Habit is the Enemy of Progress

I don't know if I read that somewhere or I made it up, but that is what came to mind when I started this morning's run. This, after stepping on the scale and discovering I have regained 14 pounds since my all-time low in late January.

(Here's the rationalization paragraph, brace yourself.) I will say that the way I got to my all-time low weight might have something to do with the regain. It was during that month when my personal life blew up and I was under even more stress than I have been since starting anesthesia school. The stress caused me to stop eating (I just wasn't hungry and couldn't make myself eat) and I was running to combat the stress, and I lost 12 pounds in 2 weeks. Slowly, in the 6 months since then, I have regained them, plus a couple more for good measure. Also, probably 2 pounds of this is hormonal water weight.

Still, it's not just that. I'm running more in the past few weeks, but this entire spring and early summer I have slacked off in the exercise department. And my eating goes from okay to abysmal. I went over what I ate yesterday, and I can't even record it here. It's awful. No bandster should eat as much sugar and junk as I have been eating. A fill won't fix that. That's my brain.

I think long-term weight loss success is a personal experiment. I have a scientific background, and I believe in the scientific method. For the past year I have been testing the hypothesis that I can rely entirely on my band to maintain my weight loss. I think I have established that this is not a valid theory. So it's time to come up with a new hypothesis (on purpose, this time!) and make this thing work.

I've wanted to believe that somehow, since my WLS, I could eat and act like a normal person, and maintaining my weight would become natural and easy. But I now accept the idea of food addiction, and the fact that I am a food addict. I need my band because, left to my own devices, I will eat myself to death. But even with it, I have to make some changes in my brain and keep working at them. They don't have to be hard, but the thing I have to fight is falling back into bad habits and thinking. I've developed some good eating habits, riding the wave of easily following them, and then not noticed when they slowly eroded into my old ways. Habit is the enemy of progress.

I want progress. I want to reach my goal. I want to change my brain. So how can I do that, in small, easy-to-implement steps?

1. Start noticing not-hungry again, and don't eat when not hungry
2. Start noticing 'satisfied' again, and be vigilant when eating; stop eating when satisfied.
3. Serve myself my own portions (I will eat everything on my plate, so must be more careful about this)
4. Focus on protein again

This is a start. There are a lot more things I want to change about my thinking, things like the idea that if food shows up in an unexpected place (i.e. in my classroom, at a meeting) then it's "free" and I can eat whatever it is, whether I'm hungry or not, whether it's in my plan or not. And I do need to get back to planning out my meals, the very thought of which just makes me tired and annoyed. This is much more about eating and thinking than it is about exercise.

Right now I am frustrated and tired of all of this. Why can't I be a normal person? But then, who is normal these days?