Category: Deep thoughts

Being someone who weighs less does not mean that you have to replace your turkey on whole wheat with steamed tofu, brown rice and algae flakes. (Unless that’s something really love.)

If a turkey sandwich is a lunch that works for you (i.e., it’s easy for you to get/make, you like the way it tastes and the way it makes you feel) then that is a perfectly reasonable starting place.

There will be times when it’s tough to find the motivation to stick with the effort. Perhaps you’re not yet seeing the results you feel you should be seeing, or you’ve had a set back. You wonder why you should bother continuing.

But, really, what’s the alternative? You can give up and just go back to being unhappy about your weight and hopeless about your ability to change it. You can go on a crash diet, but you know how that’s ultimately going to turn out. Or you can choose to remain hopeful. You can gather your resolve (or borrow some from your friends here) and stay in the saddle.

A couple of you have expressed concern about not being able (or simply not wanting) to keep up with all the posts in the Weighless forum.

If you are getting useful information or motivation from these discussions, great. But if it’s not your thing, that’s fine too. Some of us have more time and inclination for group discussion than others. Some of us take strength from community; others are happy to work on their own.

The primary course content will come to you by email and right here on the membership site. We will make sure you don’t miss anything important.

In chemistry, “activation energy” is the amount of energy that it takes to start or catalyze a chemical reaction. You can have all the necessary substrates and enzymes but without sufficient activation energy, the chemical reaction never gets off the ground. Here’s an exercise that can help you generate some of the activation energy required to catalyze the changes you are going to be making over the next year.

Make a list of everything you have to gain by weighing less–absolutely anything and everything that occurs to you as a potential benefit of making this change: looking better in your clothes, setting a better example for your kids, being more credible in your line of work, having less pain in your joints, feeling more confident in public, being more attractive to your partner, being able to be a more active grandparent, getting off medications…

Try to move beyond generic reasons like “live longer” and “be healthier” and list the specific ways in which your life will be more enjoyable at a lower weight.  Keep this list on your computer or phone or in your journal, where you can refer back to it in the future.

If you wish , pick one thing on your list that feels especially powerful to you right now and see if you can locate an image that encapsulates that benefit for you. It might be a photo of you or one you took or even an image you find online. If it’s an actual photo, place it somewhere you’ll see it frequently: next to the bed, on the bathroom mirror, on the dashboard of your car. If it’s an electronic image, make it the screensaver on your phone or computer.

Having trouble finding your activation energy? Want to take this exercise to a deeper level? Take a listen to this fantastic show from Rachel Hart’s Take a Break from Drinking podcast. Although Rachel’s show focuses on changing drinking habits, her approach is closely aligned with the Weighless mindset and these tools and insights apply equally well to changing eating habits. In this episode, she offers some great insights into how to find a (truly) compelling reason to change your habits–and how to use that reason to your advantage.

If you continue on the Weighless path, you will one day realize that you are happy with your weight, your body, and your lifestyle. Congratulations! At that point, your goal will shift to maintaining your new healthy weight, mindset, and lifestyle for the long-term, using the tools you’ve cultivated in this program.  Continuing your daily weigh-in can be one of the most powerful tools in the Weighless Toolkit, as it can alert you if your sailboat starts to drift before you’ve gotten too far off course.

As we learned back in the very first week of our program, your daily weight is likely to fluctuate in ways that don’t indicate actual weight (fat) gain or loss. Our weekly Checkpoints are a more reliable indicator. But it’s not uncommon for these to fluctuate a bit from week to week as well–especially when we are in maintenance mode.

For our members in maintenance mode, the question often comes up: When is an upward fluctuation a trend I need to worry about?

The duration of an upward trend is probably more meaningful than the size of the change. If your checkpoint is higher than it was last week, that’s not a trend. (Although you may find it helpful to get that flashing yellow light.)

If your weight trends up for two checkpoints in a row, that’s starting to feel a bit more like a trend. (Light starts flashing red). If it trends up three weeks in a row, it’s pretty clear that you need to take a closer look at what’s going on.

That doesn’t mean you need to start dieting. It just means some sort of course correction is in order. Rummage through your Weighless Toolkit and ask yourself what tool you might need to get out and clean the rust off of.

OK, but what if there’s a lot of bouncing up and down but no consistent trend? You’re up one week, down the next. Up. Down. How much fluctuation is too much?

In that scenario, the size of the changes matters more. If your checkpoints (not your daily weights) are bouncing around and there’s more than 5 pounds  (or 2 kilos) between the highest and the lowest, we might want to investigate what’s going on and if we can narrow that envelop a bit.  If your highs and lows are within that range, you’re probably fine.

Once you’ve shifted into maintenance,  it’s unrealistic to think that you’ll maintain that exact weight from week to week. It’s also not necessary.

We define your Ideal Weight as one at which you are not at increased risk of disease, are happy with the way your body looks, functions, and feels, and the habits that it requires to keep you there feel sustainable. There is going to be a range of weights that will meet all of those criteria. As long as you are within that range, and your Checkpoints don’t trend up more than two weeks in a row, then you are doing a great job maintaining.