Half Size Me

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Weight Loss Inspiration

Six Years of Maintaining My Weight (Or How Not To Be Another Weight Loss Statistic)

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I’ve always said I refuse to be a weight loss statistic.

What this means is I want to beat the odds of regaining weight. Oftentimes, we get so discouraged by hearing about the large number of people who regain their weight after substantial weight loss.

What I realized was there are some ways I can make myself successful in maintaining my weight loss. Over this past year, I had more challenges and wonderful celebrations than usual, but I still managed to keep the weight off.

I want to share with you some of what I’ve learned in my weight maintenance journey — the things I know were the most important to me this year. I’m going to start by recapping 2017 so you can understand why this year was a little trickier than others when it came to maintaining my weight.

A YEAR FILLED WITH CHANGE

From a family and life perspective, we paid off all of our debt. We had been following a modified Dave Ramsey approach for the past nine years and had been paying off various credit cards. This year, we bit the bullet and paid off the remainder of my student loan.

In total, we paid off $180,000 over the past 10 years between credit cards, car loans, and student loans. This is a huge victory, and it has brought many life changes. We are now focusing on selling our home and moving into an apartment to simplify our lives. By removing the house mortgage, we will be 100-percent debt free, and we’re extremely excited about this new phase in our lives.

On a physical note for me, this year also brought a lot of change. My menstrual cycle started to become extremely irregular. I spoke to my gynecologist about this on more than one occasion. She assured me I was too young (at 41) to be going through perimenopause.

However, I knew something was not right with my cycle, and there were other symptoms I was struggling with, like hot flashes at night, night sweats, breast tenderness, and generally feeling exhausted. She agreed to let me have a hormonal panel, and we found out my hormones suggest I am going through perimenopause. I have not used birth control in the past, but she recommended I start because they found a cyst on my ovaries.

I haven’t used birth control in a long time, but my doctor recommended I start because a cyst was found on one of my ovaries. Thankfuly, after I took the birth control for six weeks, the cyst disappeared. This was extremely good news, but all the stress and changes in my hormones caused my weight to fluctuate this year. I have usually not gone above 160 pounds, but I reached out to the Half Size Me community in November and shared with them how much I was struggling with my weight. I was hitting numbers I did not like — 161, 162.

My weight usually does not go above 160 pounds, but I reached out to the Half Size Me community in November and shared with them how much I was struggling with my weight. I was hitting numbers I did not like — 161, 162.

The reality is I know that if I don’t honor my commitment to keep my weight between 150 and 160, there’s a good chance it will just keep going up. I also know from experience that suffering in silence, keeping it to myself and hoping it will just get better never works. That behavior caused me to gain hundreds of pounds in the past.

So, I allowed myself to be vulnerable. I shared my truth and was able to get refocused. The scale started trending back down to under 160 (159.5 as of today).

BE CONSISTENT…

As you can see, 2017 was full of wonderful things, scary things, and lots of life changes.

What I have learned is that we all are going to change. Our bodies will change, our lifestyles will change, and this is why I stay firm with my commitment to this statement:

To lose weight, you must do what you are willing to do for the rest of your life because this is the only way to know you will be consistent with it.

This year in My Fitness Pal, I hit over 1827 days straight of logging. No matter how crazy my life gets or how distracted I may be, I know I can be consistent with tracking my food. However, tracking my food does not mean I micromanage my food.

It means that when I eat a doughnut, I write it down. It means that when I have an extra piece of cake, I choose to put it into My Fitness Pal. It doesn’t mean that I “can’t” or “shouldn’t” eat certain things, and it doesn’t mean passing judgment. It means being consistent with journaling or tracking what I eat. That’s all.

I also give myself lots of permission to switch out the ways I journal my food. So, if I were to list the things I find are the most helpful for weight loss, the ones that are imperative for weight maintenance, the number one thing would be consistency.

Find a way that you can consistently manage your food. Make it something you are willing to keep up with, day in and day out. For me, it’s tracking calories or points or portion sizes, but I always track. Always.

…AND MIX IT UP

The next thing I find to be important to maintain is finding new ways to keep it interesting. This year, I did a lot of fun physical activities. I added in Yin Yoga. I did a jump rope competition in the summer and a pushup challenge with the Half Size Me listeners and followers.

