I put half a pound on this week. This is not, in the grand scheme of things, a huge amount of weight, but I am a little disappointed and not at all surprised. I have not been particularly rigorous about taking care to be sensible with what I eat, and that somewhat laissez-faire attitude is being reflected in a lack of positive results.
All you can do in this situation, though, is hold up your hands, admit you made a mistake (or a few) and try to right the ship from hereon. What has already happened can’t be changed; what’s important is what you do next and what you learn from that mistake.
I’ve already started taking positive steps with the exercise. I made it out of the door and to the pool for a decent length swim this morning, after what was a surprisingly good night’s sleep. I woke up a lot of times, but every time it was because I was convinced it was 7am and time to get up, only to get the very pleasant surprise when I looked at my bedside clock and discovered that “time to get up” was still several hours away.
What I need to do is focus on some of the things that Slimming World talks about in the sessions, rather than just nodding along. Probably the key thing I need to focus on is “triggers” — in the slimming sense, these are the things that aren’t the greatest for you which you eat then immediately want more of. They are one of the biggest barriers to weight loss, because they are the things that are most likely to send you catastrophically “off plan”.
In many respects it’s like an addiction. I have some experience of dealing with people who have struggled through addiction to substances more harmful than food — thankfully, those addictions appear to be in the past for the people concerned — but I recognise some of the same behaviours in myself when I “lapse”. A desire to make myself “feel better” through the thing that is the source of a lot of my troubles; an inability to stop once I’ve started that “self-medication” process; the mental association between feeling like I “deserve” something that is bad for me for [insert justification here].
Part of my trouble is not having what I think of as “safety nets” in place — and the fact I’m somewhat inclined to think negatively of those safety nets. My immediate reaction to seemingly obvious advice like “don’t eat a bag of sweets, have a piece of fruit instead” is that this is an absolutely laughable statement, even though I know fruit can be perfectly satisfying and even delicious. I need to get out of that mindset — and to have those pieces of fruit readily to hand so I can start making positive associations with them.
There are countless other examples, but there are days when it just all feels like work. And it is work; work with tangible benefits over the long term. It’s those long-term benefits I need to keep my focus on, because it’s short-term factors — i.e. the way I’m feeling right now — that is causing me difficulties.
I don’t need advice or anything. I know what I need to do, and putting it down on “paper” will likely go at least a little way towards fixing some of those things a bit further forward in my mind. I know I can do this — I’ve done it once before — so I just have to knuckle down and actually do it.
For now, though, bed. Without biscuits.
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