One of the things I struggle with is thinking that my way of thinking and doing a diet, i.e. the calorie deficit diet, is the way to go for everyone. I truly believe that from a physiological standpoint, this is the best option for most people to lose weight based on how our bodies work.  I really can't be convinced otherwise, since I'm 70 pounds lighter today than I was a year ago this day. All because I followed that diet when so many other diets have failed me.

I'm sure many of you here can relate to that type of mindset because each of you, including my husband who suggested I blog here, has your own opinions about cryptocurrency, your own philosophies regarding how you acquire it, and how you store it and how you manage your investment in it.  It may not work for other people, but it works for you, which is what is really important.  I'm sure you've read what other people are saying about it, doing about it and sometimes think "Well, that really isn't going to work long-term..." or "Why are you wasting your energy doing that?"  

I have those thoughts, too, when I read about/hear about how other people are tackling a weight loss situation. 

We are all 'experts' in our own heads about the things in life we are passionate about. For me, that includes dieting because it's been a part of my life since my teens.

One of my friends claimed she couldn't do the diet like I did because of several reasons I won't go into. If you are interested, you can read about it here:

The Dog Ate My Homework... (Pssss.... you're not ready..)

In my most recent conversations with her, I became a little annoyed. She had decided she was going to start a weight loss plan. As she explained this to me, I could tell she had painted me in her head as "Miss Diet Goody Two Shoes." Basically, the person who does a diet perfectly, loses several pounds of weight each week, exercises regularly and never eats foods they aren't supposed to.

Apparently, she didn't remember where I told her there were weeks I didn't lose, weeks I ate food that clearly wasn't diet food and how I hardly exercised at all over the summer due to the amount of rain we experienced, the lack of an available gym, and the lack of motivation to pursue strength training options.  She started off defending the weight loss plan she was going to attempt by telling me how it wasn't going to be what I was doing and that she was okay with that.  She was very defensive about it. 

She was passionate about wanting to lose weight. In one breath, she was telling me what her plan was and then saying it probably wouldn't work well. She kept comparing it to what I did, insisting she wasn't going to be able to do it like I did it, but it would still be an improvement. All those things are true.  Most of her sentences started with "You probably don't agree...", "I know that this isn't what you did..." and "You probably think I'm nuts..." At one point she even told me she was not going to lose as much weight per week as I had.

At that point, I interrupted her, because I was confused. I asked her how much weight she was planning to lose. She said five pounds a month. I reminded her (because I've told her this before) that I had set my weight loss goal in my smart phone app to be ONE pound a week. Just one. Which was four pounds a month. That made her pause. Then, without really commenting on that revelation, she continued on, explaining the foods she planned to give up, the changes she was going to make in amounts, etc.  I'm still not sure she realized that it took me 26 weeks to lose 60 pounds (that is half a year, folks), and that part of that was attributed to eight pounds lost one week when I was sick and wasn't hungry. Otherwise, it might have taken me an additional three to four weeks to lose the 60 pounds.

It was then that I realized that how I presented my calorie deficit diet experience to her previously had made more of an impression than the actual facts of how I did the calorie deficit diet. She totally missed that I had set a goal of one pound a week because of what I had achieved overall.  In her mind, I had done so much more than that.  She missed the reality of what I had done from week to week. It got lost in the overall results.  

It's so easy to see the end result, think it was easy, and believe we could never achieve such a thing, without truly comprehending the actions someone took to get there. Losing 60 pounds seems like a huge task. But losing one pound a week doesn't. Yet that is exactly what it took to lose 60 pounds. This is so true for any achievement in life, whether personal or professional.  The overall achievement looks unattainable, until you look at the incremental actions it took to get there. 

If you think about it, a diet is really all about incremental changes over a long period of time. That it takes a loooonnnngggg time to lose a significant amount of weight is a problem for most of us in the developed world because we have been spoiled by instant gratification.

