If my weigh loss journey was a movie franchise, it would be The Matrix. The first year equals the first movie. It was endlessly fascinating and amazing to watch. Losing one hundred pounds in twelve months is a great accomplishment, just like the first Matrix was a great accomplishment of cinema. People left the experience happy and talking about what they just were witness to. The second year equals the second movie. There was a lot of hype and it was pretty passable. There were some awesome moments. (Like the interstate chase sequence - in the movie, not the weight loss.) But it was disappointing. The third year is the third movie. The wheels completely came off. It is hard to believe that this is the same franchise/journey. It is a disaster.
To recap my personal journey, in the first year, I lost one hundred pounds. I didn't exercise to speak of. I merely cut out foods that I could not control - burgers, subs, pizza, pasta, breakfast sandwiches, bread, cheese, ice cream, baked goods, soda. I was very strict with myself and establish a tight perimeter of food allowances. The weight came off quickly and consistently.
In the second year, I maintained that loss for most of the time. I would fluctuate between 255 and 265 most of the time, depending on a variety of factors. I also started to loosen the restrictions a bit. It didn't seem realistic to have such an unyielding set of guidelines forever. I still kept the troubling foods away. But I wasn't hyper-paranoid all the time. Things seemed to go pretty well until November - 22 months into the process.
I have Rheumatoid Arthritis. It is something I have dealt with for years. A while back I had a bad go of it and had to start some treatments for it. But it went into a kind of remission for several years. During this weight loss process, the RA came roaring back. It really made no sense. Every time I saw a doctor about the RA, they would suggest I lose weight. They thought the less stress on my joints, the better they would be. Instead, the opposite happened. I'm not going to lie about it - that was frustrating. I thought that I would be hurting less, not more. It finally got so bad that I had to start seeing a doctor to begin treatments. After a year of that course of medication, things were not improving. So I found a rheumatologist in Orlando and began aggressively dealing with the RA. I went onto methotrexate and folic acid. A side effect of that medication was a return of my acid reflux - which had gone away after I lost weight. I also, for some bizarre reason, had to begin taking allergy medicine for the first time in my life.
I don't know if the cocktail of medicines caused it or not. But instead of floating within that ten pound window like I had for almost a year, I rapidly gained another fifteen pounds. By March of this year - 27 months into the process - I was consistently at 280. Again, this caused massive frustration to me. I hadn't changed my eating habits that drastically from the second year. So why did I pack on the extra fifteen pounds so rapidly? After a few months of that, I got quite irritated.
If you have never battled weight issues, let me tell you the most disheartening thing you can face. It is when you are working hard, depriving yourself of foods, watching everyone else have fun, and things are not progressing. Actually, that is the second most disheartening thing. The WORST thing is when you are doing all of that and you GAIN weight. At a certain point, it feels pointless to keep up the effort. If you are going to gain weight doing things right, might as well do things wrong. Right?
The summer rolled around and the kids were out of school. This combined with a tough financial stretch for us. It has always been tough financially with Heather in medical school. But this summer felt tighter than ever before. This is an undeniable truth: it costs a lot to eat healthy. Vegetables, meat, fruit - those things are expensive. It is much easier and cheaper to rely on less healthy foods. It just became too difficult to make sure I always had lunches and leftovers that fit into my food plan. So I kept backpedalling. I started eating sandwiches for lunch with the kids. I still restricted myself to wheat bread, no cheese, and would add mustard and pickles to add flavor with few calories.
The monetary issues combined with my eroding willpower made for a disastrous situation. Before I knew it, I was having a lot of the foods I had banned before. In fact, there are very few things that I have not allowed myself to have - justifying it the whole way. The fact of the matter, though, was that I just stopped caring. The last time I weighed a little over a week ago, I was up to 292. I have gained back 37 pounds. Actually, it may be more - I don't know. I am afraid I can't stop this train. Even though I know I will absolutely hate myself if I can't control this, I still haven't gotten things under control. The really sad thing is that I have watched two of my friends who weighed much more than me successfully drop a lot of weight. One has lost 187 pounds in under a year. The other is up near 100 pounds. I know it is possible. I've experienced it and watched it. But I still have trouble believing that I can do it again.
The reason I made the link to a movie franchise is because there is a new practice in Hollywood that I think can apply to my efforts. It is the reboot. When a movie franchise has run its course, or horribly derailed, it gets a reboot. We have seen this with Spider-Man, X-Men, Batman, The Hulk, Star Trek. It is a successful business model. You still are able to utilize the popular franchise but can just ignore the disaster that came out a few years earlier. This is what I need to do. I need to reboot my weight loss efforts.
As successful as my process was the first time, there were some major flaws. First of all, I never really learned to not treat food as a coping mechanism. As I have documented on this blog, food makes me happy. When I am sad, I eat. When I am stressed, I eat. When I am celebrating, I eat. For a plethora of reasons, food fills that role in my life. I never learned to change that; I just changed WHAT foods I used for that. Instead of pies and donuts, I would have frozen yogurt. Instead of pizza, I would have 4Rivers BBQ. I found "acceptable" foods within my parameters to use. But I needed to stop that reliance on food for happiness. That needs to change. Second, I never learned to control portion sizes. If anything, I ate more than I used to. Since I wasn't eating pasta, I would have extra meat. If I couldn't have what everyone else was having, I would have a big pile of meat. Again, I may not be having five slices of pizza. But my portion sizes were still out of control. My bowl of frozen yogurt was the same size as the bowl of ice cream I used to have.
Third, I never exercised. People told me to do it. I told them to shut it. I hate exercise. I hate sweating. I hate manual labor or physical exertion. But the weight loss cannot be maintained without some physical activity. What I found is that I hit an equilibrium point where my stagnant lifestyle and my reduced caloric intake meet. So, when I relaxed my restraints even a small amount, that added influx of calories was over what I burned sitting and using the remote. As much as I detest the thought of it, I HAVE to add some kind of exercise. Fourth, I danced too close to the flame, if you will.
When you combine all of that, it is time for a reboot. I know it won't be easy. I have gotten back into the habit of eating some stuff I shouldn't have. And it still tastes good. It is going to be a hard journey to break the habits a second time. I know it can be done. But there are a lot of doubts in my mind. I just can't stand the thought that I will be back where I was. Time to reboot.
