I admit it. I got lucky and it’s luck that has played a huge part in my weight loss maintenance. I’m completely serious. I got very, very lucky when I got to the point where my weight loss period was ending and some things happened in my life that made it much easier to stick to my newer healthy habits and much harder to revert to my old ways.
It was the summer of 2004 when I got to the point when I had lost almost exactly 100 lbs since starting my current diet the previous September. I was still fairly heavy, around 200 lbs, but my weight loss was slowing down, it was getting harder and though I didn’t realize it, I was probably at a very dangerous juncture where frustration with slowing weight loss could have easily sent me back to my old ways.
How did I get lucky? Well, I met my husband. I plucked up the courage to put a profile up on a popular internet dating website. A day later, I got an email from a very nice gentleman asking if I’d like to correspond with him. We emailed back and forth with increasing frequency for about 5 days before we decided it was time to meet. I went home from that first date thinking that this was a guy I could see myself marrying some day. And two years later, I did marry him. We were fairly inseperable after the first couple of weeks of dating though.
Now, I don’t give Jim the credit for being the reason I’ve been able to maintain my weight loss. It has been my effort and it’s my credit, but I do acknowledge that without Jim, my life circumstances might not have changed in such a way that it made my weight loss maintenance much easier. First, Jim had had a health scare just a month before I met him. He had a gall bladder attack and had to have his gall bladder removed. It was painful and convinced him he needed to pay better attention to his diet. His eating habits hadn’t been horrible to start with, he tells me, he’d already cleaned them up and lost his own extra weight before meeting me, but now he was very concerned with his diet and rarely ate fatty or junky foods at all.
Can you imagine how much easier that made things for me? I wasn’t having to try to eat healthily while my new boyfriend was eating french fries and pizza. We pretty much ate the same kinds of foods. And knowing his history, I certainly wasn’t about to eat french fries and pizza in front of him, even if I was frustrated and wanted to go off my plan.
At the same time, Jim liked exercise. He played hockey a couple times a week and went for a walk or bike ride on his non-hockey nights. I was *not* exercising at the time and Jim encouraged me to go with him each time. I had more trouble with this as I didn’t enjoy it at all. It wasn’t so bad in the summer, but by the time October and November rolled around, it was too freaking cold to enjoy a leisurely walk. I knew I had to exercise though, I knew it would help with my very slow (now pretty much stopped) weight loss. When I passed a running store in the spring and saw a sign advertising a Learn to Run clinic, I asked him if he’d like to join with me. Frankly, I figured with running, I could get my exercise in faster and get it over with, that was my motivation for taking it up. Now exercise was scheduled, an event. And there was a 5k race at the end, a goal, so I couldn’t blow off a run, I needed to keep up or I wouldn’t be ready for the race.
My point about being lucky with two of the most important aspects of weight loss maintenance – diet & exercise – is that I fell into a situation where it was harder to go off plan than it was to stay on it. That was lucky. Most days I don’t stick to my diet or exercise plan because I’m thinking I want to stay healthy and fit, I’m doing it because it’s easier than not doing it. It’s become my default position, not some good place I’m striving to get to.
I know my food choices are being watched by Jim. Not in a bad way, but I know he knows what I eat well enough that if I eat off plan, he’s aware of it. And he wouldn’t give me a hard time about eating off plan, but he’d know and I’d know he knows and sometimes, it’s just that knowledge that helps me make the right choice. And we ask each other about exercise plans everyday. Not to motivate each other or push each other, but for scheduling purposes. Are we running together? Is he playing hockey? Did I run at lunch with my co-worker so he’s running alone tonight? It’s not that we are pushing exercise on each other, it’s just that it’s so ingrained into our daily lives that it would be odd if we didn’t do it.
I got very lucky. I’m not sure I would have realized without this lucky happenstance of falling into ideal life circumstances right at the right time how important it is to structure my life so that health and fitness is easier to do than to not do. My habits before were such that it would have been easy to slip back into old ways. I didn’t exercise, watched too much TV, didn’t cook much so stopping for take out food and drive thru food was too easy. I was living with my sister and her kids at the time, and there was more sugar & refined carbohydrates in the house than I would be able to resist for the rest of my life. I’m not sure I would have made it in that environment.
And even if I’d realized how important changing my environment was, would I have had the strength and determination to reorder my life in such a way as to create that atmosphere? I don’t know how others do it. How much harder would this have been to do with a husband who ate junk food in the house? With a toddler? With teenage boys who devour snack foods in one breath? With a family already used to eating foods that I now find easier to just not by to reduce temptation? Could I have had the strength to change my family’s eating patterns? Would I have had the time to do it? Would I have the time to exercise with a full time job and kids? What if I travelled for business a lot? How much harder would this be?
See what I mean about lucky?
I really think that changing our lifestyles to ones that support health & fitness instead of working against it is essential for long term weight loss maintenance. And I think I got darn lucky to fall into that lifestyle. My hat is off to those of you who had to create it yourselves instead of falling into it.
Not sure if that is luck – I’d say you were blessed! Thanks for such a positive post.