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Getting Back on the Scale After the Holidays

Strategies and goals

Just before Thanksgiving, I posted How Not to Blow a Diet Over the Holidays, which contained the best information I had to offer about holding to a difficult course of fitness and weight loss during a time of year crammed with distractions, temptations, and surprises. Toward the end of the post I said, “Today I weigh 182 pounds. I’ll update this post in early January to let you know how it came out for me: I expect to have lost at least a few pounds.” Was my prediction sound? And just how useful did I find my own recommendations?

What worked
Well, my rash declaration definitely helped me focus my attention and reminded me to use the best knowledge I have. (After all, just knowing something isn’t the same thing as making active use of the knowledge), and the self-motivation skills I’ve been researching and writing about seem to have done the trick: my scale this morning tells me I weigh 177, five pounds less than I did a few days before Thanksgiving. I’ve lost roughly a pound a week over that time, most of it in the beginning of December, and am very close to my goal fitness level. (Exactly how close, I can’t be sure, as I’m not aiming for a number on the scale, but instead for a level of visible fitness.)

Did my pre-Thanksgiving strategies help me? Absolutely. I made a point of bringing food I could eat to celebrations and meals, planned what to eat ahead of time (including limits), took special care to track what I was eating, and talked freely about what I was doing to get support and to increase the potential rewards of sticking with it.

Unexpected complications
So did my own pre-holiday advice eliminate all trouble for me? Definitely not. The two problems I wasn’t expecting seem obvious in hindsight, but when I was making my plans, all I was worried about was the food that would be available to me.

The first of the surprise problems was time for exercise. I generally try to exercise as close as possible to every day. Over the holidays, there were a number of days when I would be with friends or family in all of my available time, and the idea of getting everyone up after Christmas dinner to go for a family run somehow didn’t seem very appropriate to me. Also, my habit of taking 3-5 Taekwondo classes a week was interrupted by holiday closures of the dojang (Taekwondo gym). So I squeezed in exercise when and where I could, more than once getting on the elliptical trainer or doing home Taekwondo practice well after 10:00 at night. In future, I’d want to plan better for these scheduling challenges, probably getting in some morning exercise instead of following my usual evening schedule–but I will also know to expect that I’ll get less exercise over the holidays, and to a limited extent, that’s OK with me.

The other problem I faced was a one-two punch: I would arrive home tired (though cheerful) after having eaten at irregular hours and spent the day with family or friends. I don’t know about you, but for me the combination of being tired and being off my normal eating schedule is a very bad one: it tends to make me feel hungry and inattentive, which means I’ll often just take whatever I think of first and eat it–hardly a recipe for weight loss success. A day like this broke my winning streak of keeping under 1700 calories a day and logging everything I ate, which had gotten up to 42 interrupted days. I’m now in the early days of a new winning streak, and have high hopes that it will carry me across my personal finish line as I rack up the days.

One good holiday season may be the most I’ll ever need
As I write this and do my best to extract knowledge for future (an example of keeping a feedback loop), I’m realizing that if all goes well, it’s very, very likely that when the 2010 holidays come around, I’ll have been on maintenance for quite a while, and while I’ll need to continue to be careful, I won’t need to be nearly as careful as I am now. In other words, losing weight over this past holiday season together with continued effort may mean I’ll never have to be quite so careful over the holidays again. Even if I had done no better than maintain my weight during that time, the same result would probably apply. For many people who are getting in shape, one really successful holiday season may be the make-or-break period for the entire process.

How did things go for you over the holidays? Any special difficulties or unusual accomplishments?

Regardless of how the holidays came out for you in terms of your health, we’re now at a time of year that is probably better suited to renewing commitment and redoubling efforts than any other, and we can use it to launch ourselves forward. Here’s to a powerfully motivated New Year.

Photo by oh_candy

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