Success and struggles...
Today I had a great surprise... I stepped on the scales and I was sub 12 stone! 11 stone 13 3/4 pounds! This felt great, as 11 stone would be a really healthy weight for me to be at, and it feels like it is in reach now. It also means I am now in the healthy BMI weight range! I have been sticking to my healthy eating, and making small improvements along the way. I have also started training and running again, as my knee seems pretty solid. So life is good!
However I feel for my girlfriend. She says that she is only losing about 1/2 pound per week if that. This is confusing us both as she is eating a lot less calories than I am. She is finding it quite challenging as she feels like the beginning should be when you lose most weight, as you have more to lose. She feels like if it is this slow now, as she drops weight it is going to get even slower. The reward doesn't seem to fit the effort she is making.
I tried to frame it in a positive way. I said, not only are you losing weight, but are making sure you are not putting any more on, which is what was happening before, so the change is bigger than she realises. I also said, we all have challenges, and sometimes things are harder for one person than others. She has been on many diets and starved herself in the past, which is like trauma for the body, and this will affect her weight loss now. She has been on many diet pills, stopped eating a number of times, liquid only diets, and many other unhealthy diets. Last year she had her tonsils out, and stopped eating for about 3 weeks. Her body remembers this and thinks it needs to hold on the weight to survive, making it much harder to shift the fat. So for her, weight loss is going to be harder than most.
I tried to get her to see, how my challenges with mental health, mean I have to try harder to look after myself, and keep my mind healthy than other people, and her battle is different, but in a similar way it is her challenge. The other thing is that, all of this stuff can be improved on each week. We might not get things right first time, and we can make small changes as we go on to improve what we are doing. So perhaps the weight loss can speed up for her over time, as she builds up increasingly better habits when it comes to food.
I don't know if any of this helped, and I can see why she was upset. It doesn't help that I am losing weight much quicker, and I wish I could help her more. She is eating probably 500 calories less each day, and should therefore lose half a pound to a pound more each week. The only thing she is not doing is regular intense exercise. She does walk a lot, but I think she needs something that will get her heart rate up a bit more than this. I think she would like to cycle, so I will encourage this, but as I say to her, there is no rush, we will just make small adjustments each week until we get to where we want to go!