The last few weeks:
(The graph was generated by SparkPeople.com)
(ADDED: A useful piece of context: I am about 4 feet 11 inches tall.)
The last time I successfully lost weight this fast — 2 lb/week — and kept it off until the start of my next pregnancy, I was doing hard-core low-carb. By the end of that, I’d convinced myself that LC was the weight-control style that worked for me, and it was going to be the only way I could keep the extra pounds off for the rest of my life.
I was wrong. This has been different. I’m still using some of the helpful tricks I learned while I was low-carbing, but I’ve not been following a low-carb diet (and it hasn’t been low-fat either, by the way).
I tried to gear up for LC life again several times after post-pregnancy weight loss stopped, and I just couldn’t get into it and wasn’t enjoying it very much. I don’t mean to diss real-food LC living, which is basically lots of fresh vegetables, moderate amounts of meat, and small amounts of fruit and whole grains; it’s a fine way to solve the “What should I eat?” problem, and as I’ve said, I had success with it before. But not this time — maybe it’s because I’m busier now; maybe it’s because I’m trying to plan meals for a larger family; maybe I just got bored with the good food/bad food dichotomy.
So I decided to try, um, eating less. Ha! You’ve heard, perhaps, that keeping a food diary is one of the few habits that’s proven to assist weight loss, almost universally? I know from experience that I eat better if I keep a detailed record. So I started one up again, sort of; what I kept was more like a feed-forward record, or a plan — I used an online nutrition tracker to make the “diary” a day in advance, hung a printout on the wall, tried to stick to it, and at the end of the day made adjustments to reflect reality. I carried planned, premeasured snacks with me when I went out, so I wouldn’t be forced to improvise if I got hungry. And I gave my electronic kitchen scale a prominent place on the counter. I did some other stuff too, which I’ll post on later.
I found out some stuff about myself in the process. In retrospect, I believe that this time my habits have been addressing the underlying mental defect that’s been causing my lifelong weight dysfunction. (Whereas the LC lifestyle worked more by counteracting some of its effects, and previous fruitless attempts to do the low-fat thing tended to exacerbate them. Again, more on that later.)
More later. I will say that the graph plotted above literally begins on the day that something seemed to click in my head, and I thought to myself, “I’m ready to try being okay with being hungry.”
(Part 2)
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