I ate so much today, it's like worrying me. Like oh please get control, lady. Let's see....I had a skinny peppermint mocha, skinny vanilla latte, sugar free froyo with cacao nibs and blueberry jam, a peppermint bark clif bar, a sesame rice red bean japanese dessert, and a cocoa "cheese cake" japanese dessert. Soooooo...yeah, I worry me.
This seems like a good time to make my post for @zerocarb about gaining all my weight back.
I was 24 or so when I lost weight the last time (I am 32 now). I was tracking calories on MyFitnessPal and exercising regularly. Primarily I was running, usually for 6 miles at a time. I was doing 90 minutes of cardio 5-7 days a week. I was routinely lightheaded upon standing and my gym clothes smelled like ammonia, which I read is the smell of muscle being burned. But I felt great and I loved going to the gym.
I don't fully remember how I stopped exercising or eating well, but I remember some details, with one detail standing out the most. My boyfriend at the time and I ate garbage food on occasion and sometimes tracking it felt shitty, so one day I didn't, not realizing I hadn't logged in at all that day so I was messing up a streak of around 170 days. I didn't track again after that and I was too afraid to weigh myself, so I didn't. I figured I'd fucked up and would gain all the weight back so I ensured that I did.
You won't necessarily feel pretty after you lose weight. I felt lanky, awkward, goofy, ugly. I never knew how to dress. I didn't know how to style my hair. I thought I'd love what I saw. I thought others would love what they saw, my boyfriend included, but they didn't. I needed too much attention and I didn't get it.
Routines can be dangerous because breaking them can feel like the end of the world. It ruined me to lose my streak. This happened to one of my best friends a few years ago too. He lost 80 pounds and gained it all back after losing his tracking streak.
Exercise is dangerous to rely upon, because sometimes life gets in the way, so if your food is effed up, you're screwed without that cushion.
It is so easy to gain weight, but incredibly difficult and time consuming to lose it.
I have a tendency toward self-sabotage. Running from reality through not weighing myself fed that tendency. I need to weight myself and be open with myself so I won't spiral.
Body acceptance is such an important movement. I think the biggest lesson I learned from gaining all my weight back was that I may not ever lose weight and keep it off. Gaining the weight back kept me from even trying to lose weight again until this year, which means that for 8 years I was just working on getting over that failure. I stopped dieting. I ate what I wanted, when I wanted, and I didn't weigh myself. I developed a healthier relationship with food and I learned to love myself. My body found a happy balance at 205 pounds. I was healthy medically; I ate well and had favorable blood tests.
I learned that, even when it feels easy, things can suddenly slip back into impossible again without warning. Dieting is so much more than making a series of good choices, it is fighting against everything your mind wants you to do. And sometimes your mind wins. Sometimes you relapse. And, like with any addiction, the right mindset about setbacks is the most important thing. You will relapse. That's okay. Do everything you can to get back on track.
And that's what I'm trying to do now. I'm working on figuring it out without being too hard on myself. I need to cut all sweet products for sure, so I'm going to be thinking about how to best tackle that in the coming days. Everything is okay. I won't gain the weight back. But if I do, that's okay too. That's what I learned.
