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Are mirrors and scales telling you lies? Don’t let them sabotage your weight loss and peace of mind.


THE MIRROR LIES
I don't know about you, but I have trick mirrors in my house. In fact, trick mirrors lurk everywhere, in public restrooms, department stores, hotel lobbies and on several walls of my health club. These mirrors never tell the truth. Like a funhouse mirror, they tell me I'm fat, thin, old, young, ugly or beautiful. Rarely do those messages match up with reality. If you have trick mirrors in your world, do not believe their lies!
You know I'm kidding, right? The trick isn't in the mirror, it's in my brain. Because of decades of denial, self-hatred, weight fluctuation, aging, envy, societal messages (the fast food server asks me, "You want that super-sized?" while I study the skeletal body of an actress on a magazine cover), and random electrical impulses skipping crazily around my brain, I cannot accurately process data from my reflection in the mirror. This isn't unique to obese and formerly-obese people, but it's a special burden for us because as we work so hard to lose weight, we are even hungrier for positive feedback than we are hungry for food.
For this reason, I suggest that you save your Before photos and one Fat Outfit (no matter how much you hate them), keep records of your body measurements (because sometimes you'll see progress there when none shows on the scale) and document your weight loss surgery journey with monthly photos. Last Monday I looked at myself in my bathroom mirror and thought, "Damn, girl! You look good!" On Tuesday, after a weigh-in that showed no increase or decrease, I looked in that same mirror and thought, "Damn, girl! You are porking up!" At moments like that, it is a great comfort to try on my fat clothes and feel them slide off my body because they're so big, or to set a Before photo alongside a Now photo and be reminded of how far I've come.
THE SCALE TELLS THE TRUTH
But not the whole truth.
The scale weighs your clothes, shoes, fat, muscle, bone and water weight. This data will vary throughout the day as you eat, drink, exercise, urinate and defecate. You can buy fancy scales that will give you readings for total body weight, fat and water weight, and all those values will fluctuate every day. You can't let those fluctuations make you crazy. Recently I tracked my weight every day over the course of a week. It went like this: up, down, down, down, up, up, with a net gain or loss of zero. When I'm trying to maintain rather than lose weight, I'm happy about that. When I’m trying to lose weight, seeing my weight creep up and up as the day goes on does absolutely nothing positive for my weight loss effort.
On the day when my early-morning weigh in showed a 3.6 pound increase, I could have let that information spoil my day, but instead I copied my British friend, Kate. I shrugged and said, "Silly cow." My body weight is just one piece of information about me. It does not tell the whole truth of my worth as a human being and a WLS patient. The scale doesn't remind me that I had lost 1.75" from my bust, waist, legs and arms when I measured myself that week. It doesn't remind me that I exceeded my weekly exercise goal by 75 minutes. It doesn't remind me that I met all of my nutritional goals, wrote 20 pages of my book manuscript, had a job interview, gave medication to my dogs, listened to my husband rant after a bad day at work, took one of my dogs to visit the nursing home residents, or any of the other things that are important to me.
I realize that the scale is our primary tool for measuring our progress as we lose or maintain our weight, but you can't let it run your life. When an inanimate object starts to dictate your thoughts and feelings, it's time to lock it in the trunk of your car or have someone hide it from you. As Kate says, keep the scale where it belongs: beneath your feet, not in your head.

Another great article Jean!! Yesterday I had a conversation with my mother in law about the band. I told her how much I could care less about food these days. She could not understand it. I find myself throwing food away which is something I have never done before in my life. I am no longer a member of the clean plate club and I am proud of it. :-)

Do you know when to call it quits? To quit a meal, that is?


It’s 12:15 pm. Sad to say, your meal is over now.

I used to work with a recovering food addict (I'll call her Wendy) whose work station was about four feet away from mine. We both went to lunch in the company break room at noon every day.

Wendy had lost over 100 pounds in a 12-step program, but food was still of paramount importance to her. At 11:45 every morning, she would announce hopefully, "It's getting close to lunch."

