 Define weight-loss success
How do you define successful weight loss?
One person stops eating sweets, or perhaps stops snacking after dinner and loses two pant sizes. Another person can't seem to lose weight unless she eliminates some particular food (usually bread) from her diet and eats no more than 1200 calories per day.
Why do some have to work so hard while others seemingly have it easy?
Here's the secret: It's not the results that are so different; it's their differing lifestyles and perspectives. Let's take a look at these two people.
First, what do they have in common? They are both female, age 35-45. Both are average height and weight and exercise at a moderate level 3-4 times per week. They are not particularly heavy women, but feel the most comfortable about 20 lbs or so lighter than they are. So what is different about these two ladies?
The first lady has a strong focus on health. Although she tracks her weight, her main measuring tool is how her clothing fits and her energy levels. Her food intake is fairly consistent. She eats the same thing most days for breakfast and lunch and has a stock of dinners that she rotates throughout the month. She does like to snack on treats and knows that this is her main weakness. So, she decides to eliminate that as much as possible. She finds that after a couple of weeks her new routine feels pretty comfortable and is now a part of her regular lifestyle. She hardly misses the snacks. Over a year, she loses about 20 pounds and is thrilled that she was able to do so with only small changes.
The second lady has a strong focus on the scale. It is her main measuring tool. She weighs herself very often and the results often dictate her mood for the day. Her food patterns have a tendency to be erratic, especially on the weekends. She eats out often so she has little control over the calories in her food. As a result, her weight goes up and down a lot. When she sees the scale get past a certain point, she will start cutting back drastically to get it back down to tolerance levels. Because her habits tend toward quick gains, she has to make large changes to balance them with quick losses. In that same year, throughout all the ups and down, she ends up with the same 20 lb weight loss, but feels that for all of her hard work, it should have been more.
As you can see, the first lady made small changes that wouldn't show quickly on the scale, perhaps a half pound per week at most. But with time and patience, in a year, 20 pounds were gone with little effort. The second lady needed to make drastic changes in order to fulfill her definition of success.
So, which one are you? How do you define your weight loss success? Is it working for you? If not, it may be time to reconsider your definition. |
