and one forward again.
Still four pounds above my lowest weight I had reached this year, though.
But I keep going.
After all, while the human body does, unfailingly, hold you accountable for what you do to it sooner or later, the measurable results may take just a bit of time to materialize. As it is, I have been back on plan for just a few days, and it seems the trend is reversing already, so this is encouraging.
What I find particularly helpful these days is the smaller plates we use, because they do make the portions I eat appear so much more sufficient than if the food were floating on one of our old plates.
For quite a while, in German-speaking countries, the simple answer to what you have to do to lose weight was shortened to three letters namely, FdH, meaning "gobble down just one half" (the -somewhat rude- German phrase is "friss die Hälfte").
Somewhere around the Seventies, that concept suddenly got a bad rap from the diet industry. Eating just one half? We were told that this would send us into imminent danger of malnutrition. Instead, there were, suddenly, lengthy and convoluted plans, which told you to a "t" what you had to eat. That the portions there were, most of the time, even less than that proverbial half of what you had before, showed that the criticism was somehow unfounded. And on top of it, these plans brought the reappearance of the forbidden fruit, only that it wasn´t fruit most of the time, it was any food that tasted good and made you feel good.
There was, at that time, a person in my immediate family who did have a weight problem after quitting smoking. (and yes, it was the person who kept calling me fat even though I was of normal weight) The person in question started out trying to conquer that problem with those diet plans.
What I could, involuntarily, watch then was the effect that such diets have on a person´s mood. After two or three weeks into that diet, the person turned from just irritating to downright foul-mooded, irascible, and all in all a b**** to live with for everyone around. Only when going "off" the diet was some semblance of normalcy reached again. Unfortunately, the former weight was reached, too, so the cycle started over.
Leaving apart the shenanigans I was subjected to because that person feared that I,too, might get fat, just watching that person yo-yoing up and down on those plans and seeing that losing weight, at least on those plans, meant losing one´s composure in the process, too, convinced me there had to be something wrong there. With what I know today, and a lifetime of dieting experiences under my belt, I am certain of it.
The key word here is sustainability.
Any way of eating that you cannot keep up for the rest of your life without spinning off into a blue funk may rid you of some pounds. But, if you can´t wait to get off it again because you can´t wait to dig back into your favourite foods again, don´t toss the too-big clothes because you´ll need them. Soon. No matter how complicated the plan was, or how expensive the foods you had to buy for it (steak for lunch and dinner, anyone?).
Now, if I do not diet, there are certain foods I like, and return to regularly. Science has tried to find out why we like certain foods, but for me, I just take it as a given that I like some foods and dislike others.
And if I can work with my likes and dislikes, I will probably have a plan for myself that I can stick to.
Which brings us back to- you guessed it- the old advice to halve your portions if you want to lose weight.
If I watch my portion size, I can eat almost anything.
Of course, the correct portion size may be way less than what I used to gobble down.
But halving what I would pile on my plate is a good place to start. Eating just half is, most importantly, not sending me off into such a foul mood as I would have if I had to eat stuff I hate.
And my husband is grateful for that, too.
Julia
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