At 11:55, she would announce ominously, "It's getting dangerously close to lunch."

At 12:00, she would announce triumphantly, "It's time for lunch!", spring out of her chair, and head for the break room.

At 12:15, came the final, regretful announcement, "Lunch is over."

Our coworkers found this daily ritual both amusing and annoying. Only another food addict (like me) could understand what was going on in Wendy's head as she looked forward to her noon meal and then mourned its passing.

What's the take-home message from this story?

Lunch is over. It has to be over. You must put down your fork and stop eating when your planned portion is gone or the instant you get a stop message. But what if there's still food left on your plate? What about the children in Armenia (all starving, according to my mother)? What about that leftover food?

1. Get up from the table (say, "Excuse me" if it seems indicated).
2. Put the food in a storage container, and put the container in the refrigerator, or throw the food away (down the garbage disposal, where you can't get at it, is best).
3. Take your plate to the sink and rinse or wash it.

Did I say "throw the food away"? In spite of the starving Armenian children? I sure did. I'm not going to tell the World Health Organization that you threw out the extra food. You can donate money to a food charity to help feeding starving children (you'll be able to afford a few bucks for charity because you won't be spending $50 a month on soda). God will not strike you dead for this, I promise.

Remember what Rhoda Morgenstern said to Mary Tyler Moore as she tore into a chocolate bar back in 1973 (or thereabouts)?

"I don't know why I'm eating this. I should just rub it directly on my hips."

So look at that plate of leftover food and ask yourself, "Should I roll in it, or throw it away?"

Lunch is over!

Are you afraid of an unhappy outcome of your weight loss surgery? You're not alone. Use your fear to conquer obstacles rather than letting it conquer you


For most of us starting a WLS journey, bariatric surgery is vast, uncharted territory, full of unknowns. We long for a happy outcome – maximum weight loss with minimum problems. We listen to stories told by other patients with a combination of hope (to be as successful as they’ve been) and fear (that we won’t experience the side effects or complications they talk about).
No one wants to be haunted by the specter of anxiety and dread, but I think a little bit of fear is a good thing. I don’t want fear to dominate my life, but without it, I’m likely to become complacent about my weight loss success and/or revert to the old, all-too-comfortable ways that made me obese in the first place. In small doses, fear keeps me on my toes.
Like pain tolerance, fear tolerance varies from one person to the next. Perhaps I’m able to tolerate and use fear because my childhood and adolescence were so full of fear-provoking experiences. By the time I was in my late 20’s, I actually got a little thrill out of fear, possibly because it stimulates adrenalin production. There’s nothing quite like a knife coming at you to activate your fight-or-flight system, causing a perverse fear “rush”.
At the same time, prolonged exposure to fear has also taught me to respect it. I don’t play with fear the way daredevils like Evel Knievel did, risking life and limb for the brief thrill of jumping 14 buses at a time with his motorcycle. But I do like the way fear can clear my mental field, forcing me to draw a line between important and unimportant. When the choice is survival or surrender, I’d rather choose survival. I’m not a quitter. When challenged, I’m going to fight back, especially if something precious like my health is at stake.
