I don't know if you can believe it or not, but next month it will be the ninth anniversary of my six-month push to a 40-pound weight loss which took me down to a weight 52 pounds lower than my highest nonpregnant weight.
Since then I've had two babies and — mostly — maintained it. I say "mostly" because
- after a few months at that weight, I decided that too many people were asking me if I'd been ill, and deliberately re-gained about 6 pounds, at which point the concerned questions stopped.
- after my most recent pregnancy, not quite all of that came back off, and I stabilized at a weight that was, let's see, ten pounds heavier than that.
And that's more or less where I've been for the last two years or so, with some seasonal and vacation-related fluctuations. I did manage to get within three pounds of my pre-pregnancy weight at one point, but it proved difficult to maintain and I went up to the ten-pounds-higher one.
Still in the "normal" range, though! And that's why I feel like I can keep saying I maintained the weight loss. I maintained most of it and am pretty stable. As in, for the last two years I have not been working particularly hard, and my weight has not changed much at all, apart from some seasonal-type fluctuations.
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Let's just label as "seasonal-type" the few extra pounds I took back with me from my five weeks in the French Alps, the Italian Riviera, and London.
I knew it was coming. I had spent the last few weeks drinking a lot of pints of bitter and glasses of good red wine, and eating a good deal of cheese, pasta, and meat pies. Somewhere in there I made a deal with myself that I would stop worrying about it, enjoy myself thoroughly, and implement Austerity Measures as soon as I returned.
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Austerity Measures seemed like a better name to me than a lot of the other trendy ones burbling around these days, like Clean Eating (with which I have a word association problem) or Whole 30 (why exactly thirty?) or, uh, I don't know… Dump Dinners? Can we get rid of the phrase Dump Dinners? Just for the hell of it?
Anyway, having come so recently from France, I decided on some decidedly French Austerity Measures before I got home.
British Austerity Measures are not nearly as pleasant. Trust me, when you are in London, you want abandon, not austerity. You want three pints a day and plenty of meat pies. The same goes for Italy. You want pizza and pesto and gelato (and more gelato) and lots of wine.
But actually, French-style Austerity Measures aren't too bad. I will elaborate in upcoming posts.
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I also want to write a little bit about:
- the trap of Only One Number, and my recent goal to generate other interesting numbers to distract me from it;
- long-term (first medium, and then very long-term) thinking;
- my ever-present concern (since about 2010) that in writing about weight control at all, I'm contributing to a culture of body shaming, making an idol out of Looking Not Fat, and putting myself in a not-so-good headspace;
- and the surprising situation I'm in, of thinking about my physical self in a future that, likely will have no more babies in it.
Be patient with me, it'll probably take me a month to get all four or five or so of these posts out there. But: that's November, my goal-weight anniversary month, and I can't help but be thinking about it a lot. So I guess I might as well take you along.
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