People my age have less of problem with instant gratification than people 30 years younger than us 'seasoned citizens.'  This concept is very much its own blog post but I'm going to take a slight detour here to discuss it.

Growing up, we had 13 weeks of TV shows in the fall, reruns of those same shows in the spring and summer, and then TV shows would return with a new season the next fall.  Fast food was a special treat, never a meal. No one had a cell phone, let alone a smart phone. Before communication technology evolved, you had to be home to get a phone call or else you had no idea someone called you. The phone was communal property. You shared it with the entire family. In my grandmother's case, you had a 'party line' where you shared a phone line with a stranger (if you've never seen the movie "Pillow Talk" with Rock Hudson and Doris Day, you should watch it. It's pretty funny.)

You could pick up your phone to make a call and someone was already talking on that phone line, and you could hear the conversation. If you called someone and that person was on the phone with someone else, they had no idea you were calling them. There was no email or texting. If you wanted to communicate with someone other than by phone, you wrote a letter, mailed it, and waited for that person to write a letter back. We had pen pals in those days.  There was little, if any, instant gratification. We learned patience. Patience is a character attribute that has become increasingly unnecessary in the cultures of developed worlds. Everything is instantaneous these days. 

When we see strangers with significant achievements in their lives, isn't our initial reaction that those achievements were instantaneous and based on cronyism, luck or inequity?  I'm guessing our first thought is not the nitty gritty daily life that individual had to live to achieve what they did. 

The nitty gritty is important. It's the foundation of how accomplishments are achieved. Everyone's nitty gritty is different. The more I speak to people about weight loss and health, the more I realize that my opinion about dieting is evolving. Writing this blog has impacted my mindset, too. I've now come to a place where I realize that it is truly important for each weight loss plan to be tailored to an individual's nitty gritty needs.  A weight loss plan needs to be something that can be embraced and lived with on a day-to-day basis. Our bodies are different, our cultures are different, our tastebuds are different, our food tolerances are different, and our food availability is different. Therefore, how each of us chooses to lose weight through food will be different. 

So, why did my friend have to present her weight loss plan to me in that way? Because she was sure I was going to poke holes in it and try to convince her to do what I was doing instead, to do what worked for ME. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that she is wrong, that I wouldn't do that. Because I would probably find a few 'flaws' (in my mind) in her plan that I needed to point out to her (like her plan to not give up chocolate completely). Ironically, the very things I would be pointing out are not why her version of dieting wouldn't work for her. They would be why her version of dieting wouldn't work for me.

Her version is not supposed to work for me. It's supposed to work for her.  

I think I need to reread an earlier post of mine that I clearly haven't taken 100% to heart:

My Way or the Highway (I love that for you)

So, how is her weight loss plan going? I got this text from her the other day:

"6 pounds in three weeks and it actually might be more because I didn't have a scale for the first 4 or 5 days. Basically reducing milk and junk food. Reducing portion of noodles and French fries, though we don't eat those much. Milk was the surprise culprit. Not sure how it'll go when I need to cut back more calories. I think this is the right tool. I knew I didn't want the fad diets."

Of course, I congratulated and praised her success. I told her to keep doing what she was doing and not to worry about the future. Luckily, I was not sitting at home when I read her text, else I'd have questioned her comment about 'fad' diets with respect to what I did.  We texted back and forth a bit more about it before I had to get back to the grandkids. 

Her diet worked because she put herself in a calorie deficit. She cut down on eating higher calorie foods. She is doing a calorie deficit diet (because the only way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you consume). What is great is that she is doing her own calorie deficit diet, which works for her. It would not work for me. There is no universe I could live in where I can eat French fries and noodles and lose weight... seriously. 

I LOVE that for her!

(And I'm pissed that she can lose weight eating French fries and I can't...)

Taking stock of day 10:

Did not exceed my daily calorie allowance.

Burned 767 calories doing 1 hour and 23 minutes of ice skating.

(photo courtesy of pixabay)