I want to preface this whole post by clarifying that, while losing weight can make you feel better, it’s simply not the end-all-be-all when it comes to better health.
I’m going to get a little personal for a minute if that’s okay, because I think my story is something that a lot of people can relate to. Remember 2020? For most people, it was an incredibly difficult year. For me, though, 2022 has been even harder. I was able to take some fun trips this year, but I’ve also found myself confronted with some of the most difficult challenges of my life. As a result, my weight has slowly but surely climbed through the year which I can’t say I have been happy to see.
As a dietitian, part of my job is to help people determine the cause of their weight gain. So, I took a dive in “Lake Me”. At first, it was had to figure out what was going on, because I really hadn’t changed much. I broke my foot earlier in the year and have had a few injuries to work around. But even then, I did a great job of modifying and finding ways of staying active. I have never been someone that does a lot of stress eating, and it didn’t seem like my eating habits had changed significantly either.
Nevertheless, I knew something was off. For my body, I have found there is about a five-pound range within which I generally feel great, and can do what I want to do. (Side note: this range isn’t even the “recommended range” for my height, it’s above that.) But most of this year I have been sitting higher than my comfortable range.
Some of the major things in my life that have been causing the most stress and difficulty are finally in the rear-view mirror now. So, I decided it was time to get back to more ideal self-care. My initial thought was that if I could drop a bit of the weight I have gained, that I would start to feel better again. So, I did what a lot of people do and started tracking my weight and my food more specifically, all the while paying attention to how I felt and how my body looked.
What I learned what not what I initially expected.
What I have quickly started to realize is that my weight has little to no correlation with how I am feeling otherwise. There are days when my weight is up, my body fat (according to my scale) is up, but I look better and feel better than other days when my weight is technically lower. There are many days when I ate fantastic the previous day: I met all my nutrition goals, and according to the math I “should” have lost weight, but I didn’t lose any at all. There have been some days that I ate a hamburger and the next day my weight was down.
I was born with eight congenital skeletal malformations (that I have found) and have a genetic connective tissue disorder. As you can imagine, pain is something I have become very familiar with. One of my major motivators in having healthy lifestyle habits is to keep my pain in check. But here’s the interesting part: even my weight doesn’t necessarily correlate with my pain. My right knee was in almost constant pain for three solid years. My weight fluctuated quite a bit within that time. By the time I finally solved the knee pain, my weight was significantly higher than it was when the pain started. I have been told by knee experts that every pound of body weight puts four pounds of pressure on your knee. So, the extra weight theoretically should have made my knee pain a lot worse, and yet I got rid of the pain without losing any weight at all. Now, I’m not saying that losing weight can’t improve knee pain because there are many cases that it does.
My point is, whenever you are dealing with pain or health issues, it’s not all about your weight!
Hollywood and Madison Avenue have essentially brainwashed people into thinking that their worth, their happiness, their health, their beauty, etc. is determined by the number on the scale, when in most cases it’s rather arbitrary. This lie that people have believed and internalized is unfortunately causing a lot of unnecessary unhappiness and stress. It is however, selling a LOT of products and making some companies very wealthy.
With holidays and the new year right around the corner, many people set goals for themselves to lose weight. While this isn’t necessarily a bad goal, it honestly might not be the most important one. Furthermore, if you have been working hard to improve your eating and lifestyle patterns and you haven’t accomplished your weight loss goals, or haven’t seen the progress you wanted thus far, it also doesn’t mean you are failing either, or that it’s “not working.” I often see people give up on the positive things they were doing, simply because they didn’t see the immediate results they desired on their bathroom scale. Which means they are wasting all the valuable investment they had made. When if they just kept going, they would have hit the ROI (return on investment) point.
It looks like this:
In the few weeks that I have been able to focus on my health again, I haven’t lost a significant amount of weight, but I feel significantly better than I did before, so I know I am moving in the right direction. My energy level has improved, my pain is now under control, and my body feels better as whole. Right now, my main focus is on taking the time to get my stress level back to a healthier level. Which means getting more sleep, taking more time for activities I enjoy, doing fun things with my kids, meditating more, etc. I have not yet hit my own ROI, and I still have a way to go to get to where I want to be. But I know that if I just keep committing to self-care, the rest will come with time, because it always does.
This is possibly one of the most important things I have learned from my own experiences and from working with thousands of patients over the years. If you give your system what it needs, you will feel better.
If you want to feel better, but don’t know how to properly eat or fuel your system, please come see me. I can help! I believe that everyone deserves to see a dietitian and would benefit from working with one.
Happy Holidays!
