2nd October, 2021
For those of you out there who want to, or are trying to lose weight, why do you want to do it ? Why did you start? I ask this because it's important, you have to know the why to be able to keep going when it gets difficult. Which ever way you decide to do it, it will have it's moments of being hard, but if you know just why you are putting yourself through this , knowing why can really help. If you have a lot of weight to lose it can take quite a while before you feel the benefit, and even longer before other people notice. You need to be able to focus your mind on the task ahead of you. It is worth the effort when the results start to emerge, but once you have got near to the weight you want to be, you definitely have to remind yourself once again why you are doing this. It is so easy when you start to look slimmer and start to get compliments and feel good to slip back into old habits and undo all the good you have done.
For me, in past years when I used to go to a slimming club, I would stop at this stage and try to do it “by myself”. To save money, or because going to the club didn't fit in with what I was doing, they were good enough reasons in my mind, but it never worked out and the weight would creep back on. I personally would then think I had put weight on because I had stopped going to the club and would either then go back to the same club or try a different one if I felt too embarrassed to go back to the original one. I went back to so many different clubs that way. Looking back to those days, I realise I wanted to lose weight, but I don't think it was 1. Really for the right reasons and 2. Put all the responsibility on the club and the latest “magic” diet. For me this just became a time where I felt that I had failed. I hadn't really because what I was doing was not going to help me succeed in the long run. I was trying to lose weight for the wrong reasons and I was following a plan that ultimately was designed not to succeed long term. There is no profit in someone losing weight and never coming back, is there? I have been so guilty in the past for losing weight for someone else or worse because someone told me to. That is not going to work. Going back to how I started this blog, you have to know why you want to lose weight and you have to do it for yourself. It has to be important to you. You are the one who has to decide what you eat and be able to justify to yourself why you have made the choices that you have made. You need to learn how your system works and not depend on a way that may be too rigid or not fit into your lifestyle. If we are prone to gaining weight then we will always be prone to gaining weight, and for long term success we need to find our own way, for us and for no one else.
Having said that, it is lovely when people support you during your journey and comment on your success. When I went to a slimming club meeting I personally loved the praise I got when I lost weight and would do anything during the week to lose weight and get that praise. What I did to make myself lose weight was not always a healthy way to live. To cut the amount of food back so drastically just to get that bit of praise seems so foolish now, but I did it. The emotions and pressure involved in going to a club each week to get on those scales became too much for me. Trying so hard to lose as much weight as I could as quickly as I could became an unhealthy obsession. I would get so upset when I knew I had been 'good' that week and didn't get a good result on those scales. That is one of the reasons I decided to do it by myself. Even if my decision hadn't been made just before lockdown I would still have done it myself because I had to find a way that worked for me without so much pressure. So when I am asked how I have lost 102 pounds I will say, “ I really thought about why I needed to lose weight, I found a way that suited me, and I did it for me. It wasn't easy , but it was well worth the effort I was worth the self care I decided to give myself”.
If we feel we need to lose some weight, we should firstly think about what's right for us and why we really want to change. If change is what you want do you own research and find a healthy lifestyle that's right for you, because we are all worth a little self care .
Until next time,
Love, Jackie
xx
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