Now that I’m over myself at having no scale movement in my third week, I am really starting to think this is the easiest way I’ve ever lost weight. I recently read a post somewhere where a woman claimed she almost felt guilty about the way the pounds were coming off, seemingly without effort.
I can relate, because this week I got a shock to the system. I didn’t get to weigh last week, but five days ago I weighed in at over 207. Yesterday it was 203. For the first time in years, size 16 pants fit.
Granted, they’re vanity-sized Lee’s stretchy Slender Secret jeans, but hey, I’ll take it, and gladly. So goodbye to size 18, and seeyaneveragain!
This is the closest in years I’ve come to what the dieting groupies call “Onederland”. (I also used to have the terminology memorized… I no longer have the patience for the Rah Rah forum crowd with their obsessive overuse of emoticons and graphic scale sliders with butterflies, but it’s useful support for many).
Today, after an “up” eating day, I weighed in at 205. Also started my menstrual cycle today, so water weight was a certainty. It started 3 days earlier than anticipated based on my pre old-woman cycle, but I was tipped off that it might be early because I had an appetite on my fasting day, as in: I was hungrier than normal once I started eating for the day.
In order to find out more about this diet choice, I sought out personal stories from other successful intermittent dieters and subsequently did much more reading of personal blogs. I found the blog “The Lean Saloon”, authored by an excellently shaped man who basically has three credos: Eat using intermittent fasting, move around a lot, and enjoy living a lot.
I can get behind that. I have also discovered breakfast is simply not the most important meal of the day it has been touted to be, which hearkens back to the way I used to keep trim before I became obese. I used meal-skipping whenever I saw some scale creep and wanted to bring my weight back into the proper place, usually within a 5-15 pound range. And it always worked.
But somewhere along the way, I got brainwashed into the credo of eating 6-8 small meals a day, and never, ever skip breakfast. Eat after a workout. Eat between meals. I drank the Kool-Aid, people. And I liked it. And the lie that did the most damage was: unless I ate breakfast, I was ruining my metabolism and setting myself up for weight gain rebound.
What makes me slap myself in the head and yell "D'oh!" even more is that I lost 10 pounds last summer because I was preparing my home for sale, and didn't make time for regular meals, as well as packing, hauling and stacking boxes, mowing, cleaning, etc. I ate when I was hungry, which sometimes was only once a day. And the light bulb still didn't go off! I wasn't ready to listen to my own body!!
So now, as I come to realize how little value breakfast and rapidly-timed meals hold*, I have a growing sense of abandonment from the nutrition “experts”, and a burgeoning resentment of the entire industry, because all their advice to help me shed weight I’ve been frantic to lose has been wrong all along.
Due to false and/or mis-information, I have to conclude I’ve wasted almost two decades of effort. I’ve had so much frustration and heartache associated with failure it’s mind blowing. It had become acceptable to me to be obese, because other than medication or surgery, I had no options left.
I’ve spent thousands of dollars on the hope of weight loss. I’ve bought many books (including ebooks), used many healthy supplements (and many not-so healthy thermogenics), signed up for online forum subscriptions, calorie tracked, carb tracked, bought specialty foods, dieted using several different methods, and spent hours and weeks and months in the gym tracking reps and weights and time on cardio, just waiting in vain for the fitness fairy to finally let me get back to where I wanted to be, only to come full circle to the method that worked when I was in my 20s and early 30s. So simple.
Skip a meal, stupid. Because of the amount of weight I have to lose it’s had to become alternate-day fasting, but it’s the same exact principle.
I’ll have to absorb this one over time. It’s a bitter pill to swallow.
* The exception to this are bodybuilders and those trying to bulk for muscle building.
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