Healthy Lifestyle For All

Everyday Fitness

Everyday Fitness

Take a look at my Diet Community and you’ll see a discussion group that I entitled “I was doing just fine with my weight management program UNTIL___.” This was a real hit, with countless postings ranging from words of wisdom, “Get serious about getting rid of over eating triggers, even if it means your husband!” to pleas for help, “No matter what I do, I only seem to last no more than 2 or 3 months and then I fall apart, once again.”

Based upon this discussion group and my daily interactions with patients who are slugging it out striving to maintain their weight removal achievements, I’ve decided to concentrate on one key element of lifelong weight maintenance – vigilance.

Vigilance is the state of being vigilant, the Latin derivation of which means to keep watch, stay awake and be watchful, especially to avoid danger. It doesn’t mean you have to turn yourself into a crazed obsessed worrier. It simply means be on red alert for those situations when you know you’ll be more vulnerable to self-destructive habits.

For example, let’s say you’ve never had a problem eating a healthy breakfast and lunch. But when 3 PM rolls around, you’re fighting a well-entrenched habit of sauntering over to the vending machines and loading up on candy and cookies. This is when you must be much more vigilant and become acutely aware of your choices and actions. Red alert times are when you tend to a become a food zombie, mindlessly deferring to old habits, and then awakening from a binge coma to realize with shock and horror that you’ve just downed a mountain of food.

In addition to times of day, sometimes we’re hit with one of life’s curve balls and your best healthy lifestyle intentions can easily and mindlessly fall by the wayside. Carole is a 45-year-old mother of 3 with a strong family history of serious obesity. She’d been an athletic woman, giving birth to three fabulous boys, and life was going well until one of her son’s was diagnosed with a medical condition. Being the ultimate caregiver, she dropped her healthy habits and promptly allowed her genes to take over.

Remember my favorite saying: “Genetics may load the gun, but environment pulls the trigger.” She’d kept her genes at bay until she was seriously challenged. The good news is that her son came through with flying colors. The bad news was she gained 130 pounds over the course of 3 years. Talk about a long food coma. Once she was ready to make the change, she reversed her habits and shed the 130 pounds and for three years maintained her newly fit self quite well.

Then, she got hit with another caregiver sledgehammer when her aging mother became demented and unmanageable, draining her mental and physical energy with endless doctor’s visits and terrible temper tantrums. 50 pounds later, Carole awakened from her food trance long enough to realize that instead of donning her nice form fitting clothes, she was back to elastic. She literally had no memory of passing through 4 dress sizes. Such is the power of dissociation. At one point, Carole looked at me and said in a voice of disbelief, “I thought I was there. You know. I’d reached my goal and I was going to stay there for life no matter what stress happened. Boy, was I wrong.”

Carole dropped her vigilance and voila, the weight was back.

Thankfully, Carole learned her lesson and so will you. Here are mindfulness tips and tools to keep you vigilant and help you succeed at maintaining your lifelong weight management journey:

1. Once you reach your “there,” you have to work to maintain it. First up, get it out of your mind that some mythical fairy tale easy life “there” exists. You can never achieve a weight goal and just expect to maintain that accomplishment without continuous work. You may have shed 50 pounds and be happy at this moment. But if you let it go, and you don’t continue the very same healthy lifestyle habits that helped you reach your goal, you’ll regain the weight.

2. Plan for your red alerts. Take a moment and make a list of the kinds of stresses that have usually kicked you right into self- destruction. Any person, place or thing that triggers you to overeat and abandon your healthy habits needs to be counted and recognized. This include specific times of day when you are more vulnerable to going mindless and knee jerking into an old self-destructive habit. For each item on your list, write down at least 3 strategies for proactively preventing this stress from getting to you. If you’re grabbing junk to eat every mid-afternoon, plan to bring a satisfying snack to curb carb cravings and rein in overeating at dinner.

lululemon athletica / CC BY 2.0

3.Adapt and adjust to unexpected life events. You never know when a serious stress will occur in your life. This is when you need to understand the golden rule of coping: Under tough stresses, learn to adapt and adjust without self-destruction. If you practice stress management every day, then you’ll have honed your skills enough not to get derailed when you hit the big speed bumps of life. Yoga, meditation, journaling, the outdoors, family and friends are all great resources to draw from when the going gets that tough.

4. Ask for help. Don’t be shy. Be vigilant and aware of the fact that you’re falling off the wagon. Minimize damage control by asking for professional help if you need it. Counselors, nutritionists and fitness professionals are all there to partner with you as you seek to regroup and get back on track.

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