I have also been reading the posts from people who say, "I plan to lose 120 pounds this year" or "I plan to lose 100 pounds this year" and I have been deliberately not replying to them because I have learned that there is really nothing I can say. The posts make me somewhat sad, because I know that most of these people are going to get rapidly discouraged and most of them will not be here in another month or two.
There are people on this forum who have lost 100 pounds or more in a year. A couple that come to mind are Chemlady and ItstheWoo. However, they are definitely the exceptions and I think it is a mistake for other people to expect to follow the same weight loss pattern. In my opinion, it is better to have lower expectations and be pleasantly surprised if you exceed your expectations, rather than set extremely high expectations that you have a very small chance of meeting. We can control what we eat and how much we exercise; we can't control how fast our bodies lose weight. The rate at which our bodies lose weight is dependent upon a lot of things -- our age, our past history of dieting, the amount of weight we need to lose, our emotional state (I find that my body holds onto weight during periods of stress and from what I have read there are hormonal reasons for this), other health conditions we may have, etc.
My first five or six months low carbing I lost about 50 pounds. During the next year, I lost another 50 pounds. I have it in the back of my head that I will be very happy if I lose 40 pounds during 2004, because that will put me in a position where I can hope to reach my goal weight in 2005. I'm sure I'll lose slower in 2004 than I did in 2003 because I have less weight to lose and because I have been low carbing longer. If I don't lose the 40 pounds and I lose 20 pounds or 30 pounds in 2004, I will still be happy because I will finish up the year lighter than I started it. I get healthier and more energetic with each lost pound, so it's not like I need to get all the way to my goal weight to realize the benefits of eating this way. I think we need to learn to appreciate and celebrate how far we have come, rather than focusing on how far we have left to go. I weighed about 50 pounds less on January 1, 2003 than I did on January 1, 2002; and about 50 pounds less on January 1, 2004 than I did on January 1, 2003; how many people can say that? No, I didn't lose 100 pounds in a year, but I have lost 100 pounds total.
There are two woman who joined this forum about a year go that I will never forget. The first woman had very ambitious goals for how much weight she was going to lose and how fast she was going to lose it. She really pushed herself with regard to both exercise and eating -- severely limiting her calories while exercising for large periods of time each day. She definitely treated this like a diet, not a way of eating. We had a few exchanges in her journal about this, but she insisted that she had to lose the weight quickly and this was the only way she could do it. She was reasonably young (I'd guess 30-ish) and lost a lot of weight very rapidly (on the order of 50 pounds). People on the forum were very admiring of her. If you read her journal, there were lots of posts from people who wanted to know how she did it because they wanted to do the same thing. She disappeared one day, then came back a month or two later and wrote a post about how she had eaten a few carbs one day, gotten totally off track, and was now 20 or so pounds heavier than she had been. She posted a few more times and then disappeared again. My guess is that she could never get back on track. Because she was treating this like a diet, instead of a way of eating, she was unable to sustain what she was doing. She was racing so fast toward her goal that when she fell down she was overwhelmed and couldn't get up.
The second woman who I can't forget joined the TDC also about a year ago, and insisted that she had to lose weight very rapidly because losing weight was going to change her life. I tried to gently give her some advice in response to a question she asked in the TDC and she told me that losing a pound a week might be acceptable to me, but it was unacceptable to her, so she wasn't going to take my advice. She disappeared after a few weeks and then reappeared a couple months ago in the TDC, weighing more than she did the first time she was here, and again posting that she was desperate, needed support, and had to lose all the weight immediately. Once again, she disappeared after a week or so and I am sure that she did not manage to lose any weight during 2003.
I am pretty sure that neither of these women was as successful as I was last year, even thought their goals were much more ambitious than mine. It's not your goals that matter, it's your actions. We need to focus on doing this one day at a time and celebrate each lost pound that doesn't come back. Those pounds do add up over time!
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