All of these activities were fun and made my exercise regimen way more enjoyable. I find that by adding in different forms of exercise or giving myself new things to focus on, it keeps the journey exciting and helpful to me.

BE YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND…

Another thing I recommend focusing your attention on — and this is the one that affects all the others — is your mindset. If you find yourself struggling with the “all or nothing” mentality, with perfectionism, with beating yourself up for not doing a good job, then you need to work on cultivating your relationship with yourself. You need to become your own best friend.

This year, I became Heather’s best friend more than ever. This doesn’t mean any “woo-woo” fluffy stuff. What it does mean is, for example, if I don’t make Heather’s lunch for tomorrow, she probably won’t be able to make as good a choice. I know that situation stresses Heather out a lot, so I’m not going to make her deal with that. I’m going to watch out for her.

Being your own best friend means knowing your own areas of weakness, knowing the areas where you need support the most, and being proactive. That way, you set yourself up for your best-case scenario, and it helps you avoid your worst-case scenario.

…AND LET OTHERS HELP YOU

The last tip I want to offer is that you DO NOT do this alone! I lost weight with support, and I maintain my weight with support. I do not go at it alone. I’ve given that up. I’ve given up telling myself, “I should be able to do this. I’m a smart person. I don’t need anyone. I’m capable. I can do this on my own.”

I used to believe those things, but what I’ve learned is that attitude does not set us up for success with weight loss or weight maintenance. And this year, more than ever, reaching out to the Half Size Me community pulled me back from a possible cliff I did not want to fall over. I know my weakness is food. I know that when I’m stressed, tired, exhausted or frustrated, I’m more than likely going to gravitate toward food.

I need to have safety precautions in place, so that when I feel myself slipping, I have people to reach out to — a place where I know I can be myself, where I know they get me, and where I don’t feel like a freak.

So, that’s exactly what I did. I reached out to the Half Size Me community, spilled my guts, shared my reality, told them about the cyst on my ovaries, the birth control pills, the weight, all of it — and I felt free. Free enough to start making better choices.

So, these are a few the tips I wanted share with you after maintaining for six years. Don’t think that someday it will all just get easier. It won’t because your life doesn’t stay stagnant; it’s constantly changing. Your body is constantly changing. What I have learned this year is that just because my body changes, it doesn’t mean I have to become a statistic. It just means I may have to change a little bit of what I’m doing to make those changes work for me.

I hope you are having much success in your journey. If you need any support, you are more than welcome to join us in the Half Size Me Community. If you would like to work with me personally, you can click here.

I look forward to hearing from you!

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How You Can Lose Weight Eating More

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42_howtoloseweighteatingmoreAll right, public service announcement time. I am begging you to please stop starving yourselves. I hit my screen weight — which, if you’re in the maintenance world, you know that is the highest end of where you want to be — on April 22; it was 160.6. I don’t want to go over 160, so I decided I was going to reel in my eating, and I didn’t do anything crazy.

I looked at my average burn on my Fitbit, and it was between 2,200 and 2,400 calories — sometimes a little bit higher, but usually within those two numbers. I took a 500-calorie deficit, which puts me near 1,800 or 1,900 calories a day. I stayed in that vicinity, and I went from 160.6 down to 158.8, to 157.76, to 156.4.

The reason I want to share this with you is because I ate almost 3,000 calories on Mother’s Day. I really didn’t think I was going to lose weight that week. This is what’s important: You don’t have to do extremes. I have several of my clients right now adding calories back in because they had gone so extreme for so long, now they can’t lose weight. We actually have to start to increase their calories, because there’s nowhere else for them to go.

The other thing I really want to talk to you about is protein. I push almost every one of my female clients to eat more protein, and there’s a reason for that. Protein is not used by your body the same way carbohydrates and fat are. When you’re eating carbohydrates, there’s a certain amount of calories lost in the process of breaking it down, so you don’t actually get calorie for calorie what you would with a carbohydrate or fat.

