Let’s be honest with ourselves we cannot even begin to think about starting any form of new regime without our mind being in the right place. What is your mind being in the right place though? Following on from the theme of Knowing Me Knowing Me only you can know this. I can bleat on about what it takes for me to be in the right place and some of it might ring true for you or on the other hand and most likely you will think “what the bleepers is she going on about, no one thinks like that” but I will persevere anyway as just thinking that might provoke for you an idea of what might motivate you.
Nothing starts for me until I am totally and utterly fed up with the current status quo. After that third breakfast helping with her chubbiness and a familiar overwhelming feeling of a complete lack of control I was beginning to feel open to try anything. Let me go back to what contributed to me feeling out of control. I had felt unable to even wear a dress for the black tie dinner the night before. Every other woman there was in a little black dress or equivalent. I had worn a trouser suit that was baggy and didn’t show my legs as I was now at a stage where my legs that had formerly dominated any evening outfit I had chosen were now looking decidedly middle aged and not shapely but yes that word again chubby. The thighs and calves now bulged round the knees. This was not how I was used to seeing my legs and didn’t want anyone else to get used to seeing them like this either. I made a joke that I was wearing a trouser suit as I was rebelling against the gender stereotype of a woman having to wear a dress to a black tie function. I was lying to myself as well as my friends. I was fed up. I needed to do something but my usual techniques of cutting down on a meal or two through the week and then partying through the weekend was piling on the pounds in all the wrong places. I used to bulk up evenly and was quite toned but now I was bulking up around my middle and my legs were suffering. So this was my motivation, I knew something drastic had to be done and was willing to try anything.
`I had the motivation to start but how to continue having the motivation to continue. The first few days of a new regime are fabulous. Especially after having been away eating three breakfasts, not even counting the two course lunches and three course suppers and more alcohol than an average alcoholic would deem sufficient. The first few pounds drop right off but then after a few days of “being good” (we will get to this later in another blog - how to be good and what we did) the scales plateau and even jump and you go back to the familiar feelings of “what’s the point?” “I don’t mind being fat” “will anyone like me more if I am thin?” There are perfectly valid answers to these questions - only people who you don’t really need in your life will like you more if you are thin. However you do mind being fat and there is a massive point but you need to keep reminding yourself of this. This is why your motivation needs to be rock solid and your head in the right space.
How to achieve this though? The motivation clearly has to come from within but small simple external factors will create this. We found that the goals had to be formed in stages. You had to have very short term goals, medium term goals and long term goals but you only really ever think about the short term goals. The motivation for that moment. Many diet books and psychologists tell you to put a picture of a thin you on the fridge or think of yourself in a bikini or a tight skimpy dress that you loved wearing. This is great for long term motivation but we didn’t feel this helped us with the here and now. This left too much room for I can start tomorrow or later today or in this moment it is not going to make much difference having a milky sugary latte to my long term goal.
So short term goals every day even every half day. Yes it is time consuming but it is very motivating as you are achieving constantly and no one doesn’t enjoy achievement or having a sense of satisfaction. Conversely when it does go wrong you have only screwed up a morning or an afternoon or at worse a day and it is very easy to get back on track and not do the familiar throwing the baby out with the bath water routine.
Practically this may be that you decide to do intermittent fasting from Sunday afternoon to Monday morning, you then decide after 16 hours of fasting on a Monday morning that you go for a run and try to stick to 1300 calories a day after the run. It may be that you decide on Tuesday to eat no carbs all day. 1300 calories a day needs to be managed. Small goals, keeping breakfast under 300 calories to give yourself room in the day for that “treat”. It is all in the planning. This is where the motivation comes in. This is where the mind comes in. You have to constantly tell yourself all day that you can have it but later. You have to constantly tell yourself that your body doesn’t need nearly as much food as your mind is telling it it does. Somehow, ultimately you have to make yourself stop eating. This is the only thing that will make you thin. It is so blinking obvious it is ridiculous. This multi billion pound industry just boils down to one message. PUT THE FORK DOWN!
This will not happen on day one. Maybe like us you have to try the idea of severe deprivation (the 750 diet) in order to be happy with the “happy medium”. Everyone’s “happy medium” is as different and individual as we all are but the steps you need to make to get you to realising your “happy medium” are pretty uniform.
