Tap tap microphone, is this thing on....?
I've been watching this Biggest Loser season like it should be a weekly trip to church. I've watched it off-and-on for years. I took ahold of my life this year and came to terms with what I wanted and needed to do with weight loss and just connected with this season's cast. Hannah and Olivia and Irene: these girls blow me away.
I honestly couldn't connect with Irene in the beginning -- they didn't show her as a prominent contestant, she seemed like a background character.. She is coming out of her shell and I feel like I really relate to her. Tonight when Irene was saying the stuff that she was to Jillian, I so connected with that.
Olivia and Hannah. These two ladies have been my favorites from day 1. Some nights I watched solely for their wit and comments. I connected with them. I have a sister I'm extremely close to, and Hannah and Olivia seem like our type of sibling-team. So, I hope that one of these three ladies wins the ranch challenge.
I have a problem. I can logically sit and think 'this is wrong, don't do this' but emotionally I am not able to reign myself in or stop myself from doing xyz, whether it be eating too much, secretly eating an extra portion of something, skipping the gym, etc. I think that this is why I emotionally eat: instead of connecting emotions with what I'm intellectually thinking, I eat those feelings. compressing them to where I can't feel what I'm doing.
I feel like I have that same problem with emotionally connecting my intellect with my self-worth. Intellectually I will sit here and tell you that I'm amazing, strong, talented, smart, funny and maybe even beautiful. Emotionally, I can't connect those things, and therefore don't LIVE them... Like, I KNOW them but I don't truly BELIEVE them. I'm sure once I lose more weight some of the emotion will connect, as I SEE myself actually looking like who I want to be, but I don't know if that is enough.
I started at 300 pounds in November, down to 290.6 on January 1st. I've been in the 260s since March 20th. I lost from 0.8 to 3.8 pounds weekly. On April 17 my weigh-in was +1.6 and April 24 was -3.8. Weighing myself again this morning, I'm back up a couple of pounds. I'm looking at ways to combat this hugely plateau, have reached out on twitter, received a few ideas by e-mail and by looking online. The thing that I need to figure out, is HOW do I beat my emotion? How can the intellect go to combat with the emotion and make the emotion a believer? If you've read this far, let me know your thoughts! ARGH!!!
Great questions. I could have written this blog entry because these are the same things I'm dealing with. I'll do so well on tracking and watching what I eat, then in a single day I'll sabotage myself. By early last year I had lost a total of 100 pounds. Slowly but surely I've let myself gain 50 back. The more weight I gain, the harder it is to get back on track. Perhaps I need to go over and review how and why I did so good before. Getting off a plateau is no fun, and sometimes you feel like you are fighting alone. But the rewards are great. Keep up the good work, find something to help you stay focused. YOU CAN DO IT!
ReplyDeleteLIke Jeffrey said, I relate to your post about emotional eating. My self-sabotage comes with emotional eating, much like you both said. Right now I'm in a mental "zone" where I am really paying attention to why I want to eat at certain times. That is hard to do, especially when you have had a particularly emotional day, a fight with a loved one, or someone has been cruel to you. My problem is that I take it personally. I have been trying the strategy: when I overeat because of an emotional issue, I will blog about it or talk about it and realize that it was just one emotional eating episode, and that does not a lifestyle break. So many times before I have had an episode and let it derail me totally so that I quit. I am trying not to be the perfectionist or "all or nothing" type. I know that you feel good when you see numbers go down on the scale and see changes in the way your clothes fit. You are not alone in the fight against the yo-yo plateau. Don't give up. You are working hard and your hard work will be rewarded. You WILL succeed!
ReplyDeleteI love Hannah, Olivia, and Irene, too!
ReplyDeleteI also use food to try and "fix" things. I'm great at justifying poor food choices.
ReplyDeleteI love that you have identified the issues you want to address and are going to try and work through them. Many people tell us not to be too hard on ourselves, and I completely agree, but sometimes you need to do a little analysis and looking into yourself as a constructive critic and that's how we grow I think...or shrink ;)