Wednesday, September 08, 2010

The losing battle

I was always an extremely thin person. I weighed 98 pounds when I began high school. I suspect in the current era, people who pay attention to this sort of thing would have questioned me about anorexia and perhaps wondered if my parents were feeding me. I was not anorexic, and my parents were indeed feeding me. It was just the way I was.

When I became pregnant at age 26, I weighed 100 pounds. I gained 50 pounds during the succeeding 9 months, and at the 6-week follow-up after delivering our 8-pound baby, I weighed 105 pounds. Within a few months later, I once again weighed about 100 pounds.

But as the years passed, I gradually began to put on weight. 

By the early summer of 2006, my weight had ballooned to 175 pounds. I was in denial about just how horrible I looked until we spent a couple of nights in a very nice hotel in Las Vegas in July that had several full-length mirrors. I got a good look.

As soon as we returned home, at the beginning of August, I started counting calories, with the goal of returning my weight to about 120 pounds.

Richard decided he needed to lose weight, too, because he had a similar story. When we got married he weighed 165 pounds, and he now topped the scale at 235. So we were in this together.

On Sept 1, I marked my weight on the calendar, and during the first week of September for every year since then I have marked down my weight. The numbers tell the story:

9-1-06        170.5
9-2-07        140.75
9-4-08        129

So far, so good. I realized at this point that reaching 120 pounds was not practical, so I changed the goal to keep my weight between 125 and 130 pounds. And look what happened!

9-4-09        137.5
9-5-10        138

I’m here to tell you that taking the weight off is relatively easy, but keeping it off once one has come close to where one wants to be is dead hard.

The same thing has happened to Richard

August 2006    235
August 2008    174
August 2010    184

Both of us have gained back 10 pounds, and are in a bit of a panic. We have worked too hard to see it all evaporate, so we have both gotten our butts firmly planted back on the wagon because we can see that if we don’t immediately adhere rigidly to accounting for the calories we eat, we are both going to gradually end up right back where we started. That can’t happen. It just can’t.

This is a losing battle we are are, are, ARE  going to win.

2 comments:

The Weaver of Grass said...

Yes I too have had to lose weight for health reasons - blood pressure problems meant medication or loss of weight. I have found it quite easy - now I do not allow myself to gain more than one pound without going on a strict diet for a day - and luckily I have lost the taste for sweet things, which does help. Exercise is also vital. Good luck with keeping it off.

Oklahoma Granny said...

I just came from a dr appt today. I've had a weight problem for almost as long as I can remember. The last time I was at the dr's I had lost a few pounds. Today I'd lost a few more. Not many, but still it's better than the alternative. Hopefully, even though it's a slow process, I'll continue to lose. I've got a LONG way to go!!!