So easy to gain - so hard to lose!
Why does the weight pile on so easily yet remain stubbornly tough to impossible to shift back off?
It took me just a week over Christmas to gain seven pounds. The usual amount people gain over the festive season. It slid on easily so surely it would be just as easy to get it back off? WRONG! Weight gained is an inverse equation to weight taken back off. Your body gleefully takes in those added pounds, says thank you very much and, what you think I’m letting you have them back? It’s as if you’re paying money into a hole in the wall machine (ATM) rather than taking it out.
It took me nine weeks - NINE! - to regain my pre-Christmas weight. Same thing happened last year. And the year before that. They used to say in the comics I read growing up that the best way to stop smoking was never to start. It’s same with weight gain at holiday times. Best way to take Christmas excess poundage off is never to gain it in the first place. Yeah right!
Thing is I didn’t really eat that much more over Christmas. Sure I let up on the dieting - who doesn’t at Christmas, on holiday or birthdays, weddings, anniversaries? But once I let in a few more calories every day the weight went back on.
I have to face that in order to maintain the four stone I lost in 12 months from September 2020 at the height of Covid and BECAUSE of Covid I have to continue to watch my food and calorie intake. As I have moaned many times before, I can never eat like a normal person: I’m hungry. It’s mealtimes. So I’ll eat. No. That’s never going to be me. I have to watch every morsel because I know that liking my food so much and deriving the pleasure hit I get from eating (we all do, some more than others) I’ll have to be constantly vigilant.
I found out what happens when you cease to be vigilant. Last June I stopped weighing in. Stopped bothering. I gained ten pounds in three weeks. Clearly if I eat as much as I want to - which really isn’t all that much! - I gain weight. A good friend put it very well when she said, “You just have to accept being hungry a lot of the time.” Besides is it real hunger? Or just the desire to eat because it’s so damn enjoyable? We dieters lost that connection many years ago. We aren’t in touch with real hunger because for us hunger is a constant. “I’m always hungry” a friend told me years ago. But he didn’t have a weight problem. So he could indulge this. It doesn’t follow that over eating or eating for pleasure will make you fat. But it does for some of us! Post-menopausal women especially so.
Anyway I got the Christmas weight back off and I know I’ll put it back on again this Christmas. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m not even going to try to diet in January and February. It’s pointless. The weather is cold and miserable and post-Christmas blues, plus lots of lovely leftover food, make it almost impossible. It’s much easier to lose weight when Spring arrives. I’ll try to temper my eating and not go mad but I’m not going to drive myself crazy next January and February with the uphill struggle that losing post-Christmas weight causes.
Meanwhile we’ve got Easter coming up...