Weight Management – Frequent touchups needed!

Weight Loss

I should have caught it before now, and it wouldn’t have been a major project to lose it again, but I had millions of excuses:

Oh, it’s just water fluctuations. It will go away by itself.

Oh, it’s just because we just got back from vacation.  It will go away when I get back into my routine.

Oh, it’s just because I’ve been too busy at work lately.  It will go away when we get through this project.

Oh, it’s just because we’ve had so many birthdays/weddings/parties in the last month. It will go away when things get back to “normal.”

The problem is that it doesn’t just go away without effort!

So, we have two choices – we can stay on top of our weight, be honest with ourselves, and be willing to do a little bit of work along the way, or wait until it gets out of hand.

The problem with “letting it go too long” is that you end up with a 20-pound variation in your weight.

Yo-yo dieting, also known as weight cycling, is a repeated loss and gain of body weight due to excessive dieting. The term “yo-yo dieting” was coined by Kelly D. Brownell, Ph.D., at Yale University, in reference to the cyclical up-down motion of a yo-yo. In this process, the dieter is initially successful in the pursuit of weight loss but is unsuccessful in maintaining the loss long-term and begins to gain the weight back. The dieter then seeks to lose the regained weight, and the cycle begins again.

The best way to prevent all this is to keep track of our weight and do a little bit along the way to keep it in the healthy range. I’m as guilty as the next girl, but I’m not gonna be 20 pounds on the wrong side of this journey ever again!