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.

Twerps!

Before going further, I want to clear something up.  This is not the first time I’ve had a “big weight loss” project.  It’s not a brand new discovery that this kind of goal takes a lot of time and investment and is just super hard.  In fact, I’ve generally had at least some kind of project to get or stay healthy and lose weight.  I’ve immersed myself in biking, martial arts, walking, running, and gyms before.  I’ve recorded my food intake in paper and digital diaries for extended periods of time.  Most of the time, over my whole adulthood, there has been at least some kind of “project” running.  I am not a newbie.

I say this in part because it’s important to state at the outset that of course, this is a huge, time-consuming problem, and not an easy one to solve.  If there’s a “new element” this time, it’s in my committing a vastly larger amount of time and effort to the project than I’ve done before — I’m finished with the “all you have to do is this little bit on the treadmill” philosophy. And I’d also like to think that I’ve learned a lot over the years about stuff that works and things that don’t.

But I also say it because it brings up, again, the problem of our “critics.”

If you grew up heavy, you learned a lot about your critics, and also about how thoroughly rotten people can be sometimes.  Little overweight kids are nearly always exposed to the jeers and name-calling and even downright bullying of other kids.  And of course, kids take all that name-calling inside — it informs their self-images.