Ain’t nuthin’ new, unfortunately: I jumped off the wagon with both feet and effectively put an end to the progress I was making.  Not only that, but I gained back the weight.

I’m not quite sure why it is that my brain thinks that going off the program is the answer to not making progress; if anything, I lose any progress I’ve made.  It all circles back to the basic premise of why I started this blog in the first place: the best and worst tool I have at my disposal is my brain.  When it’s in the right place, everything goes great.  When it’s not, seemingly no amount of scolding will get it to accept that giving up is not the answer.

I know this.  No one has to tell me.  I know it as certainly as I know that weighing myself can be as much of a demotivator as a motivator.  I know it as certainly as I know that just about every effect of exercising is a good one.  And yet, I set myself up for failure and do it, anyway.

I am pushing forward to another effort. I’ve been thinking about it for a while; I desperately need to change my ways.  And I desperately need to get my head in the right place.  It’s going to take using some methods that I haven’t used, before, and ones that at first glance, may seem kind of dumb to the general populace, but the idea here is to take my brain out of the equation until it’s so totally set in the right place that nothing will shake it.  I know this is possible.  I’ve done it before.

I haven’t picked a start date, yet.  It just might be tomorrow.

So, what’s so different?  What am I going to do this time to get around my biggest hurdle — my own brain?  Well, for one thing, I am going to take away the demotivators — as many of them as I can, so my brain can’t whisper to me that this is yet another failure, stop now.   These are my demotivators, as I see them:

Stats. I’m a stats girl.  I love stats and numbers; as a website developer, stats and judging progress from stats, manipulating numbers… those are a big part of what I do.   In weight loss, I’m just as much of a stats girl, but I tend to lose myself in them; if the scale doesn’t say what I think it should, I might tell myself that this or that is the reason, but there’s a chunk of my brain yelling FAILURE! at me.  I am notoriously tough on myself, and I don’t give myself breaks.  So what’s the solution?  I’m taking the stats out of the equation.  I will do an initial weigh-in, and then… drumroll… I’m not weighing.  Not unless I have to go to the doctor.  At some point in the future, maybe several months down the road, I might weigh.  I will also take initial measurements, but I’m staying away from the measuring tape otherwise.  I may also take initial pics, but I won’t take another set of pics unless I’m in a different size of clothing.

That means there won’t be weekly check-in numbers, like I was doing before, but I will write here, regardless.

I’ll be judging my loss on a couple of things: how my clothes fit, and how my body feels.  I have a plethora of weight-related complaints; I will know I’m making progress as those complaints abate.  These really are the top two things that matter in the long run, anyway, and if these items are showing progress, then who cares what the scale says?

Exercise. I’m still trying to figure out what to do about this one.  I have a hard time with exercise.  At my current weight and in my current circumstances, I’m pretty much restricted to pool work.  I like pool work when I’m actually in the pool; but getting there and getting out is a pain in the butt.  It becomes easy for my brain to convince me to not go, because it’s going to be tough.  I may need to pair exercise with something I really enjoy doing, so when I do one, I do both.  I’m totally up for suggestions. It has to be something I can do several times a week; and I live in a small town, so my resources are limited.  Initially, I’m thinking of pairing exercise with tanning.

As for motivators, I need to do things for myself that make me feel good about myself.  I feel absolutely ponderous, these days, and I just hate the way it makes me feel.  When I feel this way, my inner voice tells me that I’m the fattest one in the room, and that means I’m gross, so why make the effort to try to make myself look better?  Isn’t it like putting lipstick on a pig?  So I often don’t bother to make the effort to do my hair or makeup, or dress nicely.  I have the tools at my disposal; I need to treat myself better, because when I do these things for myself, I feel better.  It’s like that feeling of wearing nice underthings; no one else may see them, but if it makes you feel good, it’s worth it.

I need to get outside, and out of the house, as much as possible.  When you’re self-employed and morbidly obese, it’s an easy thing to become a hermit.  To shut yourself off from other people.  It becomes a demotivator when people ask me how much weight I’ve lost, and all they can talk about is weight loss.  I am tired of my weight being one of my identifiers… and honestly, when I lost a lot of weight several years back (140 pounds), I grew tired of one of my identifiers being my weight loss.

I’ll be giving more thought to this, but for now, this is where I am, and this post is my commitment to returning to the things that will help me achieve health.