know how much I’ve lost, because I still weigh myself occasionally at the gym. I lost about 3-4 pounds the first month of my blog, and around 4-5 more by the end of January. That’s about a pound a month after the initial weight loss. I gave that some serious thought last month: given that I’d like to lose somewhere around 20 more pounds to be in a healthy BMI (and would ideally like to lose 30 more or so), at that rate of weight loss it would take me 2-3 years to lose all the weight.

When I had this realization, I was torn. I didn’t want to make deadlines for myself that could detract from my focus on positive changes. At the same time, I also didn’t want to wait three years to lose the rest of my weight.

How many times have we heard things like, “Gradual weight-loss that is part of a lifestyle change is the only kind of lasting weight loss,” or “diets don’t work.”? The problem is this: how gradual is gradual? How do we know when a behavior change is habitual? How do we know when we’ve “really” changed? Moderation is a knife’s-edge between indulgence and extreme self-denial. Its meaning is murky, there are no rules, and there is no clear path to get there.

One reason that diet prgorams can be helpful in the short-term (though usually not the long-term) is because they are clear and specific. Yet diets are also extreme, and in their extreme-ness they are unpleasant. Who wants to live a life without a single carb? Is a life devoid of butter what we really want? Diets are all about self-sacrifice. Part of me has been tempted to panic about my modest weight loss; to immediately cut out all carbs so the weight will start flying off again like I know it would. Then I remembered: Oh yeah. I hated dieting, even though I tried to convince myself that it was kind of enjoyable to eat weird things like nothing but egg whites or turkey chili for breakfast. I hated eating barely any fruit.

When dieting, I was not changing any habits, I was temporarily adopting different habits that I planned to ditch the second the extra weight was gone, and then what would happen? I would go back to my old ways. I gained the weight back before. As most of my maintenance blogger friends have said in one way or another, much of the work begins in figuring out how to maintain weight loss. So where did that leave me when I had this realization about my extra-slow weight loss a few weeks ago?

Instead of burning all of my whole-grain bread and bananas in a giant bonfire, I decided in mid-Feburary to kick things up a notch by making one change: I started tracking my calories again. I have been using the “Tap N Track” app on my iPhone, and (with one or two exceptions) I have stayed in the 1200—1600 calorie range. Since starting that, I’ve lost another 3-4 pounds in two weeks. Truthfully, the loss is probably attributable to the magical Trifecta of tracking calories, meal planning, and weight lifting, but the difference is there: my pants have all of a sudden started hanging on me and my body and face are starting to look different to others.

Given my positive results with calorie counting already, it is tempting to say that I should’ve counted calories from the start; that I threw the baby out with the bath water. Yet that’s not really what I think. I think I had to go to the opposite extreme and see if trying to “ignore” weight loss but not ignoring healthy behaviors would work.

Fast forward to nearly half a year later, and my habits have changed. I eat out much, much less. I cook at home, and prepare lunches to bring to work. I eat healthy things for breakfast everyday, like green smoothies, oatmeal, and cottage cheese with fruit. Exercise is an ever-evolving but consistent habit. I meditate more. Who knows if I would have had the energy for all of that if I was focusing my attention on calories?

My point is that I have needed a slow weight loss up until this point to allow time for step-by-step change. In my wisest of minds, I think that I’ve thrived with a more gradual approach. I have had to make decisions coming from a place of what I sincerely I want and need, not because of dieting rules and orthodoxy. It’s been a lesson in choosing, instead of feeling obligated.

Maybe part of the reason “diets don’t work” is because we feel they are imposed on us, and because we lose a sense of our choice and power in the process. On the flip side, though, didn’t Spiderman’s theme go something like “With great power comes great responsibility”? I am trying to walk the tightrope between trying too hard and not trying enough. I’m in the gray area between my old overindulgent habits and my old Extreme Dieter habits. Even though gray areas are uncomfortable because of their uncertainty, I believe this is where I will find peace with my body and my eating habits.