a talk with oneself

A few recent posts by bloggers have talked about regain, how the hard part of weight loss is hanging on to the ground you have won.  Some very good sites concentrate on that subject particularly.  I don't think many of us will disagree with the importance of the subject, especially those who have decades behind us of "failure."

It comes down to THIS:  people with metabolic issues can NEVER eat in a manner conventional wisdom considers "normal."  Never.  We never should have eaten like other people in the past, and now that we've taught our bodies how to be thrifty through food restriction, we are front-loaded to regain at the least sign of carelessness.

"Young" dieters -- i mean either chronologically young, or those who never had a weight problem till mid-life, and are essentially having to consider it for the first time -- usually have a vision that, if they can only get back to a "normal" weight, they'll be able to join in the feast like everyone else, just be more moderate this time around.  Nuh-uh.  It doesn't work like that.

My history is pretty typical i think, barring the hypothyroidism; i was a chubby child, but got lean in my teen years and stayed normal in my twenties -- though that's where things started getting screwy.  I got "infected" with the low-fat propaganda in the middle of that decade, and from then on it was a battle to try to "eat right" and exercise and keep my weight where i wanted it.  Of course, i couldn't.  All those plates of low-fat pasta, all those bowls of oatmeal, all the baked potatoes with artificial toppings....  I could cry -- but of course, the tears are actually pretty far from the surface now that i do VLC, which stabilizes emotional behavior.

Through most of adulthood i've never been out of the "overweight" range as defined by BMI.  I almost made it to the lower limit last year, but vacations got the better of me.  Not to mention the failed attempt at reincorporating starches....  :-(  By now, i have no illusions.  It's VLC to the bitter end.

The sooner we have that big talk with ourselves the better!  We have to convince our conscious AND SUBCONSCIOUS minds that we can't go back.  We have to become comfortable with the idea that certain foodstuffs are simply not in the books for us.

I wrote the other day about convenience foods; i think i implied that work-arounds are particularly valuable for newbies in the low-carb world, but let me add here that they need to be "the new treat" for us long-timers as well.  Remember how, as a kid, that special cake or cookie was something you looked forward to on your birthday or during the holiday season, and even then your mom would ration it out to you and not let you make a pig of yourself.  That's us, once again.  But "mom" is now your higher self, as we say in the esoteric world.

For those of us who need to stay away from starches and sugars on an everyday basis, THIS has to be "normal" eating.  We can't let others' definitions of what constitutes a healthy diet seem at all appropriate, even in our imaginations.  If we can convince ourselves that THEY are the ones who are weird, and we are the evolutionarily congruent thinkers, the battle is won.  If our self-talk succeeds in pinning the "toxin" label on everything that actually IS bad for our cells, we've done what is also accomplished by ex-smokers, ex-alcohol-abusers, and ex-addicts.