Based on prior posts you now have a way to monitor your weight and calories. This has to sound like a pain in the backside to do. The question then becomes why not just go use those miracle diets and pills that promise instant results? These things may work short term but for several reasons, we doubt their long-term sustainability. We ultimately realized that managing our weight was only sustainable by modifying our lifestyle. This is not an easy journey and it takes courage, dedication, and discipline. In this post we will talk about some of the challenges we didn’t expect forming new habits. .
It Takes Courage
We found it takes courage to say you are not happy with something about your current weight or body shape. It will come into play when you speak with others about your goals. We found it very hard to explain to others why we didn’t want to always go out. Getting together at a local restaurant or to a friend’s place for dinner was part of our social life. The extra alcohol and calories weren’t going to help.
The same things occurred around the holidays at get-togethers. Unknown portion sizes and ingredients abound during this time of year. For us, portion sizes served and where our calories came from mattered. The conversation about diet made it challenging because we felt like we were discussing things of a personal nature with others. Further, there is always the person who will tell you ‘It’s ok, it’s the holidays’ and has to comment on your eating style and question it. It takes courage to stand your ground at these times.
We eventually found some workarounds for the above cases. We began to focus on eating things like meat or bread where they weren’t altered too much. Because these items were predictable, we could join in the meal. When a sauce was served with something we asked for it on the side. Similarly, we might choose an appetizer over an entree or even split a plate at a restaurant. In any event, we learned strategies and mechanisms that allowed us to participate but stick to our goals.
It Takes Dedication
Dedication comes into play because you are working towards a goal. In weight management, you are creating a new you by learning about your body, its needs, and how it responds to changes. It may take a few tries to get on track. We will give some pointers later in this post around some of the learnings so you can avoid some of our learning curves.
What most people don’t realize is that changing your physical body shape does take an investment. You may not be competing in the next Olympic event but you are making changes to a living organism. Our bodies don’t change unless something is acting on them. We can liken this to other Newtonian physics in that a body at rest wants to stay at rest. While not a direct correlation, without actively working on change, nothing will change.
It Takes Discipline
Discipline is the primary key in weight management. The more consistent you are the easier it is to tune your plan. For the first month tracking your calories, activity, and weight will be annoying. You are creating new habits. Once the habits form, they will feel routine. Eventually, you won’t need to track things as closely. Consider the first 30 days of habit-forming a period of learning.
The cold hard reality is your body will fight you. If you don’t have the discipline to keep on it, you will end up on the weight management roller coaster. What happens out of that is you will make negative connections. When we endure challenges (suffering) and don’t get rewarded, we are giving ourselves a complex mix of negative outcomes. Research has been done that says we are pre-wired for negative outcomes so we simply expect to fail. We will talk more about this idea of risk-reward-based incremental change later in another post.
This post may sound draconian and despotic. That’s not its purpose. There are certain realities to managing weight and body shape. We feel it is best to know them going into it. We have made a lot of excuses over time for why things weren’t working. The reality was we just didn’t want them bad enough to have the courage, dedication, and discipline to make the changes we needed to. We have found that all of us fight many of these same things.