If fear tends to paralyze rather than mobilize you, you may have to use your own compass to navigate a problem, or play follow-the-leader (provided you have a trustworthy leader) instead. Whatever you do, don’t give in. Giving in turns you into a victim (click here to read an article about victim mentality: http://www.lapbandta...-of-obesity-r79), which is not a position of strength in any battle worth fighting. And your health is worth fighting for, isn’t it?
So, how can you make fear a working partner in your WLS journey? Let’s take a closer look at two of the more common faces of fear.
FEAR OF FAILURE
Somewhere between my first, mandatory pre-op educational seminar and my pre-op liver shrink diet, I became uncomfortably aware of a shadow that followed me everywhere. It was dark and scary, and even bigger than I was. It was my fear of failure. After decades of struggle – diets, weight loss, weight gain – I felt that WLS was my absolute last chance to be healthy. And after slogging through all those pre-op tests, evaluations, consults and procedures, I danged well was not going to fail this time.
Since I had to admit that my weight management skills were sadly lacking back then (as amply proven by the number on the scale and the numbers in my medical files), the only option available to me was to become the most compliant patient my surgeon ever had (click here to read an article about patient compliance: http://www.lapbandta...g-deal-abo-r112). I had to believe that he and his staff knew what they were doing and would guide me well. I’m a very curious and often mouthy person, so I asked a lot of questions and did my best to understand what was going on in me and around me, but I spent very little time trying to second-guess the instructions I was given. That approach freed up a lot of time and energy that I was then able to devote to changing my eating and other behaviors in ways that helped my weight loss.
FEAR OF COMPLICATIONS
Compliance served me well I this area also. I can’t claim that I was never tempted to cheat on my pre or post-op diets or to test my band’s limits. I can’t claim that I believed I’d be forever exempt from the side effects and complications I heard about from other WLS patients. But when my dietitian told me (for example) that I’d be mighty sorry if I accidentally swallowed a wad of chewing gum and had to have it scraped out of my stoma, I quickly lost my interest in chewing gum. When I observed that many bandsters experienced certain types of side effects and complications after engaging in certain types of risky behaviors, I resolved not to follow them down the road of no return.
Eventually I discovered that life after WLS can deliver some unpleasant surprises, just as in every other aspect of life. I had to learn some things the hard way, like: If you swallow a large antibiotic capsule that can’t pass through your stoma and slowly dissolves into a corrosive mess, you will end up in the ER thinking you’re having a heart attack (and end up with a big unfill). And no, liquid antibiotics don’t taste good, but they taste a lot better than the weight I regained after that unfill.
Most of the mistakes I made were the result of impatience or carelessness, but I did my best to learn from those mistakes and keep moving on. A handful of mistakes was about all it took for me to decide not to challenge the validity of my surgeon’s and dietitian’s instructions, and that kept me trudging along the bandwagon trail, getting ever closer to my weight goal. And once I reached that wonderful place, I was determined to stay there!

