A Blog about the Blogs

There have been a lot of good blog entries out there lately.  First, I listened to Barbara Berkley on the Dr. Oz radio show, which was an excellent interview about weight maintenance, and the one word that stuck out to me was ‘vigilance.’  Dr. Oz asked Dr. Berkeley what was the one quality that maintainers have that all the other losers and regainers don’t have.   And she said ‘vigilance.’  And that just struck me, that that is exactly what we have to do.  Sometimes we complain about it, sometimes we love it.  Sometimes we can let our guard down, but it always has to go back up.  To maintain we must remain vigilant.  Barbara and Lynn have written a couple of really good posts about this over on their blog, Refuse to Regain.  Barbara wrote about the word ‘maintain’ being an unsatisfactory word.  It sounds boring compared to all the work we do.  Maybe I should have suggested ‘the vigilantes!’

 And then Lynn wrote that maybe a better word was ‘sustain.’  Because sustain has a more rounded definition of what we must do to maintain our weight.  Lynn also wrote about the mysterious factor that causes a few to be able to maintain, and compared it to flipping switches on and off until the reality of the situation hits and you are able to leave certain switches off and certain switches on permanently, BASED ON REALITY.

Vickie had a post about how she was finally content with her body after doing a LOT of physical and mental work to get to that point.  And she had a paragraph in the middle that I found outstanding.  It created a word picture that just fascinated me.  Here is that paragraph:

I literally see myself on a path – I can see all the road behind me – and all the road before me. Does this make me tired? Does this make it seem never ending? No, to me there is no ‘drudge’ in it. The path means I am moving – and have a sense of direction and accomplishment. I very much have a sense of having moved a great distance. I have a sense of getting somewhere – moving forward steadily.

So here was the comment I left on Lynn’s blog entry late last night after having all this stuff rolling around in my head all day.

Maintain or sustain, it is still hard work. But so worthy. And so fun to share with those others who have flipped the switch successfully. Today was one of those great days on the path. I made such good choices. When I had too light of a lunch (challenging myself) I got hungry and I wanted a snack. But I thought about what would fuel me, and I made a much better snack choice. And then, because the snack was such a good choice, I was able to pare dinner down and have a lighter meal. Some of my choices were directly influenced by my friends on the web. It was a different day than yesterday, where I had to talk myself ‘down’ all day from just eating for the sake of eating. But that is the path I am on, and I will keep looking forward down that path to a future as an older woman who is comfortable in her own skin, and who can move freely with a minimum of pain. And maybe even lift a 50-pound feed sack or two.

And maybe I’ll even do some ballroom dancing when I’m 80.  (See Miz’s excellent post on being unapologetically ourselves, and my comment #66.)