The Thick & Thin of it....Or How I "Accidentally" Lost 73.5lbs

I’ll tell you the secret to how I lost 73.5 lbs (gotta be exact ya know) without trying, but I have to warn you.. it,… the secret…. is not a secret… I KNOW you’ve heard it at least 1000 times… well, I’m actually sure you’ve heard everything I’m going to tell you at least 100 times before… I know I had... but it was thinking about it all at the SAME TIME that made it “click” for me.

There is ONE key thing you have to do but it is so… tiny… so… obvious… that I feel silly even pretending like I “know” anything… You know how in the movie Kung Fu Panda, Po finds out in the end that the secret ingredient in his father’s secret ingredient soup is…..that there is NO secret ingredient?... Ooops, sorry if I should have put a spoiler alert on that… I can just hear the groans… “Aaaaahhh Prairie Girl now you just ruined Kung Fu Panda for me!!!!!” again I say … “Oooops”

Okay…the secret ingredient in my accidental weight loss is….. pay attention.

No… that was it….. PAY ATTENTION….. seriously, all there is to it….. Okay… before you start pelting your monitors with bread rolls, or tootsie rolls, or something I’ll start at the beginning…. often a good place to start… Hey! I’ll even start with pictures! How about that?

Me July 2009

 

 

Me July 2010

First I’ll admit that, like so many of us, I have done EVERY diet known to man… and woman. Some have worked some have not.... I’m not putting anything down.. I’m just saying what happened to work for me and NOT feel like work…

Okay, so get on with it your thinking… but, first, I do need to say… take all of this with a “grain of salt” … or two.. I love salt by the way….. I’m not a doctor, nor do I play one on tv… and I don’t know if, health wise, anyone should be doing what I’m doing… I don’t feel like I’m living on the edge or anything, but… what’s good for me is seldom everyone else’s cup of tea….

That being said, there were several food related “AHA” moments that happened to me over the span of a few weeks last fall. I’ll point them out to you as I go. For now, just know this, everything that ended up causing me to loose weight only worked because of how these aha moments happened to coalesce (that’s my $3 word for today, and yes, it did hurt) in my mind, into a way I could live the rest of my life. They are absolutely NOT new and may not mean ANYTHING to you…. But I’ll tell ya anyway…

I have to say that my weight loss this time started with loneliness…not unlike this blog actually.

It was at about this time last year, school started, and my BABY started all day kindergarten. I was completely and utterly alone with myself, oh, and my now ex-husband (not The Him, my 2nd ex-husband the father of my kids). I was suddenly without distractions, other than food, of course, and having to admit to the fact that my life was not the happy one I’d been projecting to the world…

So I made a video of my kids..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc-Cv425OIg

But it didn’t alleviate the sadness that was overtaking me.

I decided it was hormones, I mean I was about to turn 45 it was about time for peri-menopause right? So I started taking herbal stuff for that (which I’ve since quit as after 6 months on it I began having periods ever 16 days. They went back to regular as clockwork as soon as I quit them).

Oh and here’s a very humiliating confession… a few weeks before school started my eldest (7 at the time) had a buddy over. They were playing in the hay fort and my son got stuck. The other boy came running to the house to get me to come help. I began “running” out there and was shocked. No matter how hard or fast I tried to move I was barely moving… here’s your visual… think… hippo under water… seriously… that’s how it felt, and probably how it looked….

So I decided that I should start walking…I mean that’s supposed to elevate your mood and other good stuff right?... –

You should know that I am some one who understands fully how food can be a drug.. I used it as one ALL the time.. admitted I did it.. said that I could drive my kids to ball practice on “medicinal fudge” (fudge made in the microwave that won’t “set up” but who cares we’re eating it with a spoon) but not on a glass of wine (I’m a lightweight when it comes to booze).

I thought it was funny when I told people that I only had a kitchen cause it came with the house and that I didn’t cook (Ex-Hub was too picky)…I knew they had to wonder about the size of my rear end if I didn’t use my kitchen…. Well…. I may not have cooked in my kitchen, but I spent more than enough time in there eating Doritos until I could pop…..

See, as I’m sure you already know, there is a lovely…numbness… than comes when your stomach is stretched tight… for you skinny folks think about the way you feel after Thanksgiving dinner when you are stuffed and sooooo relaxed… okay…Can ya remember it? Okay, you’re with me.. That’s why I always knew that if I had gastric bypass, or the lap band it would be a waste of time and money. I didn’t eat because I was hungry, I ate to be numb….to be “happy”.. I would have told you that I ate just because I “enjoyed the flavor” so much… then I saw one of those news shows and got my first aha moment….

Here’s “aha moment” #1- The news show said that there were “super-tasters” and “non-tasters”.. they even had a little paper strip they’d put on people’s tongues to test them.. non-tasters said “tastes like paper.. nothing”. They also claimed to LOVE to eat, loved the flavor of food, and were either overweight, or struggled with their weight.

All the skinny models they tested on 5th ave in New York City were super tasters.. they thought the paper tasted horrible… and admitted to being picky eaters… and of course.. they were skinny models… duh

Hmmmm… I thought… I’ve struggled with my weight my whole adult life… would swear I LOVE food.. swear I eat for the sheer pleasure of it….hmmmm.. I wonder… what if I’m really a NON-taster…. interesting

Aha moment #2- They’ve done studies (I’d heard about them years ago so this might should have been moment #1, but….) that said we only taste the first few bites of our food (maybe 3? Can’t remember) and after that we’re eating based on the memory of how that food tasted the first bites.

