…may make or keep you fat.

Meet Fat Fox.  He’s my daughter’s stuffed animal who has turned my house upside down.  We have arguments over whose turn it is to hang out with Fat Fox.  He’s the man.  However, when you think you *look* like Fat Fox, that’s not cool.  Especially if you’re orange.  That’s a bronzer issue.

You would be amazed at how much you really do not know about losing weight or being lean.  The whole ‘cals in vs cals out’ thing?  Nonsense.  The no starch but ‘healthy veggie carb’ thing—only a matter of time before you find a bunch of insulin resistant folks out there because of this misinformation.  The ‘lean’ craze that hit everyone who eats meat about 10 years or so ago—holy helpless hormones, Batman, we’re beginning to see the effects of that surface now.  Our girl is no different in what she thought about dieting.  What she thought to be fact is actually fallacy and now the struggle begins.

Back in the Battle

About a month after Armageddon, our girl is ready to get back to dieting.  She’s officially disgusted with herself.  Mirrors?  Thing of the past.  No, our girl is not dressing up anymore or wearing her cute gym clothes, she’s in a baseball cap, black baggie sweatpants and a too big T shirt.  She’s switched gyms because there is no way she can go back to her old gym and face anybody a month after her glorious goal date.  It’s too fresh and raw for her.  So she joined a gym on the other side of town and got back into the swing of things.

Failing forward: You will never rebound with the same magnitude again.  You may rebound again, but it will not be as great as the first time.  Changing gyms is extreme and really speaks to the severity of insecurity our girl had.  However, some of us wished we had changed gyms but stuck it out anyways.   What our girl is really suffering from is the fall from the top.  I’ve alluded to this here.  I will tackle it for real some day in a longer post, just know it’s coming.

Watching Grass Grow

The second time around is nothing like the first.  Nothing.  First, it’s hard to get that fight in your spirit again.  You know how hard it’s going to be.  You know how much you’re going to have to give up for it again and you’re not sure you want to.  There’s also no romance left to this battle:  the little nuances of seeing the body change, the cool reaction of all your friends when they would see you and not knowing what all the phases of dieting would be like so you looked forward to each one.  Second, it is WAAAAAAAYYYYYYY harder to lose weight each and every time you diet.  If you lost 2 pounds per week the first time around, you’ll lose 2 pounds per 2 weeks and possibly 3 weeks the second time around.  It’s hard.  It’s laborious.  It’s like watching grass grow.  So here’s our girl…miserable, heavier than her initial weight and profoundly disillusioned.

Myth: Many girls believe they have “metabolic damage” at this point and that’s why they cannot lose weight.  That’s not exactly true although they have jacked up their hormones which is what’s causing the delay in weight loss.

Fact: This is going to sound insane, but if you want to try and lose weight right after a rebound, you need to at least start with a re-feed of some sort and then s-l-o-w-l-y start to diet again.

Failing forward: At this point, patience is a virtue and we seasoned dieters tend to understand this.  We do not look for progress the first 4 weeks or so and instead, give our bodies time to get back into the groove.  Learning to separate our emotions from the task at hand is not easy and takes a good amount of practice and emotional fortitude.  But going for the gusto here would do more harm than good so she has to ride out this storm in slow motion.

Stalemate

Eight weeks in and our girl weighs 2 pounds less than when she started.  She picked up right where she left off and can’t understand why the scale isn’t moving.  Yes, she’s had a few breakdowns here and there.  A whole pint of ice cream, a few days of endless nibbles, some cookies and a few other indiscretions not worth mentioning but that shouldn’t be enough to stop her progress, right?  She’s missed the gym a few times, too, and she doesn’t keep track as well as before but she’s still in the gym 7 days a week so what gives?  She also doesn’t measure what she’s eating and she has the meal plan memorized so she knows what she’s eating every day so whatever.  She’s on it…yes?

Myth: Picking up where you left off will give you the results you had before.  Somehow you think your body should just snap back in place because you’re back to eating the same boring chicken and tasteless green beans.

Fact: You didn’t start off your first plan at 7 days a week and no condiments, why would you start there now?  Torturing yourself does not make your body conform faster.

Failing forward: We begin to discover the tricks of the trade and what really produces change in our bodies.  We do not lose weight because we exercise and eat right, we lose weight when we cause a *change* in the body great enough to elicit a response from it.  If you’re used to running 5 miles a day, you will not all of a sudden start losing weight doing so just because you declared yourself on a diet.  You must do something different or more to elicit that weight loss response from your body.  As we mature as dieters, we begin to realize this by actually backing off from dieting when we really do not need to.  This keeps us from having to go on 10 calorie diets and run a ½ marathon every day for cardio.

We’ll pick her saga up tomorrow when she finally gets to where she wants to go but now finds maintenance about as fun as getting a colonic with a central vacuum attachment.  More to come! Woop woop!!:o)

Previous Series Post Next Post in Series

You know I am all about inner beauty because it is what facilitates your outer beauty.  And you know that inner beauty comes from a balanced, healthy diet with fabulous training.  And I’m sure that by now you probably know that I shoot straight from the hip and will do whatever is necessary to get your attention.  You may have even picked up on the fact that I may know a thing or two about nutrition.  Well it is time to start putting all those traits together to make some learning magic. 

Welcome to the first of one of many series I will be hosting on my blog.  From time to time I will introduce a new topic that I will cover in bite size pieces so you can really learn something from it and then take something useful away with you.  I do not have any worries about giving you useful information and I hope you do not mind receiving it!  I also hope you don’t mind that I’m going to be pretty silly while giving you the info, too.  You know I’m a clown.;o)

No matter who I am speaking with, food is an issue.  Let me say that again b/c you may be in denial:  food. is. an. issue!   It could be planning it, controlling it, liking it, eating it, sharing it (that’s mine–back it down cuz forks hurt when they hit your hand!lol), who knows what *it* is, just know that “it” is many people’s source of stress.  Thus, success demands that you will to have to be a Jack of all trades and a master of none.  I say master of none simply because people tend to beat themselves up when they are not “perfect” at something and I honestly do not expect any one to be perfect at anything food related. 

Dieting (meaning the act of planning and controlling one’s nutrient intake) is hard.  No doubt about it.  Ask anyone, whether they are a seasoned athlete or a mom just wanting to be hot again, what they are doing that day for a workout and they will give you great detail (whether you wanted it or not).  They can tell you what time they are going, how long it should take, what weights they like to use…etc.  They can even tell you when they last made a change to their workout and what effects they got from the change.  Let me just quickly add that I am referring to those folks that really are interested in looking good–you know…you!  Anyway, they are like a walking workout journal.  But if you ask that same person what they are eating and when the last time they changed what they have been eating, they look at you like you just asked them if you can lick their spoon for them (what a nasty thought…ewww). 

Now don’t get me wrong, they will tell you they eat “healthy” or “clean” or whatever–and they most likely do.  But they also eat the same thing day in and day out because they don’t want to, or do not know how to:  menu plan.  That’s right, I just said it.  Menu Planning.  What are you going to do about it?  Hide under a chair and act like I just didn’t bring that topic up?  Menu Planning.  Said it again!  And I meant it too. Haha!

So let’s stop this awful practice of eating the same thing over and over again and just learn how to plan a menu, rotate some foods in and out, count some macros and etc.  We’ll take it step by step beginning with the layout.  How does that sound to you?  Let me know before I roll this Cadillac worth of information out on this blog and scare some of you into hibernation.  How about we do it over a 4 day period–maybe 3 if we’re feeling adventurous.  We can put a few days in between so you may have time to digest the info and try a few things.  You have one day to say yay or nay…so what you say?