Act-as-if (Fake-it-till-you-make-it)

This isn't quite the last day of April, but it's close enough, so I'll post my updated weight loss chart.

I had some terrible diet days in April. I had some pretty decent days, too. Apparently I had more good days than bad according to the scales. And I'm sure the daily exercise has helped.

It's a good feeling to look at my chart and see the dots drop.

I tried various tactics in April - - calorie counting, food exchanges, omitting sugar, intuitive eating, a morning fast... Then I went back to a method that's been stuck in my brain for months, probably years. It's called act-as-if. Basically, it's telling yourself you are already where you want to be, and behaving accordingly.

In my case, it's putting food on my plate in the amount I would need to maintain my ideal weight (substantially less than eating to maintain my current body weight!)

It's saying no to second helpings (or nibbling as I clear stuff away from the table).

It's not eating in the evening before I go to bed. If I've GOT to munch on something while I read or watch TV, I try a carrot.

It's walking a mile every day, either outside or with my walking DVD in the living room.

It's making better choices when I'm away from home, such as a decaf latte with lowfat milk and no sugar instead of malt, or a turkey breast Subway sandwich instead of a MacDonald hamburger and fries.

It's saying no to that candy bar calling out to me in the checkout lane at Safeway, and popping a stick of gum into my mouth instead.

I'm going to trust that skinny thinking will help get me where I want to be. And as the lyrics go,

I'm not where I want to be,Not where I ought to be,
But thank God I'm not where I was.

I'm hoping acting-as-if is one way to rewrite the script in my brain. If I stop the craziness of eating the way I have always eaten, with all the bad habits, then how can I expect to see change? If I eat and live like I would at forty pounds less than I am today, how can I not see change?

I stumbled onto a page for Alcoholics Anonymous. A suggestion often made to people who are stuck in a cycle of poor choices and behaviors is to act-as-if, implying if you follow the steps and teachings of the program, the program will begin to work for you.

Another web page suggested acting-as-if could be looked at as living a faith-based life rather than an evidence based life, tapping into the power of the possible. That sounds pretty thought-worthy to me.

Next month (or sooner) I'll let you know how it's working.

A marathon, not a sprint...

I've been eating like a crazy person since my husband's been gone on a trip, doing just terrible with my diet. I was reading something this morning, though, not from any diet book but from a book on caregiving. There was a phrase: "Caregiving is not a sprint, it's a marathon." The whole gist of that is its for the long-haul, so a caregiver needs to pace herself, take breaks, have reasonable expectations, or else she'll burn out long before the end.

 

While that is true for caregiving, it also applies to getting healthy and dieting. Looking back to the beginning of this disaster with my diet, when I'd been doing so very well for months, I decided to go in high gear and cut my calories back more than what I was doing. I wanted to see bigger losses, partly because of this new thing with prediabetes.

 

I didn't do anything terribly drastic, but that small change threw my "alter ego" into rebellion. It screamed, 

"I hate change! I was managing just fine on what we were doing and I was giving you a pound a month loss. But no, you couldn't be happy with that. You want to see a pound a week loss. Well, baby, that's not reasonable. And besides that, I'm tired of this whole dieting thing. I quit. You are on your own. Don't expect any help from me. Infact, I am going to sabotage everything you do from now on. And that's that."

 

That's exactly how it's felt lately, like a case of mutiny. Every night I've thought about the next day's plans, and every morning I start out well, but then the battle begins. So, I've revised my plan once again. I'm ready to try the light dieting I was doing, forgetting about big losses, and if I can get back to a pound a month I will stay with that. Maybe Esmerelda will call off the rebellion.

 

My appetite seems to have increased, even exploded since my husband's been gone. But not just with me. The birds have been going crazy outside, carving away the seed block until it's down to nearly nothing. They'll probably finish it off today. It should have lasted another week. So tell me, how do they know he's gone?