The Weight Loss Chronicles

                         

This photo is about exercise, but hey! It also is about Just Keep Going, in regards to anything to do with weight loss.

     

week 1

I’ve been overweight for a while

I have been trying to lose weight for some years now. It packs on with me, when I am under incredible prolonged stress with not enough sleep. Right on my middle, which is definitely stress weight loss. After a while, it decides to spread to other parts of my body. And then, it will be damned if it will leave me. Like being its own determined little entity.

weight loss and stress

You may wonder: what, a yoga teacher being stressed? Yes, us too. We do not all spend hours standing on our heads, nor hours in deep meditation, because, like everyone else, we too have families, have to pay the rent, and other important things, and there just isn’t the time for self-indulgence. However, I have, mostly, for decades, done meditation each morning. Not a great marathon of a meditation, but meditation nevertheless. Short and sweet.

And I do think that this is the way to go, with meditation. Short, sweet, and just do it. I feel that when people try to do long meditations on a regular basis, it ends up becoming like some scary lurgy awaiting oneself each morning. It can become a real trial, and then, often, morning meditation stops. And, some months later, the same overkill effort starts again. I have seen this cycle go on and on, especially with some yoga teachers. I would always say, make it less, and just do it.

Sometimes meditation just doesn’t cut it, on its own, with reducing stress. Sacrilege to say, but this is just my own personal observation. So, I let go of meditation for a wee while. I’m back into it now, but… I took a break! Whenever I sat for meditation, my angst and worries were right in my face, so to speak. I could not relax into the joy and peace of meditation.

reducing stress

Sometimes we just have to reduce any stress that we are able, in our situation, to reduce. And this is just what I did. I won’t mention any personal “stuff”, just the practical.

For about five months I worked at reducing stress. One of my stressors is that I have a permanently bad foot, and trooping up and down hilly terrain, like where I was living, is just not good for it. Of course, I was doing this to lose weight. Ha! It didn’t work.

I have moved to where it is a bit flatter so now I am able to resume walks, my foot is a lot better. But for five months I canned the stress and foot pain of determinedly marching up and down (actually it was limping up and down) those dreaded hills.

What I did do instead, was just to get up and move more during the day. In short spurts, briskly and with purpose. My foot was so happy!!

the dreaded set-point

I have veered between four kilos for quite a while. I would lose up to four kilos, my body would protest, and back up it would go. I believe that this is called a set-point. The point, or weight, that one’s body is “set” at. I have never, ever, believed in this. I have always felt that when one’s set-point is high, that there is an underlying reason. Maybe medical, like an hormonal issue, or it’s the awful food one is consuming, or, most importantly, there is an underlying emotional issue/s and our body responds by causing a weight gain and subsequent overweight “set-point”.

However, I am no medical person, nor dietitian, I am just a long term yoga teacher and healer who has worked with, and observed, hundreds of people. And these all are just my observations. A wonderful web site to go on is Jon Gabriel, who lost an incredible amount of weight, has kept it off, and who personally understands the whole stress and emotional issue of weight.

healing and weight loss

So, for over five months I also underwent a healing process with a Tohunga (Maori spiritual teacher, and in this case, also a healer). A proper one. I sobbed out the deep and painful hidden emotional issues of my entire life over those months, in those healings. I am so grateful to Mr Tohunga to have done this.

You would think that all that meditation would have done the process for me. Decades of faithful meditation. It did do a lot in reducing “stuff”, but not completely, and not enough. Meditation is not for healing, it is for something else. Visualisation is what people are usually doing, to do the healing thing in a meditative way. And, frequently others do the visualising thing to induce a meditative state. I don’t do this. I do good, old-fashioned, yoga meditation.

I’ve lost – how much? (wow!)

I have been doing some other things, food wise, etc, to lose weight. Nothing too full on, because I am very mindful of the stress thing. Hopefully I will be able to report, now and then, about my weight loss progress: six kilos so far. That’s almost a clothes size.  Not that you would notice it yet.

I had been hoping, for some time, to lose five kilos, and maintain that loss, because it would mean (to me), that I had broken the set-point barrier, because I had been unable to get past the see-saw between four kilos routine. It was completely by mistake that I realised the loss. I had completely stopped weighing myself. Why? Because in some bizarre, illogical, and completely not understandable way, I decided it was bringing me bad luck, weighing myself each week or so. So I put away the scales for a while.

Then, a sister whom I hadn’t seen for a while, told me that I’d lost weight. Of course I believed I hadn’t. So I checked. I weighed myself. My avoidance of that scary little scale must have worked. Obviously. I decided to ignore the weight loss, so that it wouldn’t curse me by returning.

But, a few weeks on, I even believed that it had actually returned with me eating a different diet by having a new flatmate who eats different food than I. I couldn’t bear to look at said scary scale. But I finally did. And, yes, I had not only maintained, but was down another kilo, making six kilos gone.

weight loss blogs

So, I decided to blog about my very own weight loss, and may that loss continue until I am back to being slender.  And, maybe there will be some hints for you in there, too.