Tagged

Every once in a while, usually on a Saturday, I finally get round to spending some proper time reading those other blogs that I link to and, eek, I've been tagged by Liz with:

1. Go into your archives.
2. Find your 23rd post.
3. Find the fifth sentence (or the closest one to it)
4. Post the text of your sentence in your blog along with these rules.
5. Tag five other people.

"I was working out that to get to the sort of weight I would like to be at it's going to be a long process, and that after that my "short term" aim would be to keep the weight off for at least a year to give any hope of keeping it off in the long term."

Reading back through that post was good for me. It was the moment that it clicked that maintenance and long term thinking would be the only thing that would work to keep the weight off long term. I remember how I sat back, looked at a planner of the whole year, and worked out that even if I lost weight at a fairly rapid but healthy pace I'd still only be nearing a healthy BMI by the end of the year (and this was back in April).

I pondered though, whether I could do it, and whether I'd be able to stick to it for that long.

"Of course, my rough jottings now don't take account of anything that could throw me off my stride. Another foot injury, illness, falling off the wagon like I did last autumn. Losing my motivation. A plateau. And I'm desperately trying not to hold myself to the figures I set out, because that way I foresee failure. Hopefully not dismal failure, but I don't know whether I can keep up this progress consistently for that long.

But then part of me says, why not? Just go for it. If you fail to lose another 29kg then what does it matter if you've managed to lose 25. Or 15. Or even 5. You'll still be improving your health, your weight, your fitness, and there's always next year. But maybe once I set a target and miss it it will cause me to lose my motivation and throw me off the wagon completely."

Anyway, the reason I'm glad to have found this is that it's late October, and I'm still here and I am doing it. The target has changed so that I'm a bit further away from it now than I was on the old figures, but I've been losing fairly consistently for that whole time, and I'm pretty much where I hoped to be on my April numbers. They're not the be all and end all, but it's nice to be on track and to be able to look back and say "I did it, after all".

I need to go away and think of 5 people to tag now, which is always the hard bit...