I really was going great guns for a couple of years there. Took off over a hundred pounds, got a lot more mobile, a lot less bothered by pain, rediscovered the joy of dancing--and the ability to dance for nearly an hour without stopping ... So what the hell happened? And what am I doing differently?
Well, what I realized happened in hindsight was that I didn't have the right kind of support. Sure I was blogging about my weight loss program like crazy--but it was lone-ranger blogging, and almost despite my best intentions I got overly invested in being the Healthy Weight Loss Hero. It became challenging to my pride to talk, in this very public medium, about the troubles I was starting to have--not only with food, but with other areas of my life, some of which I will still refrain from going into in detail here because of matters of privacy.
What I needed--and what I was seriously lacking--was a confidential, even anonymous support venue where it was okay for me to just let down, be a mess, and vent about all sorts of things that were deeply upsetting me, both on the weight loss front and in other areas of my life. I had started off my previous weight loss adventure with something of the sort--a weight management program through my HMO. But it was a finite-duration program, and then finances forced me to drop the HMO, and that was the end of that. (Yes, as I think I mentioned earlier, financial/employment insecurity was another of the issues that began to drag me down.)
So now I was on my own with the weight thing, and everything was looking good, but two landmines started to mess with things. One was that, as I got closer to my goal weight, I began to hit the Dreaded Plateau. This is where a person doing weight loss reaches an equilibrium between their calories in via food and calories out via activity level. There was actually nothing wrong, at least on paper, with the quantity and quality of food in--in fact, cutting it much would not have been healthy. But I was running headlong at last into the ever-neglected exercise part of the picture. Yes, I could dance all night--but I only did it one night a week. Not enough.
The other landmine that got me was more insidious. It was my lizard-brain, which I had once boasted so egotistically of having tamed, sneaking up on me and almost literally biting me in the ass. See this article by James Thornton for the most succinct explanation I have yet found of the triune brain model of human consciousness and the lizard brain's role in it. The superfast capsule: while we humans have our vaunted neocortex in which we reason, plan, and set goals, it exists side by side with less rational brain structures that are the seat of emotions (the limbic system, the so-called dog brain), and of basic "primitive" survival instincts (the lizard brain). I like to say that the lizard brain is in charge of the Four Fs: fighting, feeding, flight, and ... let's call it fornication.
I love the following paragraph from Thornton's article so much I'm going to quote it here:
Have you ever wondered why you reach for that pile of hot greasy fries while you tell yourself you are on a diet? The answer is that you have three brains, and the older brains were wired to put on weight long ago when food was scarce. Your old brains are not easily controlled by your fancy new brain hardware that reads diet books."
I had believed I had mastered my lizard brain in the area of weight management through the strength of my commitment to a new way of life. Unfortunately, I was in denial about the holes in my commitment--such as my never having gotten the exercise part of the project on a firm footing, and having lost a strong, unconditionally accepting support system, as opposed to one in which I had ego-investment in looking like I had my act together. And then I started having life troubles... disruptions to job, finances, living situation ... and without the right kind of support, my resolve began to crumble, and the lizard slithered out of its cage going "danger danger eat like crazy" ... and it only took a year for me to completely undo all the progress I had made.
The resulting Slough of Despond was seriously Not Pretty. In fact, I can only blog about it objectively now, having put the worst of it some three to six months behind me. But I did climb out of it, and part of how I did it was by finding a community that offered the right kind of help--the confidentiality/anonymity, the specialization around weight management issues, the practical tools, the unconditional acceptance, the optimum mix of tough love and unabashed cheering section. It happens to be SparkPeople.com -- and no, I'm not going to tell you my username on there. But I do want to let you all know that it exists, and that it is no-cost--which means it does have a bunch of ads that can admittedly get a bit annoying; but the resources it offers, and the huge and active community in its forums, are worth braving a few obnoxious ads.
So--I have returned, a humbler and hopefully wiser person, to this project of taking care of my health through good nutrition and sensible weight management. I still have a long way to go--again the exercise part of the program is lagging, but I am taking baby steps in that direction, so to speak. Mainly I'm making sure I am asking for help, taking advantage of the fact that I now have a safe online space where I can let down when I'm feeling like a screaming mess, without fear that it is somehow going to be held against me. Because those are the moments that are going to torpedo my precious weight management plans and any other plans I have going for getting my life back together.
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