So, the dreaded event has come and passed. I went to that family celebration, and I met my critics in person for the first time in four years. I also met a number of old acquaintances I had not seen for as long, and each of them complimented me on my new weight. From "them", not a word on it. It´s more than I hoped for.
Otherwise, the general mood was that of a pack of wolves faced with a newcomer, not knowing how to treat each other, being extremely careful not to step on any conversational land mines. Normalcy that was not. Not even the semblance of it. But we went through the motions of acting civilised, making small talk and pretending the big bang had never happened. I guess that is the maximum I could hope for, considering how much I dreaded that event and meeting them.
Knowing that that meeting is now a thing of the past instead of looming before me means knowing that now I can go back to doing things, weight-loss-wise, not in order to prepare for that meeting, but for my own sake.
On the one hand, that means no more deadline ahead. On the other hand, the knowledge that I had to go and see them and the desire to be as slim as possible until then has perhaps been too big a part of my motivation to lose weight.
Now that is gone, I will still have to get myself back on track with eating and exercise. I have had a seven-pound regain over the holidays, which I want recondensed as fast as possible, and I´m still clinically obese, which means that I missed last year´s goal, too.
So what do I aim for this year?
Getting below morbid obesity is, of course, still top of the list. Getting back to "normal" BMI would mean condensing another 37 pounds, or almost twice my annual losses from 2010 or 2011, so I don´t think it would be realistic for me to set that as a goal.
Then again, I didn´t start losing in 2010 until late August, and in 2011, there was a six-month stretch of plateaus and regains that effectively stalled my weight loss half of the time. Were I to go down with my weight at the rate I did during the periods of my big weight losses, and not hit another plateau, I could indeed be normal-weighted by the end of the year 2012.
But first I have to get back into the groove of recondensing, which means re-starting to journal what I eat, and being extra careful about carbs.
Three weeks of having to eat a "standard" diet with bread, potatoes, and sugar in it have been working havoc on the control I had over my eating impulses, too, which means I´ll have to apply more willpower than what I needed by the end of last year.
They also had a detrimental effect on my digestion, which I hope will disappear fast when I return to the way of eating that helped me lose those first sixty pounds. If I regard the experience as an experiment, I have proved that I feel less good all over, have poor digestion, and gain weight, as soon as I eat more than minuscule amounts of carbohydrates.
Luckily, the temptations in the shape of Christmas sweets and cakes have mostly left the house by now. The last unopened package of stollen I gave as a hostess gift to my relatives. Let them eat cake, as Marie Antoinette was supposed to have said, while I will return to a way of eating that is better for my body, and my shape.
I´ll see how far that takes me.
Julia
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