Aha moment #3- My special angel friend Sally told me about one of her customers who had gastric bypass and was now so annoyed that she had to stop what she was doing to eat now… she just wasn’t hungry, but her blood sugar would drop and she’d have to go have a spoonful of peanut butter… I had to wonder…did she KNOW how much fat was in peanut butter? How many “points” it had? Did she care? Uhhh no… Did she continue to loose weight? Uhhh yes…hmmmmm

Aha moment #4 - I saw an actress on the red carpet of some awards show and they asked her if she let herself eat cake or the like and she said yes, she ate everything she wanted…. Just only a few bites of it….not more than say… three…hmmmmmm

So, back to me, my life was starting to unravel a bit. I was no longer able to numb or distract myself from how unhappy I was and I’ll admit that I had a few days of…. Unrest…upset.… in my stomach. So I “went with it”… I kept thinking about the peanut butter lady and I just stopped “stuffing” myself.

I also announced that I was tired of being treated like crap and wanted a divorce, and while that is a whole OTHER topic, it has to be documented as a turning point. I was now able to listen to my “gut” and not stuff down the feelings with food. Funny how we call it that, our gut, and… anyway… refer back to previous “gut” postings for more on that… back to the eating part.

I began to really, seriously, no joke, PAY ATTENTION to me. Pay attention to how I felt when I ate. How the food tasted. I began to pay attention to WHEN, exactly, I was no longer hungry… NOT full.. just…..not hungry…paying attention at every bite… and STOP eating THEN… at that bite when I could honestly say… Nope..no longer hungry..

I’d often heard that the reason we get so stuffed is because we don’t stop eating until we FEEL full, then the rest of what we’d been eating up until that point hits the bottom and we’re STUFFED! Miserable even. So now I stop at the bite when I realize I just don’t feel the hunger pang anymore. I mean, if the hunger comes back I can always eat again! Right?

I began to pay attention to how food tasted… REALLY tasted… every bite… The first might be good but how was the second? Third? Was what I was eating what I REALLY wanted? If I had a bite of … say…. peanut butter, was THAT what I wanted? Or was I craving salt and what really sounded good was greasy potato chips? If so … I ate em… and if they weren’t salty enough I had the peanut butter stuffed pretzels… mmm love the salt on them… anyway…I began paying attention to how every bite tasted… how my hunger felt… was it the 3rd bite that really wasn’t cutting it for me taste wise? The 4th? Was the taste gone but I was still hungry? If so I’d use my previous dieting experience and think…hmmmm had a bunch of chips… how about some protein to balance it out and finish off the hunger… What sounded good?

Something else that happened at the same time is that we happened to not have any sugary foods in the house for about a month… no birthdays.. no holidays with yummy desserts.. nothing… I don’t drink pop much, and never drink diet, so when the next birthday rolled around and I tried a bite of cake it tasted HORRIBLE!!!! Unlike in the past, when I would have “pushed” through it and ate it anyway, for the “buzz” if nothing else, I just didn’t. It didn’t taste good, so I didn’t eat it.

Which brings me to aha moment #5 – I mentioned food as a drug, and medicinal fudge right? Well, I’d also recently seen a news program talking about THAT! They took people, both skinny and heavy, and gave them an milkshake. Then they put them in an MRI machine to look at their brains… The skinny people’s brains lit up like a light bulb after the shake… The heavy people’s brains barely lit up… they concluded (I’m paraphrasing here) that the heavier people had to keep “chasing” the buzz and having more and more sugar to get the buzz, hence the weight problems… ding ding ding….my lightbulb went off big time… I WAS needing more fudge to get the same effect!!!!

Okay, on this note I have to say that now I never never never go hungry. Never.

One more thing…people are always asking me if I’ve been exercising to loose this weight… my answer is… sometimes… but it’s not motivated by weight as much as it it by mood elevation… though.. if I’m going to do some form of exercise I’m going to use what I’ve learned from my failed diets… So…

I learned from the 6 week body makeover diet that lower intensity exercise like walking, biking, very slow jogging, like a marathon runner, will supposedly make your body burn fat instead of sugar like it will if you work out too hard…meaning your heart rate is too fast.. he says do this very low intensity stuff for 45-60 min a day…

Oh the The Him confirmed this 45 minute belief by telling me that 20 some odd years ago when we were married and he had a…. person who knows… tell him that it’s not the intensity of the exercise that’s important as much as the length of time you do it and that 45 min was the minimum….

But since we’re playing “true confessions” here, I have to admit that I do good to do 35 minutes most days, and I haven’t done ANY exercise all summer (except for riding horses a few times)… and while I haven’t lost as fast as I did in the winter (2 lbs a week then and only about 15 lb all together for the early spring and summer), I didn’t gain. And I didn’t have to “do” anything to not gain, so I’m happy.

Okay… to sum up.. should have told you in the beginning you could have just skipped to the end huh?
1) I pay attention, and only eat exactly what I want.
2) I pay attention, and stop eating when I’m just no longer hungry, not when I’m full
3) I pay attention and don’t eat what doesn’t taste like EXACTLY what I want… even if it did and hour ago.. and even if it means I might be wasting food (put it in the fridge and hope for the best)
4) I pay attention and never never never go hungry.
5) Oh and everyday I say “I loose weight as fast as my body & skin can handle it” over and over… Don’t know if it does anything, but I do it anyway.

Okay… I’m tying this diatribe to a tumbleweed, but it’s so long and heavy I’ll be amazed if it makes it outta the yard…