You’ve made it to your goal weight. Yahoo! But in the past it has always crept up again and you have regained all the weight you lost and even added extra ballast. So now is not the time to relax but to enter a slightly different phase of mindfulness. But how do you control your eating when you have always had a yoyo relationship with your weight?
For many of us, the whole weight loss journey starts with wresting control back from the sugar fiend, because while he has us in his grip we are his puppets—little fat ragdolls dancing sluggishly to his siren tune.
But say by some miracle we have managed to drop the weight and look fantastic. How do we keep it up? Or I should say, down? Most of us have experienced that sweet spot where we are at the right weight and eating the right food, then it all goes haywire … perhaps, gradually, perhaps in a tsunami of bad decisions or from simply taking our eyes off the ball. Or having our eyes on the donuts, perhaps.
Some of us just have to accept that we need to be vigilant, pretty much forever. We must do everything we possibly can to stay in that sweet spot where we have the control we need. Sometimes I’m sure we have some internal fear of succeeding and sabotage ourselves just when we’ve made it.
It’s not easy. But it is fairly simple. We decide in advance what we will be eating. That helps with control. When we are preparing the food we have decided on while we were being rational and careful, we weigh and measure, using our previous diet as a guide and factoring in, exactly, the extra calories we are adding. That helps with portion control.
Some people think that having to weigh or measure food after the reducing diet is finished is ridiculous … a waste of time … an indication that you have failed after all. It is none of those things. It’s a tiny little aid that keeps us on the right track. If a little weighing is all that’s required to keep our newly slim figures forever, it’s a very small investment in time and effort for a priceless measure of peace.