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All my life, I have wanted to get the place and the weight where I could just be a normal weight and eat a normal diet. I am not an overeater or a binger or a snacker - I eat moderate portions of healthy homemade food! I knew if I could take off the extra pounds in a healthy, slow, deliberate way and exercise while doing it, once I reached my goal weight that I could continue my healthy lifestyle and keep the weight off. It never worked. Not once, not for a minute. Apparently, I am not alone.
As the video describes, the moment I stopped losing, my body started gaining. It took fewer and fewer and fewer calories to maintain the smaller size. In 2009, I estimated it took 800 calories a day for me to retain my weight loss. A slow half a pound at a time it started creeping back. Resolve gives way, life interrupts, jobs change, people die, and the last thing you can do is get in the gym and eat another salad....
Several concentrated and serious efforts were made along the way to halt the progress but like a creeping flow of lava, the weight would not be staunched.
The depressing and hard fact of life is that once an individual is overweight, they will struggle for a lifetime. Instead of viewing this journey as a destination, I have chosen to look at this as a concerted effort to get the symptoms of a chronic condition under control.
When I have lost the weight (again), I will look at it as if I were a malaria patient who was not exhibiting symptoms at the moment. A chronic disease is one that reoccurs and has to be managed, usually under a doctor's care, and one for which there is no known cure.
It's indeed sobering; at first glance very discouraging - but upon deeper reflection, like any truth, once looked in the eye is liberating. For the love of God, we should understand what we are up against! Know the truth and the truth will set you free.
As such, I have placed myself under a physician's care. I am taking appropriate medicine to help control my chronic disease. There is no shame in seeking help, I have tried to do this on my own. I have tried willpower, I have tried organic, I have tried homeopathic, I have hired personal trainers, I have read books, I have done every diet on the planet. I have tried everything on my own to get this disease under control and I can not. So Viva la Pharmaceuticals and a new way of looking at a lifelong struggle.
The one hope - the one glimmer, did you notice I put in the above sentence that there is no "known" cure? That means that we do not give up hope, we keep pushing, we keep striving, we keep trying.
