What to do?

A terrible two weeks of stress (mostly work-related) have finally derailed my efforts, though I hung on by my fingernails for a long time.  I stayed abstinent for a long time but my portion control wasn’t the best, so my weight loss stalled at the 171 range, then I ate something sweet (I think it was a couple of bites of a Peach Supreme pie while out for coffee with my daughters) and then it all began again.  I call it being “back on the sauce”.  I’m not in full-blown out-of-control eating mode but I can get there pretty quickly, and then I will rapidly gain weight.  At my age, it’s pretty discouraging how quickly one puts back on the weight that was such a struggle to lose.

I also have had to miss three weeks of OA meetings (reasons:  vacation, working late, feeling ill) so that isn’t helping.  And in all honesty, my abstinence was pretty wishy-washy.  I avoided white sugar and white flour, but I was eating all sorts of other stuff (lots of nuts, raisins, and other calorically dense foods).  No wonder I was losing so slowly, which made me get discouraged.  Which left me vulnerable to that "first compulsive bite".

So what to do?  Can I establish a realistic eating plan that I can live with long-term that will result in a slow but discernable weight loss, enough to keep me going?  Is it realistic to give up my trigger foods of white sugar and white flour forever, which is essentially the OA model?  The longest I’ve ever managed to do that is for about 9 months, and it’s pretty difficult given how pervasive these items are. My Big Birthday looms, and I’ve always given myself permission to eat whatever I want on my birthday, which doesn’t work well in practice because it usually takes me weeks, if not months, after that lovely day of eating Krispy Kremes and ice cream and chips and lattes and more, to get back on track. 

I was reading my cousin’s blog (she invented an exercise method, The Bar Method, which I do via DVD, and has a lot of devoted followers) about what she eats.  She’s 5’5” and weighs 114, a weight I DO NOT aspire to, and I guess people always ask her what she eats so she wrote a blog post about it.  It was pretty interesting to see what she eats (which is very little but not totally perfect nutritionally), but what got me discouraged about the post was she had a link to a website that calculates your daily caloric needs based on age, weight, height, and activity level, and according to this website, I only need about 1900 calories a day to maintain my current weight of 171, and to lose a pound a week I can only eat about 1400 calories (my stomach growls just thinking about it) and to lose 2 pounds a week, which I don’t want to do, I can only eat nine hundred and something calories a day, which would be starvation rations.  Yuck, I guess being firmly in middle age means my metabolism has really, really slowed. 

In the good news however:

• My six-year-old started first grade this week.
• My oldest is finalizing her wedding plans (wedding in December)
• Today is the one-year anniversary of my husband’s emergency bypass surgery and the doctors say he is doing very well.  Glad you’re still with us, 99.99%!
• The end of the long, hot summer is in sight!