Why it's so much tougher second time round
Despite lowering my daily calorie intake to practically subsistence level my weight is stubbornly refusing to drop.
Can you lose weight after you’ve lost weight then regained some of it? Yes. Yes you can. But only with the kind of steely determination and ruthlessness most of us find impossible. Inhuman almost. If you’ve ever wondered why most diets fail in the long run - we can take it off but we can’t keep it off - that is why. When you relax, stop dieting, go back to normal eating, your body cheers HOORAY!! Food again. And the pounds creep back on. And when you try to take them back off again - it worked before, surely it can again? - your body responds with: “Not this time sunshine!”
And so the whole merry-go-round starts up again. Only this time it’s much much harder. Your body - your brain actually - is wise to it. Primed for it. This time it is prepared. You won’t catch it unawares. It’s going to fight you and it has huge advantages which make this a deeply unfair battle. Brains usually win.
So what can you do? As I’ve said before I don’t like the idea of being at war with your body. It’s very unhealthy. What we need to do is work with it. Feed our brain sufficiently that it doesn’t send impossible-to-ignore signals telling us to eat.
Some success!
I have had some success. I did manage to get back the five pounds I piled on in just three weeks in June. However it took me nine weeks to get them back off; nine weeks! So three times as long as it took to put them on. And now I’m stuck again despite dropping my calorie intake first to 1350 a day and now to 1150. Not easy! I get hungry if I’m not careful but so far I have managed to avoid a binge which I regard as a huge achievement. It’s so easy to say, sod it, why bother when the scales refuse to budge despite you eating as little as is humanly possible to survive. So you overeat to compensate. I’ve managed not to do that. I’m sticking to it. I know that if I keep with the programme it will eventually come off again. I just have to accept that it’s much harder this time. But I’ll get there. It isn’t just willpower that does it for me - it’s sheer bloodymindedness! I will NOT let this defeat me. I will overcome. As with so much that is bloody hard in life you have to really REALLY want it. It’s not the defeats that define us - it’s how we deal with them.
Don’t let up!
So my message this month is if you’ve ever managed to reach your goal weight for goodness sake don’t let up! Don’t ever let up. You can’t. If you’ve been overweight there are incredibly high chances you’ll be overweight again. We can’t let up. We just can’t. We have to accept that. It’s a lifetime’s work. But if that sounds just too awful think of it this way - alcoholics and drug addicts have to give up forever. Their addiction never goes away. That’s why the motto for the 12 Steps Programme is One Day At A Time. At least we can eat! They can’t ever have another glass of wine, a beer, nor even a Bailey’s at Christmas. Never smoke again, or take in any nicotine. And for drug addicts not even a painkiller lest they fall off the wagon remembering how lovely an altered state is, no matter how mild.
It could be worse. We can have our favourite tipple. Just have to train our brain to accept moderation. And it will. It’s YOUR brain. It isn’t something foisted on you from above. You can do what you want with your brain. You don’t have to be your brain’s servant. It is your servant. Make it do as you want. Train is like you’d train for a marathon. You can alter your brain messages. You can override those signals begging you to eat. It takes work but it can be done.
I’m five pounds less than I was when I wrote my last Substack. I’ll be at least four pounds less when I write my next one. Could be a long wait BUT... I’ll get there! And so will you. Just keep saying, “Stick with the programme.”
Happy brain training!