Frustrated by a weight loss plateau? You need a combination of patience and a plan to push through it.


It happens to everyone sooner or later. Your bandwagon stalls. You’ve been going great guns, fired up with enthusiasm, working that tool, doing all the right things, and losing weight. Then one day the weight loss stops. One day, two days, twenty days go by…you’re still stuck, and you’re wondering what happened. And because you’ve spent so many years failing at dieting, and being told that obesity is always the fault of the patient, you start to wonder what you are doing wrong. You even think, “Is my band broken?”
Chances are, you’re not doing anything wrong, and neither is your band. What’s happening is that your body is adjusting itself to the many changes that have happened during your weight loss.
The human body doesn’t know what you’re going to do next, be it climb a mountain or relax on the couch, so it has to continually adjust and readjust your metabolism to make the best use of the calories you take in. It looks at the history of what you’ve been eating and how much you’ve been burning off through physical activity and comes up with a forecast of what you’ll need to stay alive for the next week or so.
THIS MONTH’S WEIGHT LOSS FORECAST IS…
At work I’ve had to prepare sales forecasts for various jobs through the years. How many widgets will we sell in the month of April? How many defective widgets will be returned by unhappy customers who want a refund? Will all this income and outgo generate enough cash (in our case, energy) to cover the payroll and the equipment maintenance and the CEO’s country club membership? I once had a boss who joked that we might as well toss a deck of cards down a flight of stairs to come up with a prediction of which new product (represented, say, by the joker card) was going to be the best-seller. That suggestion didn’t go over big with the finance guys. Like us, they were trying to follow the rules, keep everything identified, counted and categorized. And like the bean-counters, we count our calories, carbs, fats, proteins, liquids, solids, income, outgo, with faith that this accounting system will help us win the weight game.
Meanwhile, our bodies have a different agenda: survival. When we decrease our food intake and increase our physical activity, the body watches to see what will happen next. As our purposeful “starvation” continues, the body struggles to accommodate the changes we’re making. It makes some withdrawals of funds from our fat cells and fiddles with our metabolism to prevent an energy (calorie) shortage. Gradually it becomes acclimated to the new routine so that it’s making the best possible use of the few calories we’re consuming. It’s keeping us alive, but it’s also putting the brakes on weight loss. Eventually we find ourselves stalled on what seems like an endless weight loss plateau. And unless we change our routine and keep our bodies working hard to burn up the excess fat, we’re going to grow to hate the scenery on that plateau.
AND ON THE FLIP SIDE
I’ve suffered through countless weight loss plateaus but by varying my exercise, my total caloric intake, my liquid intake, my sleep, and so on, did manage to finally arrive at my goal weight. For the past few years, I’ve felt mighty smug that I finally got promoted to the Senior VP of Weight Management here at Chez Jean. Maintaining my goal weight +/- 5 pounds seemed effortless. But it didn’t last.
Turns out it was time for me to learn another lesson about my body’s fuel economy. When I had all the fill removed from my band to deal with some bad reflux, my eating didn’t go berserk. I didn’t pig out at Burger King, didn’t drown my sorrows in a nightly gallon of ice cream. I was definitely eating more because I was so much hungrier than before – perhaps 500 extra calories a day, which would amount to a weight gain of one pound a week. Imagine my dismay when I gained seven pounds in 2 weeks – the equivalent of an extra 1750 calories a day! There was a time when I could have overeaten that much without any effort at all, but as a WLS post-op, I’d have to work hard at eating that much extra food. I was flabbergasted. And frightened. Obesity was a mountain on my horizon again – far in the distance across my weight maintenance plateau - when I thought I’d left it far behind.
So at the end of a visit with my gastro-enterologist during that scary time, I asked him if my sudden and substantial weight gain was the equivalent of my body shouting, “Yahoo! We’re not starving anymore! Let’s get ready for the next starvation period by hanging on to every single calorie she takes in! Let’s store those calories in those fat cells that have been hanging around here with nothing to do! C’mon, troops, get to work!”
I’m pretty sure that’s not the way Dr. Nuako would have explained it, but he smiled, nodded, and said, “Oh, yes.”
I felt like I was facing the flip side of a weight loss plateau: I might be in a weight gain plateau. All I could do is keep on keeping on with exercise and healthy eating, enjoying some of the foods, like raw fruits and veggies, that had been harder for me to eat with a well-adjusted band.
PUZZLING OUT THE WEIGHT LOSS PLATEAU
So the good news was that my wonky metabolism following that complete unfill wasn’t my fault, but the bad news was that my metabolism wasn’t in a cooperative mood. I was going to have to start playing much closer attention to the details of weight loss and maintenance again. What a pain!
But hey! I’d already had a lot of practice at that. I had the tools – a little rusty maybe, but still in usable condition. I ended up regaining 30 pounds between that unfill and my revision to VSG, but I have a suspicion that without those weight tools, it could have been 60 pounds. And that’s one of the reasons that even today, bandless for 14 months now, I don’t regret my band surgery. The band helped me lose 90 pounds and learn a host of useful (if uncomfortable) things about myself, my behavior, my body, my lifestyle.
What about you? How can you get your weight loss going again and avoid regain? So many factors can affect your weight that sorting out the reason(s) for your weight loss plateau can make you dizzy even if you’re not a natural blonde like me. To help you assess what’s going on and what might need to be changed, I created a Weight Loss Plateau Checklist. To access the checklist in Google Docs, click here: https://docs.google....emtSYjJLRnVGTFE
The checklist includes a long list of questions about you and your behavior, with answers and suggestions for each question. I can’t claim that it will give you the key to escaping that plateau, but it should give you some food for thought and perhaps some ideas to try. Use that to come up with a plan to deal with the plateau, and work that plan for at least a month to give your body a chance to get with the new program.