Stay Away from the Carb Monster
This was posted on the Texas message board and I thought it related well to our discussions about staying away from carbs lately. I know I needed to read it w/ my popcorn vice.
Karla
Just This Once Won't Hurt ?
by Ken Miller
I've had the opportunity to closely watch the weight-loss journeys of hundreds of WLS patients during the last several years as I've studied those who are very successful and those who struggle.
Almost everyone has plateaus along the way. Some lose weight rapidly and consistently; they reach their goal weight quickly and are able to easily maintain their weight when they get there. Meanwhile others lose weight much more slowly and some never reach their goal weight. Most of those who lose slowly, with extended plateaus along the way, usually struggle much harder to maintain their weight once they reach their goal than those who lost weight quickly and consistently.
The number one factor that affects a WLS patient's rate of weight-loss and the ease with which they are able to maintain their weight after they reach their goal is the intake of refined carbohydrates.
When they start their journey everyone wants to know . . . "How fast will I lose weight?" "Do you think I can actually lose all this weight?" "Do you think I can do it in a year?" Those are difficult questions to answer because we can't predict, just by looking at them, which people will lose quickly and which ones will lose slowly.
Last week I received an email from a woman who is about to undergo a Roux-en Y procedure two weeks from now. She included a table that she'd created that listed her short term weight loss goals leading all the way from where she is now, down to her final goal weight. Each line of the table represented a month and she listed the amount of weight she was planning to lose during that month. She knew she would lose weight more rapidly in the first few months and that her weight-loss would slow down as she approached her goal so her monthly goal list started out with losses of 30 pounds in each of the first couple of months and gradually decreased those amounts until she was predicting a loss of 5 pounds during each of the last couple of months. Her list of goals looked reasonable to me; I believed it was possible for her to achieve them, and I told her so. Then I expressed some thoughts about the key factor that I believe will determine whether she will be successful or not.
Oh, one more thing . . . did I mention that she wants to lose 260 pounds in one year? I told her that normally I would never suggest to the general patient population that they could (or should) expect to lose that much weight in one year, but I knew something about her that I couldn't know about most other patients. I knew she had already lost 150 pounds during the past year BEFORE her surgery!
She did it by studying and following The Success Habits of Weight-Loss Surgery Patients. You see, she joined BSCI as an online member about a year ago, expecting to have surgery in the near future and she wanted to get started on adopting the new lifestyle she would need to be successful for the long-term after surgery. She was disappointed several times during the next year as her insurance was denied and she had to file appeals to get them to reconsider her situation. But, during that time, she continued to stay with us. She read all about the Success Habits? principles and she watched and listened to others who posted messages about their experiences as they were going through their weight-loss journey. And I believe she paid attention to who was following the Success Habits? principles and who was cheating themselves by only following them part of the time. I'm quite sure she recognized what I have witnessed . . .
The number one factor that affects a WLS patient's rate of weight-loss and the ease with which they are able to maintain their weight after they reach their goal is the intake of refined carbohydrates. Of course there are rare exceptions, but my observations clearly show these two facts:
Those WLS patients who say to themselves, "Just this once won't hurt anything . . . I'll go back to no carbs tomorrow," and eat refined carbohydrates struggle to reach their goal weight and then, if they do reach their goal, they have a much harder time maintaining their weight than those patients who don't.
Those WLS patients who eat only complex carbohydrates and who do not eat any refined carbohydrates lose weight rapidly and consistently and they have a much easier time maintaining their weight during the following years.
So, here's my advice to those who might be interested; Don't make the mistake of saying to yourself, "Just this once won't hurt anything." IT WILL. The consequences of that decision won't be immediately evident to you; it will take time before they show up. But, they WILL show up, and by the time they do, it will be too late to go back and "fix it".
Don't cheat yourself out of the final success that you can achieve and maintain for the rest of your life, by trading it for "Just this once . . ." The Carb Monster shows no mercy; not today, and not tomorrow, or next year.
I know that's very black and white advice. It's not sugar coated; it doesn't taste good, or feel good, and it might create fear in some WLS patients who have already cheated themselves. I hope so. The good news is that the sooner you banish the Carb Monster from your life, the easier the rest of the journey will be for you. I also hope it will scare every new patient enough that they'll use those initial few months following surgery to banish the Carb Monster forever. There will never be an easier time to do it. It only gets harder later.
I expect there will be those who want to express their opinion on this subject . . . both those who believe they are exceptions to what I've said, and those who are willing to take a couple of minutes out of their lives to warn other WLS patients about what happened to them when they said, "Just this once won't hurt . . ."
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