Weight loss, and Effort vs Accomplishment

Yes, its that time of year for the annual weight loss posts.

But this round has been kind of weird with me.

Now, to start off, I have medical issues… related to various glands messing up their production amounts… throwing off all sorts of hormonal balances.

So, I don’t lose weight. Pretty much ever. But then, I don’t gain it either. My weight bounces around a bit within about a 10 pound range.

The few exceptions have always been gains that had medical reasons. I went on a medication in college for about a year, and gained about 5 pounds a month. When I went off of it, it stopped…. and found exactly the same pattern my weight used to do, just using the new, higher 10 pound range.

Again, when I got pregnant… same thing. Weight went up, stabilized, and then just hovers in the 10 pound range. And then again when I went on another medication for several months.

But, unfortunately, these changes have always been bumps up, never down. And when you consider that I’ve never been skinny to begin with… and you add 60 from one med, 45 or so from a pregnancy, and about 40 from another med… it doesn’t make for this being a positive trend.

No matter what I’ve done, it hasn’t dropped. Even when I had an overbearing doctor put me on an extreme 800 calorie diet, with only about 10 different foods I could eat, and on two medications which make me exhausted.

He was expecting a pound per day loss. In two weeks of keeping to the diet strictly, I lost a grand total of 2 pounds. He accused me of cheating and told me I wasn’t really trying. I never went back to that office.

So this has been my past experience.

You can thus imagine my surprise at the fact that I’ve lost 7.8 pounds in the past 2 weeks.

A few months back, my mother’s boyfriend (not to be confused with her husband) started selling for an herbal supplement company. Followed by talking her into taking some of the products, followed by talking her into selling for the company.

So for Christmas, I recieved a large box containing a month’s supply of their middle level program. A 200 buck value or so, but a rather off gift.

So I decided I might as well give it a try, given that it’s far from the siliest thing I’ve done in the name of weight loss attempts over the years. 3 powders mixed (with splenda) to make goopy shakes twice a day, plus a grand total of 14 “tablets” per day split into 4 different groups (they’re abut the size of vitamins, but I keep getting corrected by mom for calling them pills), plus two goopy snack bars a day that remind me of the fruity-centered pieces in the really cheap boxes of valentines chocolates.

Oh, and one “normal” meal.

I’m less than impressed with the bars, but they are edible. The pills taste absolutely awful because they try to disolve a bit in your mouth before you get them swallowed. Which is where the shakes come in. Because while they don’t taste great either even with the splenda, if you use them to swallow the pills then they mask the taste, plus leave you with only about two large swallows to chug down before you’ve finished it.

Can ya tell I’m not a huge fan? lol

However, even before the weight being lost, I had to notice… it really was reducing hunger. As in, I’d only had the two shakes and two bars all day, and failed to notice that I hadn’t eaten dinner until my daughter came home at almost 9pm.

Trust me, that’s never happened before!

Plus the completely atypical weight loss for me.

But as much as it was working, I still wasn’t very sure about it. I mean, I can tolerate goopy and not very tasty things for a while, but this isn’t something I’m going to want to spend the rest of my life on. And, like most diets, the weight may well come right back the minute I stop.

So its with this uncertainty that I send my mom a little chart thing of my weigh-ins. And of course she makes this giant deal of it.

But… something about it jsut doesn’t really sit right with me. Here I’m getting all this hype over this progress when I haven’t really done much to get it. But how many times have I worked and worked and gave it my all, and had nothing to show for it?

How much cheering on did I get for my two miserable pounds from the two awful weeks with the doctors plan? But then, if I had the cheering with the 2 pounds, would I have even taken it seriously?

I guess it just seems really hollow compared to how much effort I’ve put in on previous attempts. Unearned maybe.

The thought crosses my mind to ride my exercise bike more next week. Maybe that will make it feel more earned. But then I really think about that… and I’m back to my lesson from a few weeks ago… trying to put forth effort to earn things that aren’t earned by the effort.

Not that getting increased exercise isn’t good, just knowing that the bike is not what is doing it. I’ve done the bike in the past, frequently, and it doesn’t change things. Even if it makes me feel better on the hollowness, it’s still the goop and pills working the magic, not the effort I put in to “earn” it.

It’s just kind of odd how much this is bugging me. I mean, as many times before as I would have done about anything to drop that much that quickly, tons of effort with no accomplishment… why in the world would I be having issues with having accomplishment with little real effort?

Isn’t accomplishment without effort supposed to be what society’s dreams are about?