My Journey With Weight Loss – Know Your Limits

This was not the topic that I originally planned to write today. I was going to talk about keeping going but then Sunday I saw a tweet that made me freak out about overcommitting to this journey. The tweet was retweeted by someone I follow and I don’t know the originator. The person who wrote the tweet was talking about significant weight gain and the impact on their mental health. I scrolled through the comments and saw one that said ‘let’s commit to us each consistently losing 2lbs a week’. Noooooooo!!!!!!! I decided not to go crazy on Twitter but did provide a link to this page and encouraged the struggling tweeter to have a look at my blog as it might provide some support.

Why did I go crazy? I’ve posted before about how important having support is to being successful on this journey. It was great that someone reached out to work together on a goal and I encourage that. What really bothered me is saying ‘consistently’ losing 2lbs per week. This simply is not realistic. Yes, 1-2lbs per week is a healthy weight loss but the one thing it will never be is consistent. Weight loss can vary due to a number of things, eating the wrong things, eating too much, not eating enough, not enough exercise, too much exercise, water retention, dehydration, and the list goes on. Weekly weight loss, to me, works better as an average over say a month. However, I will note that I have had plateaus where I know I was doing everything right but my weight either stayed the same or sometimes even increased slightly. I learned to realize, that was ok. There is so much going on with your body when you truly work on weight loss and sometimes the body’s response is not what you expected. I know I did the right thing when my body seemed to be rebelling, I sought help, made the changes recommended and just kept moving.

But the real important thing here is the mental pressure that you put on yourself. Last week I talked about goals and failures and trying to force yourself into a commitment that you can’t keep is like setting yourself up for failure. I can picture in my head me seeing the scale hasn’t moved 2lbs and I convince myself it is my fault. That would just lead me back down the path that got me to obesity in the first place. It has been a lot of work dealing with my mental health along this journey. I had to learn to give up on a body image I had had for a very long time. I had to acknowledge that there was no easy fix to my weight and it would only be if I put in the hard work that I could make a real change. I had to stop with unrealistic goals and accept that if I just kept trying to do everything right that at the end of a long road I would be where I wanted to be. For me, making some of the mental changes that I needed to do were at times harder than dietary changes and exercise but I knew they were as important (if not more important). So yes, hold yourself firm to realistic goals and commitments because that is how you will have success but don’t make this journey so mentally detrimental that you can’t complete it.