I personally eat at least one gram of protein per pound of body weight. This makes a huge difference. For me, being about 158, I try to eat about 158 grams of protein. Now, if you are 200 or 300 pounds, and you’ve got a lot of weight to lose, that’s an extreme amount of protein to be eating. In that case, even just shooting for what you want your goal weight to be — say you know you want to get to 150 —would even be a better marker. I guarantee you, if you pay attention to your tracking, most of you are probably way under on your protein, especially if you’re female.

I’m coming to you because I care. I really, really, really care, and I have so many people coming to me, saying their moms are starving themselves. They’ve been on repeat yo-yo diets. They don’t understand why they’re eating so little and not losing weight. It’s because they have slowed down their metabolism, and it has adapted.

To actually fix the problem, they need to start eating more, so that way they can go ahead and later take a cut and actually get where they want to be. It’s much better to lose more than a pound per week, like I’ve been doing, on a diet of 1,800 calories than it would be if I had to eat 1,200 calories. But I couldn’t do that if my metabolism had been slowed down because I’d starved myself prior to this. I had to be eating close to my maintenance calories and taking good care of my metabolism.

Make sure you have an idea of what your daily burn is. If you don’t have a Fitbit or some kind of a device, there are tons of good calculators out there. One, Fat 2 Fit Ratio, has a really good TDEE calculator. The Scooby Workshop has another good one. It will give you an idea of where you should be. Then, look at what you’ve been doing and see what the difference is.

If you’re burning 2,500 calories a day doing your activities, depending on your body weight and height, in theory you should be able to eat around 2,000 calories and lose a pound a week. If you can’t, then this might be a good opportunity for you to start to increase your calorie consumption, so that later you can take that cut. It’s so much more rewarding to eat more and lose weight.

Look at your protein. Make sure you’re getting enough. Your body needs it.

Are You Struggling With Your Weight Loss?

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38_areyoustrugglingwithyourweightlossHave you been struggling lately with continuing on with your weight loss? Maybe you’ve plateaued or your weight loss is slowing. I’ve had two coaching clients recently in this same situation.

For one client, we decided on a week of maintenance, and her weight went up 5 pounds. The next week she lost the 5 pounds she gained during her maintenance week, and she lost an additional 1 1/4 pounds.

I had another coaching client who took a month of maintenance; she didn’t focus on losing at all. I told her this would be really awesome for her metabolism. Guess what? When she went back, she finally went from 193 down to 184 in a couple of weeks. It was crazy.

What I’m trying to tell you is a lot of times prolonged dieting really slows down your metabolism, and one of the best fixes is to stop what you’re doing. Take a break; go up to your maintenance calories, or take a couple of weeks off from dieting and then go back to it.

I’m going to share a few different podcasts with you from Dr. Lane Norton that I highly recommend you listen to (see links below this post). He talks a lot about reverse dieting. He talks about protein requirements, things that are going to help you. If you’ve been dieting for a long time, I really think you’d benefit from hearing what he has to say.

Those are some tips that might help you. In our Half Size Me community meetings, we address more questions from the community. If these are things you’re struggling with, or if you just need some general support, come join us at our next meeting. Just go to halfsizeme.com/join for more information. We’d love to see you there!

https://www.biolayne.com/media/videos/video-log/biolayne-video-log-24-reverse-dieting/

https://m.soundcloud.com/biolayne/episode-4-reverse-dieting

http://www.podcasts.com/ben_coomber_radio/episode/221-metabolic-adaptation-with-layne-norton

How Much Exercise Do You Need To Lose The Weight?

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40_howmuchexercisedoyouneedtoloseweightI recently got a question about how much exercise you should be doing for weight loss versus weight maintenance. My answer is whatever you can maintain, whatever is sustainable.

For example, if you’re doing two hours of cardio a day right now and it feels like hell, I highly recommend you don’t do that because honestly, it’s more about you staying in this for the long term than it is about losing weight in a short period of time.

I wrote a post a while back called “If You Can Lift a Fork, You Can Lose Weight.” You don’t have to exercise in order to lose weight, but it will speed up the process, and you get tons of great physical benefits from it; you can actually change your body composition if you’re doing the right types of exercises.

