Starting Over (and over again)

The process of getting to a healthy weight and body image is a process of stops and starts. Any of us who have gone through it know this only too well. We start with enthusiasm, get to a certain point, stop, then back-pedal a bit (or a lot) before starting over again. And again. And again.

I'm back at the starting over phase.

My body is screaming out for help -- never mind how much I detest how I look and feel in clothes, which is more about vanity than health -- and I know that if I ignore the screaming, it will only get worse until something really drastic happens. I am at my highest weight EVER in my life. This was the weight I was about a year before I moved to France, and at that time Nutrisystem was my key to losing 30 lbs. Don't get me wrong: after that 30 lb loss, I was still way too fat and still weight over 200 lbs, but I could move move easily, and spent hours wandering these Paris rues with nary a hint of joint or back pain.

I am now 7 years older and so are my joints, and they are not at all enjoying the 30 lbs I've put on since I got married 5 years ago (which is when I remember being at around 208-210, my "low" weight since 1997 or so). My husband has been putting on weight as well. Are we THAT couple? The couple that is so happy being married that we just let ourselves go all to hell? We really DO love each other no matter what we look like... but we also want to live together in good health for as long as possible, and at this rate that's not going to be very long.

I am concerned. More than concerned. I'm scared.

The question is, am I scared ENOUGH now to do something about it, once and for all? Every time I start this process, I think "THIS time it will be different". And sometimes, it IS different... for a while. Until it ISN'T any more.

I've been watching episodes of a British series called "Secret Eater" (go on YouTube and type "Secret Eater" - there are 2 seasons so far), where couples (romantic couples, brothers & sisters, parents & adult children, friends, neighbors - and I think last year they profiled an entire family including the kids) who are struggling with being overweight are filmed 24/7 for a week, then analyzed by experts to see WHY they're so fat. Because each of them starts out with the same story: "I don't know why I'm so fat. I think I eat healthfully. I think I'm mainly making good choices. There is no way I'm eating enough to justify being THIS overweight. It's a mystery to me."

The program puts cameras in their home, but also has two private investigators following them and enlisting their friends, family members and work colleagues in finding out exactly what each of their individual eating habits are. At the start of the process, the couples fill out food diaries where they all estimate themselves as eating what turns out to be something like 2,000+ calories LESS per day than they ACTUALLY eat. Because the evidence -- as shown on film -- is indisputable: through a variety of bad patterns, habits and choices, they are eating the equivalent of what TWO (or even THREE) normal people would need to eat in a given day. Even some of the people who actually do exercise regularly discovered they were still taking in far more calories than they could ever burn off by biking, running, etc.

Mystery solved: that's why they're fat.

I have often been reluctant to keep a food diary, although when I've been on certain programs like Weight Watchers I have tracked my food intake. But what I'm learning from Secret Eaters is that I really have NO CLUE how much I'm actually eating each day, other than "way too much". So I've started this week with a food journal. And it is already making me much more conscious of what I'm choosing to eat and drink.

I've also picked up some interesting tips that I'm mentally taking notes on, in terms of what some of the TV couples have discovered about themselves that could apply to me as well:

• How much sweetener am I putting in my coffee or tea? I don't drink a lot of either, but typically put 2 large sugar cubes in each mug (1 cube if I'm in a restaurant and it's an espresso-sized cup). I am now trying to cut that in half. There are 3,870 calories in 1 kilogram of sugar. 1 box of large (i.e. #4 rectangular) sugar cubes = 1 kilo or 168 cubes. 3,870 divided by 168 = 23.04 calories per cube. So okay, 23 calories isn't a huge amount, but over the course of a week if I have 1 cup of coffee and 1 cup of tea a day, x 2 sugar cubes per cup? If my math is correct, that's 92 calories a day, 645 calories a week, or 33,546 calories PER YEAR just from adding 2 little sugar cubes to my hot beverages! Divide that by 3,500 (the number of calories it takes to add on a pound of body fat) and that's 9.5 pounds PER YEAR, just from 2 sugars in my coffee or tea a day. So cutting it down to 1 cube per hot beverage? It could make a very real difference. I'm working on going back to an artificial sweetener, but am torn because I don't want any of the chemical options out there; they create other health issues I don't want, either.
• You can't fix what you don't acknowledge. This means tracking what I'm eating and drinking, down to the last sugar cube, single jelly bean or "just a little taste" of something. One woman on the show basically starved herself during the week so she could eat big on weekends (which wasn't healthy) but the filming uncovered that she was constantly "tasting" food as she cooked for her family. And her "little tastes" added up to something like 700 extra calories a DAY! She was totally shocked... and when she cut out the constant starve/binge/sample routine and went back to eating three normal, healthy meals daily, she lost about 15 pounds in 5 weeks. I'm not always the one doing the cooking here so constant sampling isn't my main issue, but I do tend to mindlessly grab a bonbon here, a cookie there. So I need to track it ALL to see where I'm going wrong. Just now I remember that yesterday afternoon, I did eat one bonbon of my step-son's but never wrote it down... so I wrote it down.
• There are some psychological tricks I could play on myself to aid my progress. One of the things the show does is show experiments on how things like visual cues affect how much we eat. For example, in one episode they did a test to see if people would drink a large quantity of a beverage if it were in a short, fat glass as opposed to a taller, thin glass -- and they DID drink more from the short, fat glass. So now I'm trying to use our smaller, thinner glasses for things I'm drinking, unless it's water, because I'll not be tempted to drink more than a reasonable serving size that way.
• Changes are necessary for fat people to become slimmer and healthier, but don't HAVE to be painful to work. In virtually all of the cases on the show, the people learned that most of what they needed to do was make changes that -- for the most part -- were easy and virtually painless. Yes, they had to perhaps give up certain things, but when you find out that using buckets of double cream on your dessert or drinking giant glasses of fizzy, sugary drinks or juice adds on thousands of unwanted calories, it becomes a bit easier to make those sacrifices. As my best friend back home said to me recently, when talking about her efforts to get her family to eat healthier, "Yes it's hard at first, but really it's just a matter of making an ADJUSTMENT." I like the idea of thinking of these necessary changes in eating habits as "adjustments" that I need to make. It feels less like punishment when you put it that way.

Am I going to say that "This will be the last time" I'm starting over? No. Of course, I HOPE that it will be. But if it isn't -- if I fall off the wagon again -- I guess the comforting thought is that I always CAN start over, whenever I want. And the "adjustment" I can make right now is to stop seeing the starting over as failure... when all it is, is part of the process.

I can also remind myself regularly that other people successfully can and do get through this process to the other side, the healthy side, and they've managed to STAY there because they made their particular adjustments permanent. There is the part of weight loss that is perhaps more temporary, as in restricting your calories enough so that you can LOSE the unwanted weight, versus eating the right amount of calories to MAINTAIN your healthier weight.

But in the end, the people that succeed at this ARE the ones who "adjust" their habits and their thinking -- for good. So that they are no longer "starting over".

That's where I want to be.