November 19

Nov 19, 2024

Just not gaining weight during the holidays, while perhaps a vast improvement and not to be discounted, is not as good as it will need to be if you currently weigh a lot more than you want to.  It would be like just not overextending yourself on your credit card any more than you usually do each month or each holiday season.  How about the idea of not overextending yourself at all – at living within your means all the time, including the holidays?  Sooner or later, you need to learn to go through the holidays at the weight you want to be if you ever want to get and stay there. Quantifying your goal (whether you do it mathematically or with a specific menu plan) and shooting to live there rather than temporarily “dieting” makes so much more sense, since that is the long term task.

I know that this can be disconcerting to recognize, but it is an important reality check.  You can then see if your goal weight really makes sense for you and adjust it to something more realistic if necessary.  Many are unsuccessful at weight management because they set unrealistic goals for themselves and don’t realize it.  Huge health improvements can be accomplished with a sustained 10% loss in body fat.

It can also help you to not rest on your laurels if significant change is still needed.  Even if you can’t quite accomplish your intended target weight yet and want to set more motivating interim goals, it is important to keep your eye on the ultimate task.  One of the main reasons that people gain back significant weight, I think, is that they never quantified the task to maintain the loss (never really knew what changes they had to keep in place) and so went back to a lot of their old behaviors thinking that now that they lost the weight they can relax.  Nothing erodes commitment to weight management like weight gain.

Case in point:  One of my clients was saying just this during her first holiday season after she had lost about 30% of the weight she wanted to lose.  While just not gaining would in fact be a vast, vast, vast improvement for her (since historically she had gained throughout the holidays), it still isn’t going to be the right food plan or calorie range in the long run for her to be the weight she wants to be.  It can be a great interim goal perhaps, but not really what she wants for herself in the long run.  It would be like wanting to get an A in biology because you aspire to become an oceanographer, but settling for a C+ this semester because at least it is better than the C- you had been getting.  At 238 lbs., if she just doesn’t gain, she would still be creating a surplus of about 900 calories per day above her real goal of 150 lbs.  This would accumulate to almost 2 lbs. of weight gain per week if she went into the holidays at her 150 lb. goal.  That’s 12 lbs. gained between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.

Another case in point:  A particularly successful client who had lost, at the time of this story, almost 100 lbs. lost his grip on a few key behaviors and gained about 8 lbs. in five weeks.  Sounds innocuous enough, right?  He’s thinking, “Hey it’s only 8 lbs. out of almost 100 lost.  What’s the big deal?”  But if you take a look at the math (the amount of calories he had to be taking in on the average daily to have gained that kind of weight in that time frame), he was back to conducting himself at close to his old weight – re-embracing that old lifestyle, as it were.  That is a very different picture than the mere 8 lbs. would seem to reflect, and important for him to understand.