2 posts tagged “weight loss”

“What are you giving up for Lent?” has become about as meaningful as “What are your New Year’s Resolutions?” I have to be honest: I haven’t given anything up for Lent since I was a kid. I’m considering it, this year. What prompted this? I was repenting my gluttony (seriously - I’ve lost 43 lbs. and gained back 30 - that’s disgusting) and renewing my commitment to good nutrition and fitness (again) and looking for a SparkTeam that might help me figure out why I’d sabotaged myself after such significant success, when I ran across one called 40 Days and 40 Nights (for Lent). Not a member, yet?

What caught my eye was the mention of bread, and how giving it up had once led the team leader to lose a good chunk of weight.

And thinking back on when I first started losing weight, bread was one of the things I cut out cold turkey. I like bread. I especially like bread with butter on it. One piece leads to two. Two leads to a sandwich. With cheese. But I can eliminate bread and not feel too deprived; if I don’t taste it - don’t think about it - I can live without it just fine. I don’t feel particularly “deprived.” I think of it with longing; I’m tempted. But…life goes on. Maybe it would be good to give up bread again.

I remember the first time I “cheated” on the diet (I hate calling it a “diet” because it was really just eating healthy, making better choices, limiting portions) - I think it involved having a piece of pizza. And what is pizza? Yummy stuff - on bread. So pizza’s got to go, too. And fried foods. Popeyes. Because… well, because. Greasy food’s bad for ya.

Now, I realize that the giving up of pleasurable things is supposed to be penance for our sins - and maybe it is - but ultimately, I’m going to reap the rewards, in better health and weight loss. (I think there may be a deeper spiritual message in that, but I’m not sure I’m up to playing connect the dots. Suffice it to say that if penance were truly akin to punishment, I should be forcing myself to eat chocolate - or bread - until it comes out my nostrils…which, tempting as that sounds right now, after having had carrots and Lean Cuisine for lunch, ain’t gonna happen. I’m all out of low-fat chocolate, palm-kernel oil blobs, anyway.)

I like this notion of adding something for Lent. Some of the things I’m thinking of adding:

• Learn to make Simnel Cake and bring two or three to church on Mothering Sunday (not to be confused with Mother’s Day). (Here’s another recipe.)
• Exercise. Regularly. Or don’t eat the Simnel Cake!
• Be brave; get out there and “just do it.” Camping, book signings, volunteering, school visits (if they’ll have me)… Just do it.

So, what are you giving up for Lent? (Yes, you - feel free to add a comment. It’s not like a private golf course where you can’t step on the grass - c’mon in, chat a while.)

It took me a day or two to catch on, but thank you - to those of you who followed my breadcrumbs over to SparkPeople (I get 10 Pavlovian slobber-points for each of you - which takes me that much closer to a cute new graphical trophy I can't eat - yay!! Ridiculous how easily motivated we homo sapiens are.) Here's to meeting all our goals in 2007! It's a great site -- not just for setting and meeting health, fitness, and weight loss goals - but for other goals as well. In fact, I'm about to log on there to enter the goals I stated here, last night. But remember: It's just the first step on the thousand-mile journey. Taking the second, the third, the ten thousandth step is up to you.

I joined SparkPeople in January 2006, all full of my starry-eyed, New Year's resolution clean-slatedness and determination, and promptly forgot all about it.

In September, I stumbled across SparkPeople again. "Oh, yeah, I remember this," I thought. I chuckled over the goals I had set in January, remembering how fresh and full of potential the New Year had seemed, back then. I stepped on the scales. Wow. I weighed just about the same thing I had nine months earlier. (I know that sounds good to you if you're caring for a newborn and working on losing the "baby weight," but I'm 43 and my "baby" is ten years old.) I browsed through some of the other members' pages and saw their "before" and "after" shots. It hit me like a ton of bricks: If I'd done what I'd said I was going to do, back in January, I'd be at my goal weight now. Instead, I'm right where I was...in January. Nothing has changed.

I asked myself right then and there: Self, do you want to be right where you are now, next year, on  your birthday? That was about seven months away. A quick mental calculation told me that was a reasonable length of time in which to meet my weight loss and fitness goals at a safe one to two-pound a week rate.

The answer, of course, was "no." If not now, when? I knew I could do it. Somehow, I knew without a doubt that I could reach all the goals I'd set for myself. "The journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step," Confucious said.

"Just put one foot in front of the other, and keep moving," my mother often said.

Okay, starry-eyed Self, I muttered. Where'd I put those "resolutions" for 2006? Oh, crap...I posted them in public?

I smacked myself, hard. Then I opened up a browser window and Googled myself. Sure enough, there they were, in my 2005 NaNoWriMo blog. (Don't ask me why I keep doing that to myself.) I'd laid everything out with clear intent and specificity, hadn't I? I'd even figured out all the steps necessary to get there. No getting out of this - I'd been careful not to build in loopholes. Damn the legal training...

Anyway, the weight loss was easy, once I stuck that foot out there in front of me and started to move. A few months later - December 2006 - I was thirty pounds lighter. I reviewed the goals I'd set and checked each one off the list with pride. I got to the end of the list...

Quit smoking.

Oh, no I hadn't... yep. I looked at the list again. I had. Why? I whined (in my head). I was doing so well; now, a year later, I didn't even want to quit smoking. But suddenly, I wanted very much to do everything I'd vowed to do at the end of 2005. I'd said I would, I'd said it in public, and by G-d, I would. I  took a deep breath. I set my quit date to...December 29. That'd get me through the holiday stress, I reasoned. And I won't have to think about it for another three weeks. Yeah, there was that. Unfortunately, I ran across this post on committment. It opened with the following quotations:

In reading that, I realized that (a) I wasn't truly committed to quitting, if putting off the quit date - giving myself a chance to "draw back" - gave me such guilty pleasure; and (b) without committment, I was doomed to fail. Might as well just admit defeat. Doooooooomed, I tell you...

Screw that.

See, that's actually one of my biggest fears. I'll quit, but I'll start again. I'll lose the weight, but gain it all back - and then some. So that's just not going to happen. And in determining that I would not fail - no way in Hell - I found the substitute for the rebellion factor that's kept me lighting up over the past three decades. I was really tempted not to mention quitting in public. I was downright sneaky about the whole thing for the first few days. In fact, I only wrote about it in my blog (thus proving that very few people read the darned thing) - it was eleven days before my husband noticed I'd quit, and two full weeks before my father-in-law figured it out. The kids caught on after about four days.

I did enlist and receive the most wonderful support from my Sparkly "March Moms" (a group of moms and dads and kids my son's age - we've been together on a mailing list for almost twelve years, now, since learning we were pregnant and due in March 1996). One of them took me on a virtual tour of the world - on non-smoking flights to destinations, like a gorgeous under-the-sea restaurant or the ICEHOTEL, where smoking would be impossible or disgustingly inappropriate. They quietly congratulated me each day I stayed quit, without once making me feel they'd think less of me or lecture me or preach to me if I didn't. They knew it was that "F*** you!" cig that was the biggest challenge of all to give up - and never once triggered the impulse. I love my March Moms. I love my family, too, but I can't quit smoking for someone else - that whole "If you loved me, you'd..." tactic never worked on me. Mom made damned sure of that, before she let me go out on my first date. I'm sure she had no idea I'd use my inner strength of will as an excuse to hang onto bad habits, but I doubt she'd have weakened my resolve to make quitting smoking easier, in any case.

As of January 1, my quit stats look like this: