By Lynn Haraldson-Bering
After reading all your comments and emails in response to Barbara’s last blog, the more convinced I am that maintainers share more in common than people realize. Many of your answers had similar themes, and I could relate to every one of them.
Maintenance feels like a secret society sometimes, only without initiations or secret handshakes. We’ve all paid our dues, though, and if there is one word I culled from your responses to best summarize weight-loss and maintenance it would be “patience.”
I’ve been thinking about one of the questions Barbara asked: “What is the one thing that you want to tell people who are losing weight right now?” I wondered about the 300-pound me and if she’d have listened to the 127-pound me. While I was in awe of and somewhat motivated by people who’d lost the kind of weight I wanted to lose, mostly I was intimidated. I never adopted the attitude, “If SHE did it I can do it” because I didn’t know for sure I could do it. After all, like many of you, I’d been down that losing road before and look where it got me. I wanted this time to be the last time. I wanted to be a success and keep it off for good, but until I developed patience, that wasn’t going to happen. And you couldn’t tell the 300-pound me that. I had to learn it by myself.
When I began losing weight in January 2005, I suffered from what I call Centipede Syndrome. When I was a kid, my bedroom was in the basement. It was a nicely finished basement, but a basement nonetheless, and no amount of drywall could keep out the creepy crawlies.
One night I was reading in bed and I felt something on my leg. I threw back the covers and a centipede was crawling up my calf. I screamed and brushed it off and, well, kept screaming. My dad ran downstairs and rescued me from the centipede I’d flung back into my bed, but all night and for weeks to come, I slept in pants and with the blankets tucked all around me.
When I “woke up,” so to speak, and realized I was 300 pounds, it was like a centipede was crawling up my leg. “Get the weight off me NOW!” was the frantic mindset I was in. It was like I was feeling all the years of weight-related embarrassment all at once and I was completely impatient with weight loss. Just as I was all the other times I’d been down the scale.
I tried and failed several times in those early months to shake that sense of the urgency. I celebrated the big losses and criticized the small ones. I developed charts and graphs that I used to estimate how long it would take me to get to certain weights based on my average losses. I pored over them day in and day out until something clicked. I don’t even remember what it was. Maybe I was just tired of the stress. But something caused me to slow down and stop looking so far ahead, and to concentrate on the day, the meal, and the moment.
I don’t know if patience is inherent for some folks, but it was definitely a learned skill for me. And I have to hone that skill every day. I recently had a root canal and was given a steroid shot afterwards. My dentist also treated me for an infection in one of the roots and I took antibiotics for 10 days. My weight went from 127 to 132 overnight and stayed there for a few days. Slowly it crept to 130, 129, 128 and finally, today, back to 127. It took almost three weeks to get back to “normal.” But surprisingly I didn’t panic. I knew I’d done nothing different in terms of diet and exercise and I trusted that my body was responding to the medications. A few times I wondered if aliens had taken the real me and replaced me with this person of some advanced patience. Then I realized that’s what comes with time and trust. Patience.
The 300-pound me didn’t understand that. I know I’d heard it. People said it all the time, “You’ve got to be patient with the process.” But I didn’t really hear it until I started living it.
Today on the elliptical I listened to the song “Gonna Fly Now” from the movie “Rocky.” There aren’t many words in the lyrics, but they are powerful, and combined with the dramatic furor of trumpets and drums and strings, they give me goose bumps. I thought about the 300-pound me and how an elliptical was as far away from possible as going to the moon, but somehow she thought she could. And she did.
So my fellow maintainers in this secret society, thank you very much for your willingness to share your insights and advice. I recommend you download the theme from “Rocky” and allow yourself to feel the good vibes for developing the patience necessary to do this day in and day out.
“Trying hard now
it's so hard now
trying hard now
Getting strong now
won't be long now
getting strong now
Gonna fly now
flying high now
gonna fly, fly, fly...”
