Pesky plateau

It´s less than a week till Christmas and the extra-special meals that go along with it. I had hoped to break the barrier down from morbid obesity before that, but it doesn´t look like I´ll be able to make it any more, as my weight seems, once more, to be plateauing. Now this isn´t the first time that has happened, actually, I have encountered a plateau about every ten kilos down and at any weight I´d had for more than a couple of weeks. As I´ve gone down some ten kilos since this summer, hitting another of these should not come unexpectedly. From past experience I know it´s the time during which my body reorganizes itself around the lower weight, the time where the multiple chins and loose skin recondense and I find myself going down in clothes size in spite of my weight being stuck. But still- I had gotten so close! Less than three pounds from where I am, there´s the land of Just Overweight waiting, and me looking at it like a person on the wrong side of a river with no bridge. As it is, the high workload during the last weeks has been taking its toll on my dietary habits, resorting to pizza for dinner too often and having to dig into the pantry for pasta and rice because there was no time to grocery shop. So, I did go over my carbs, if not my calories, for several days in a row, and promptly regained two pounds. I´m not as vexed by that as I might be, because I know that filling the carbohydrate stores of the body back up will keep some water inside, too, to a tune of about two pounds, so, I know where the gain came from.
As I wrote before, the human body is a perfect accountability instrument.
Which is what I will have to keep in mind during the holidays, too. I am intending to stick to my guns as close as possible, which means leaving out all those starchy and sugary goodies, and hope I will be able to keep my weight and not regain. As I have taken some time off work beyond the holidays themselves, maybe, if the weather stays warm enough, I might even resume my morning walks that had stopped when the demands on my time at work became too big.
As I will be away from my scales for some time, too, being extra vigilant of my intake will be of the essence if I don´t want to have a rude awakening at the start of the new year.
Then again, I should not complain. I am, at present, twelve kilos down from what I weighed at the same time last year, and twenty-seven  from two years ago. At that going rate, I might even get close to being normal-weighted again by the end of next year. Provided I don´t fall off the wagon and stick to my caloric and carb limits, of course.
In the end, it´s perseverance that counts. I would never have believed that I could get my weight down to where I am now, given what more than twenty years of fighting my weight unsuccessfully had done to my metabolism, and the relatively slow speed at which I am going down again, compared to what some other big losers claim, is what I can do and keep up without stressing myself too much. Besides, what I also found is that my body would switch into starvation mode rapidly if I went too far below 1200 calories a day, so that, too, is a limit I have to respect.

Slow and easy does it. Sometimes, it even works small miracles.


Julia