Being open to change

Someone recently asked me what I thought they needed to do to make sure that they were successful  at losing the excess weight and just, if not more importantly, keeping it off. I think that one of the things is being open to change. What that means to each of us can be very different from one person to another. It is clear that we each have to find what works best for us where we are in our own journey. Not only do we need to realize that what works for one person may not work for another, but what worked for us at one juncture of our journey, may not be as effective in another. I guess I'm saying that we need to be open to change.

When I was losing weight I developed a whole set of skills and tools that helped me to take off the excess weight. Of course, my surgery did a great deal of the work for me. More than I think I acknowledged. That said, I too worked hard; I followed my program's dietary plan. It also meant that logged my intake and activity on a daily basis. This helped me develop an awareness of my intake and the value of that intake. All of these things helped me get the weight off, but they were not enough to help me keep it off.

As I got closer to maintenance, I thought that I understood what I needed to do to maintain my weight loss. While I had developed some skills that helped me be more aware of the value of my intake and activity, I didn't really fully appreciate weight of understanding the correlation of food and emotion. Learning to identify and more importantly for me, acknowledge dangerous behavior patterns have been key to my long term success in keeping the weight off. The tools and skills I use now to keep the weight off, are related to, but different than the skills I used to get the off.