Weigh-in day and stoking your motivation

This morning it’s my weekly check-in, which as I mentioned before, I prefer to do in mid-week, just in case there were any unfortunate but temporary eating “mishaps” over the weekend.

Today the news is all good.  My weight is down a pound; my waist is down an inch and a half; chest is also down a bit.  Body fat percent is hard to be clear about because I just got my new meter this week, but it’s a half percent lower than the past few days.  And my blood pressure is holding at some good numbers.

Excellent.

And rare, to have all those numbers lining up in the “just where they should be” category.  It’s often the case that you put in a week or two and nothing much changes.  Which leads to an important discussion: maintaining your motivation for weight loss programs.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there are at least seven psychological factors that one can attend to in order to make a weight loss program work.  These factors have emerged over the years, both as a result of the hard work of people who’ve tried to lose weight, and developed by psychologists who’ve researched weight loss.  (My advisor in grad school, now retired, spent most of her career researching weight loss.)  Maintaining your motivation is among the most important factors.

Motivation can often be defined as “desire,” but really it’s the sum total of your thoughts and emotions about why you want — or need — to lose weight.  Generally, the more powerful your motivation, the more likely  you’ll be to stick out your program, or to start one.  And the more likely you’ll be to tolerate the bad weeks, the weeks when you go off the wagon, when you gain instead of losing weight.

Seven Attitudes for Weight Loss

I’ve mentioned previously that one of the most important ingredients in a weight control program is more often implied than specifically mentioned: the role of psychological factors.  I know that for myself, I have learned that it takes me about four or five specific psychological “tricks” every day to stick to my program.  As I’ve been working on this blog, I’ve come to realize that I’ve never really listed them all in one place before.

I assume that it’s not just me.  It seems likely that for the vast majority of people, the psychological factors are key to sticking with and succeeding at any significant weight control program.

The Time It Takes

Having turned fifty a few years back, what I mostly remember about the event was realizing that fifty is the age after which, if your friends hear you suddenly died of something like a heart attack, they shrug.  Before that, they would have said, “he was so young!” but once you’ve passed the big five-o, not so much.  Especially if they knew you were heavy, and especially especially if they’re thin, because, as we’ve already discussed, thin people just assume you could have lost that weight if you “really wanted to.”  “He should have been like me,” the scrawny ignorant bastards would have thought.  In the nicest, sweetest and most well-meaning way, I knew they would tell themselves that if I keeled, I had it coming.

If for no other reason than to deprive them of that misguided satisfaction and to save them from all that bad karma, I have to do this and do it now.  Of course the real reason is I love what I’m doing and experiencing in life far too much to see it wrecked by health problems.  I was feeling sluggish, blood sugar wasn’t controlling itself as well as it should, and in short, major commitment was needed.

In late January I found an article in the NY Times that inspired me, and I think that helped get things rolling again.  It was on people who make big changes in their weight or body.  The article (“Fitness isn’t an overnight sensation” by Gina Kolata) captured some of what I’ve known about big weight loss projects, mainly that these projects take time.  Time is either your friend or your enemy in this kind of project, so we might as well face that head on.  And there are three very distinct aspects to this “time” issue.

Character and weight loss

Pop quiz: Which person in the picture above has the most “strength of character”?  Answer fast — left or right.

You guessed left, right?  The thin woman.  Why?

One of the obstacles in launching a big weight loss project is the psychological mix of messages we tell ourselves about weight loss.  The simple fact is that it is hard to accomplish significant amounts of weight loss.  The stats show that — most of us fail at it, often time after time after time.  (I’ve been working on it since age 8.)

The other simple fact is that it usually seems like it should be easy — to anyone who hasn’t tried it.  In fact, one of the things that isolates overweight people is that thin people (including your doctors and those perky little 22 year old dietitians they send you to) so often look at you and think, “why don’t they just…” and the implied rest of the sentence is, “be like me.  Do like I do.  I manage my weight just fine.”