Our steps - Severe deprivation was followed by bingeing. This meant that whilst we did lose a few pounds over the months we did this we also found that long term the 750 diet was too time consuming and not conducive to living our lives.
On 750 calories each day for four days, following the first day of 1100 calories we could not work very well, we could not parent very easily, we could not socialise or exercise. As well as the slowest runs known to womankind our brains were slow, (not that my husband noticed a great deal of change according to him… rude!) we were very short tempered and patience was the commodity that had been moved to the back of the fridge along with the butter.
We found it increasingly more difficult to block out one week a month in our diaries in order to make this work. It didn’t work because it involved putting our bodies and minds into an extreme state for five days a month. Whilst we had each other on the same timeframe we just about managed but realistically we couldn’t carry this on for longer than four months. Our lives took over and it was impossible.
Neither of us could have even contemplated doing 750 without E.L.F. squared. However the fact that we did this for four months meant that we taught our minds that we could cope with the hunger and that going to bed hungry was not only possible but also not as bad as we made it out to be. It was that very old, worn cliche of mind over matter.
When on the 750 diet we went to bed and brushed our teeth as soon as our last calorie was consumed, we then WhatsApped each other to death about how torturous the whole process was, what we were going to eat when allowed and even simultaneously watched cooking shows whilst frantically texting the other E.L.F. about the mouth watering dishes being lovingly prepared. We got through it. Neither of us ever gave up despite the fact that we were feeling tortured, desperate and wildly out of our comfort zones.
The euphoria after the five day stints and the sense of achievement was addictive but too often a night out followed the diet and a feeling of “I deserve this” accompanied the fourth glass of wine and the triple cooked chips. The four or five pounds weight loss dwindled to two or three the following morning and the rest of the month then loomed to try and keep those pounds at bay without having learnt any techniques whatsoever as to how to keep the pounds off. We knew how to lose five pounds in five days but not how to keep them off or keep going on a more even keel.
This is where we needed to find our “happy medium”. The 750 was not going to fill that role it was too extreme. Motivation was there for five days a month, yet after four months this was dwindling. Motivation needs to be there for a lot more than this. We decided to try other things.
One Chubby went on a juicing diet at a retreat in Turkey with some friends. This turned out to be a very similar experience to the 750 as far as results were concerned. It involved 7 days of pure torture for the Chubb, she didn’t smile much after about 36 hours. Despite the constant distractions of four friends talking non stop for 7 days plus morning walks, endless massages (they were so cheap!) facials, Turkish baths, sunbathing (the sun was the only entertainment), saunas, saline drips, oxygen enhancing masks, colonics etc etc the net weight loss at the end of the week of 8lbs was soon dwindled away with a euphoric ceremonial stuffing of face and alcoholic binge followed by an even worse face stuffing the next day. Within two to three weeks a net loss of about 2 to 3 lbs was the only thing left. Some might feel that this was worth it but the body analysis showed that about 25% of the weight loss was muscle mass and so really the whole exercise was pointless unless you had a regime to follow at home that could sustain the weight loss and not contribute to the yo yoing. If Chubb had come back and had a regime to follow that did not involve extremes one way or another some could have been saved. Once again the “happy medium” needed was not in her toolbox so she went back to within a couple of pounds of her original weight within a week or two and gradually worse.
Health farm visits were a little more successful than just juice for the Chubb as eating real food and especially having some meat did not induce the euphoric ceremonial stuffing which for the juice was reminiscent of a roman feast after they invaded Gaul or the likes. Health farms are cleverer as they actually spend a large amount of the week that you are there instructing you on what you should do at home and whilst that did venture into the overloading of “top tips” and the inability to achieve all of these in any given day or week they did teach us tools that are useful for maintaining a healthy weight after having reduced to the size you would like to be.
In future blogs we will take you through all our diet trials and retreat visits in order to give you lots of ideas for yourselves. One of these we hope will resonate as fundamentally we have discovered over these years of experiments that it is all inside you and only the alignment of your emotions and motivation with the help of you E.L.F. Squared buddy will ever get you where you want to be in both mind, body and soul and actually physically putting the fork down!
We’d love to hear about your own experiences of Expanding Late Forties – your successes and failures of shrinking your waist and expanding your mind. Use the form below to get in touch and we might even post it on the site.
