It should be a mini series…. lol… and although I am laughing, it is a huge frustration. I have experienced a few of them along the way and they are beyond frustrating. You are doing everything right, at least you think you are, and that scale becomes your enemy. You want to chuck it out the window.
And as tempting as it might be to grab Oreos, you don’t. You have done far too much to go back. After all, eating healthy, has totally eliminated all my symptoms. Weight or not? Not losing that everrrrrrr again. I don’t ever want to live with a single symptom again.
I am at that plateau place. One of the many plateaus, and before, I used to get really upset about it. I would get on the scale and well up with tears. I would jump off and beat on myself something awful.
But now I take a more analytical look. Are there things I can do to help myself? So first off, look at the journal. Is there any little piece that you can tweak? Am I being sure I wrote it all down? Yes! I still write a food journal every single day. Proud to say I have binders filled with pages. Is there something I missed? Look at it and analyze it. Yes! A few things might need to be checked.
For me, it’s a fine balance of those dang sugary vegetables. I can’t handle sugar. In any form. A few days of too many carrots or tomatoes, and things stall. I have seen that before. Sugar and I do not do well together. So I can watch that.
Or not eating enough. Maybe I need to keep my metabolism going some. Some days I am not hungry, others starving. Have I gone to work though unprepared without some snacks I might need? Maybe I need to look at that.
Organic? For me, again that is a biggie. Sugar, preservatives and toxins are poison to me. A few too many toxins and I am showing symptomatic signs. Clean it up some. Yes, I was in a hurry and grabbed some produce that wasn’t organic. Some might be okay but for me, I do best when my staple produce items are organic.
Next piece? Sleep…. I don’t seem to need as much sleep anymore. I sleep like a baby since I started with Dr. Jack. But am I getting enough? Nope…. need more so I tacked on a bit in the morning, just fifteen minutes and also, no internet at night. I might read for ten minutes before sleep but no emails etc.
Lifestyle? Well….. I gotta work a lot on that one. Two jobs does that to you. Plus all the responsibilities that just go with life…cleaning, laundry, errands. And job one does not stop at three. I am a teacher, there are things to do from September through June. Always….
Stress? Check….got a bit of that. Don’t we all?
Drinking enough? That’s one I can give myself an A+ in. I got into s great water habit early on in this and have stuck with it. I drink more than half my body weight in water every single day, most of it after school. Now I guess I should tweak that some, but being a teacher, you need to have a huge bladder capacity because bathroom breaks are not plentiful. Okay… guess I could work on that.
Notice I didn’t say anything about exercise? Too much of it and that will stall everything. I have learned that for me it has to be the loss body beating, the better. Pilates, walking, swimming, a few machines at the Y, light lifting of weights are all okay. Start that crazy jumping sweating intense workouts? Too much stress and my cortisol is produced in buckets. No thank you. slow and steady wins races too.
Riding out a plateau is tough. Scale is up, then down, then back up, then down, then steady. And rarely does a jump on it bring any reaction but to look up and ask, “Why?” In the end, you just fix what you can, and wait. Eventually it will move. The biggest thing is you can’t give up! You have to be strong, and just live the best you can every single day.
For me, I went into this with an idea. I was going to lose 40 pounds and a few symptoms. I have dropped over 100 pounds and I don’t have a single symptom left. Yeah…. I can ride out a plateau. Absolutely!