If you’re eating at a calorie deficit, you will lose weight, so the question becomes, what is sustainable for you? What is the amount of exercise you’re willing to do for the rest of your life? I call it your minimum. What is your minimum that you’re willing to do? Just as an example, my minimum is I want to walk at least 10,000 steps each day; I like to take several walks a day. And I do a minimum of three strength training workouts a week — that’s my minimum. Anything above that’s gravy.

If I feel like it, great; I’ll sometimes throw in two HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) workouts, but that’s about it. I don’t go out of my way to kill myself at the gym, and I’ve maintained my weight doing that. When I was losing weight, I did a little bit more cardio, but not an excessive amount. I realize even then I didn’t have to; I just enjoyed doing certain classes at the gym.

It has to be enjoyable. If you’re miserable, chances are you will beat yourself up if you don’t do the workout you had planned when you really aren’t feeling it, and then you’re going to let your eating go, and then you’re going to find yourself right back where you started. It’s better to create a very nice minimum for yourself of what exercise you’re willing to do and adhere to that. I started at 280 pounds with lifting weights.

If I had to pick one thing that I would say to prioritize more than anything else, it would be strength training. Pretty much every personal trainer I’ve talked to will agree with me that no matter what weight you’re coming in at, if you’re lifting weights, you’ll get more benefit from that long term and in your body composition than you would if you’re doing excessive cardio. Even if you’re just doing it two days a week, whatever you can do as your minimum is what I would recommend.

It’s got to be sustainable. If you’re miserable doing it, you’re not going to keep up with it, and then you’re going to say, “To hell with it; I’m not doing enough.” Then you’re going to give up on the eating, and before you know it, you’ll be right back where you started. Don’t do that to yourself, OK? Try to find what is sustainable, what you can see yourself doing for the rest of your life. I’ll walk for the rest of my life. I’ll hit the weights a couple of times a week for the rest of my life. That’s doable. Some of this other crazy stuff, not so much.

You have to find your minimum and be willing to do that. If you’re miserable, stop doing what you’re doing; it’s not necessary.

How To Eat When You Go Off Plan Or After A Binge

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41_howtoeatafteradayoffplanorabingeOn Mother’s Day, I went to Cracker Barrel. I had three pancakes, two servings of eggs and bacon. I also went to Chipotle and had what I usually get there, and then I had Cold Stone ice cream for dessert. I ate what I wanted and I enjoyed it.

For a long time, I would have denied myself these things, then binged or overate on other things that maybe I really didn’t want, then deprived myself extremely the next day. I have given that up.

Now I actually plan for these indulgences. I say OK, I want to indulge in this. I allow myself to have it, no guilt. The next day, I just eat like I normally do. If I’m in a fat-loss phase, I take a 500-calorie deficit off my maintenance calories. If I am maintaining my weight, I just eat at my maintenance calories.

I don’t beat myself up for that anymore, and I’m going to urge you to do the same. If you have a treat or a day where you eat off what you normally would, don’t beat yourself up for it. Don’t deprive yourself of food the next day for two reasons.

One, your body wants to get back to its normal state, its homeostasis. Two, what happens mentally if you go into the day knowing you were “bad” the day before and feeling like you have to cut way back on what you’re eating and over-exercise to make up for it?

First, you’re not going to enjoy the food that you had the previous day as much because you feel like there’s a punishment attached to it. And second, chances are it’s going to be hard for you the next day, right? You’re not going to feel as good as you would.

I’m sharing this with you because I was in that cycle for a long, long time. I’m telling you, you don’t have to extremely restrict the day after having an off day where maybe you ate way above what you would normally eat or you ate things you wouldn’t normally eat.

Your body will readjust down as soon as you get back to your normal way of eating. I’m going to urge you to do that. Enjoy food. Enjoy the day that you’re in when you’re having it. The next day, just get back to what you normally do. You don’t have to extremely restrict. I’ll tell you now, if you do eat a lot of carbs and sugar, holy mackerel will it bring about an improvement on your workout! After my Mother’s Day meals, I deadlifted 205 pounds, five sets of five. I have not been able to do that. That’s all carbs, baby.

You have a great day. Pick up where you were and just keep moving forward. Don’t deprive yourself today.