A quick blurb on me- I’m a clinically obese 36 year old male who has been obese for the last 13 years or so and I’m horribly addicted to food. Currently I weigh 316 pounds and I’ve started my last diet ever at 335—I say my last diet because I’m treating it as a permanent lifestyle change. Since the 25th of March I’ve lost 19 pounds, which isn’t that big of a deal considering how many times I’ve lost that amount. In 2017 I lost 50 pounds in 4 months and then gained it all back when my Dad died in October of that year, so losing just this amount wouldn’t make me feel like I had finally had it normally. This time though, my mindset has been completely different and I feel I’m ready to lose it for good.
Over my life I’ve read so many nutrition books and studied the science of diet so much that I could almost be a nutritionist. I can’t tell you how incredibly terrible it feels to know how to lose weight, but just can’t seem to muster the willpower to break through the addiction. This was mostly because of the way I perceived dieting and the mindset I had around it. I felt like in order to have accomplished anything I needed to lose quickly so that I could make myself assured this was the time I would really shed the weight—I was focused on fast weight loss by any means necessary. I would go as hard as I could on the diet, cutting everything out overnight, and would white knuckle my way to success. Inevitably life would happen, something would come along and derail me and I would just get tired of eating. I would binge, feel terrible, and then “start again Monday”.
There have been a lot of “start again Mondays”.
I had a breakthrough when I started on that March 25th Monday and then on Wednesday ate 7 pieces of pizza. Normally, this would be it for the diet—I would start over again on Monday after putting myself through horrible guilt and binge from Wed-Sun with the idea that this would be the last time I would eat these foods.
Instead this time I said, “You know what, no. I will not start over again, because I haven’t stopped.” I had recently begun listening to Half Size Me and the individual that does the podcast advocates weight loss from the stance of maintenance. I’d never thought of losing weight in that way before, this isn’t something you do until you’ve lost the weight and suddenly you did it and can go back to normal. This is a lifelong change, so it has to be one built on a slow and strong foundation. How fast you lose weight doesn’t matter, just that the changes you make can lead to permanent changes to your behavior. How can you do that if you are always starting over? How can you ever change your relationship with food if every time you fail you give up?
So there is my big revelation: just start, or just start again. If you fail, just get back up again. Don’t make it something where you wait until the next Monday to do so, make your next snack your chance to start again. For the longest time I saw that failure as the sign that I couldn’t do that, that I was meant to be fat, instead of learning from the failure and making small changes. Over the last few weeks I’ve slowly changed the way I look at food and I feel like I’m finally going to do this. It isn’t because I’ve lost a tremendous amount of weight, but because my habits are changing and it doesn’t feel like I’m barely hanging on. Sure, there have been hard moments, but they were smaller choices in a larger day. I feel the freedom to fail, because I know that failure won’t be the end, and that freedom to fail allows me to really make sustainable changes.
I see people celebrating small victories all the time here, and you absolutely should, because weight loss is 100% about those small victories adding up to one larger one. Your diet isn’t in that one binge meal, it is in the 100s of other times you went to a vending machine and choose the lean beef jerky over that large bag of chips. It is in that time that you DID go to McDonalds, but instead of 10 nuggets, a large fry, an apple pie, and a large soda, you get a small fry, a 4 piece nugget, and a diet soda instead of a regular. Yes, you went to McDonalds, but you made a healthier choice than you’ve have before. It is those small choices that define a lifestyle change and eventually lead to real, sustainable weight loss.
Feel free to make mistakes. Live your life in a place where every time you make a choice is a new chance to make the right choice, instead of the last chance to make the right choice. If you can do this over and over you’ll find you’ve changed from a person who is controlled by food to a person who controls their food.
I’m not all the way there yet, and that is ok, because I’ve started to change the way I think and that is the biggest victory I can imagine.
Have a wonderful day everyone!
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