It was roughly four years ago that I tried an elimination diet for a couple of months to see if part of my inability to lose weight was caused by sensitivity to certain foods. As part of the diet, you track everything you eat, along with how you slept the night before, your mood and your energy levels.
I did a good job of following the guidelines, and came up with a disappointing but not surprising answer. (I kind of knew I'd be better off if I limited the amount of cheese and processed carbs in my diet even before I went through the rigamarole of the food restrictions. *sigh*) As a side bonus to my newfound knowledge, I lost a few pounds in the process of discovery.
I'd tried tracking my food intake before, in online apps, but always gave up after a few weeks. The foods I eat are not readily selected from a dropdown list and I found the process of guesstimating ingredients tedious at best. However, tracking on paper and then weighing myself the next day, as the diet had me do, seemed to be a happy medium. So, after returning to my normal eating habits, I kept up the tracking piece of the plan.
As a weight loss tactic, it worked for a while. Over the next couple of years, I lost enough weight to be comfortable in my current set of clothes again; a highly sustainable loss. Then I got stuck. I've been losing and regaining the same five pounds for the past two years.
As I was pondering my life the other night, I figured out why I got stuck. While my ostensible goal for tracking my weight was to drop some pounds, I do believe my real motivation was to avoid having to shop for new clothes. To put it mildly, shopping has never been my favorite activity. I'm a little taller than the average woman, and finding clothes to fit can be a real chore. So, the minute I had dropped enough pounds to put the need to buy a whole new wardrobe comfortably out of the picture, the pounds stopped dropping off, even though I hadn't reached my somewhat arbitrary goal. I was comfortable enough in my skin.
Once the shopping motivation lightbulb came on in my head, I decided that, perhaps, I am being a bit OCD in continuing to track all I eat. If it hasn't made a difference in the last two years, chances are good it isn't going to make a difference in the future, either. Perhaps it is time to stop reaching for a goal I don't really care about.
So, I ended my food tracking journal with the end of 2022. It's been surprisingly unsettling. Logically, I know that four years of established good eating habits aren't going to undo themselves overnight, but there's a part of me that's convinced that the minute I stop tracking all that detail, I'll automatically lose all my hard-won progress along with it, and the dreaded shopping chore will pop back on to my to-do list.
Each day since the calendar turned to its new leaf, I've anxiously hopped on the scale in the morning. Each morning, the scale has shown exactly what it's shown for the past few years.
I'm starting to wonder if it's been hard for me to give up the ritual because I'm short on rituals these days. There's something anchoring about keeping a log of stuff I've done, but I no longer need to log my accomplishments at work (or home) to satisfy the powers that be. It might be one of those existential questions: If I'm not logging anything, do I still exist?
I'm going to go out on a limb, say that I'm pretty sure I do, and stick with my discomfort zone.
I figure either the urge to log stuff will go away, or I'll begin to log something I care about for longer than a week after the log is completed. Keeping track of the books I've read would be a heck of a lot more interesting, I should think. Hmmm...
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