Statistical Status Quo? ,,,or Beating the odds?!!!

Today not feeling well...flu I think. Trying to avoid the emphatic hurling that my husband did all night...so instead of engaging my own brain today I'll be quoting EvidenceBasedFitness.blogspot.com (then crawling back to bed):

Burning your boats....
He says statistics do not favour success...in fact of those who do succeed this year, most will ultimately fail. Real reassuring.....but maybe we can use the information from these stats to take steps that improve beating those odds....

"Success in weight loss or any self-improvement goal depends mainly on the ability of a person to adhere to a new behaviour. Quitting smoking is a good, simple example (albeit of a very difficult task): You succeed at quitting smoking by engaging in behaviours that do not involve smoking. Do or do not, there is no try. Taking a drag on a cigarette means you've relapsed and are no longer an ex-smoker.

Weight loss is not as simple of a goal. It can involve multiple behaviours, many of which involve changing substantial portions of one's day from both a time and a performance perspective. For instance, beginning to exercise is a behaviour that requires time investment. That means exercise has to DISPLACE another activity that you've grown accustomed to doing. Eating less or eliminating certain foods means the performance of eating changes. And then on top of it all, there's the social dimension of weight loss, which can mean displacing perfectly enjoyable activities that not only provide nutrition/caloric value but also contribute substantially to our sense of well-being and belonging (e.g. a weekly pub night, or after-work drinks and appetizers, or Sunday dinner with parents.)" Kim here: Not to mention the psycho-social aspect regarding our psychological relationship with food usage as a coping skill...if calories-in vs.calories-out were only that simple. That whole process gets thrown off by emotional eating. The only way to end emotional eating, or eating as (inappropriate) coping, is to replace it with a new, more useful and more appropriate coping skill.. Now back to EvidenceBasedFitness.blogspot.com:

"The most common theme I've discovered (and this is, in and of itself, just opinion and anecdote) from watching patients attempt to enact lifestyle changes and reading stories of people who have had overwhelming success, however, comes down to something perhaps equally as unpleasant as making a lifestyle change that you've failed at in the past: pain, and sometimes, fear. Unfortunately, this is, thus far, a fairly immeasurable quality, so making causal associations between pain/fear and dietary success is fairly difficult, though, with the right research team, not impossible.

When it comes to adherence to new behaviours, (and I'm not sure this has even been studied at all yet, in the way that I'm going to state it), is the introduction of a situation in which the pain of staying in the same place (or moving backwards) becomes so great that success is the only option. I have personally witnessed (though with limited verifiability) patients who, after suffering a serious hand injury that would affect their ability to earn a living, stopped smoking the day of the injury. These were people who had tried to quit in the past unsuccessfully and years later, are still smoke-free, even though the danger of affecting their hand function by smoking is pretty much gone.

In medical school, we're taught to try to find reasons for patients to change their lifestyle. Sometimes, it's an injury or a new diagnosis. Sometimes, it's being around for their loved ones. In most circumstances, it's the pain of the situation, or the pain of the fear that ultimately moves people to action."

(We've all heard of scared straight and we've all heard Dr. Phil's mention of the pay-off that someone is getting from continuing their bad behaviours, sometimes not readily obvious, but moreso with a deeper search...that comment was me again, BTW).

"Personally, I think that the reason why most people fail at their goals is because it's really not that painful to fail. If you fail, you'll get over it. Your waist size doesn't change, or it might even get a little bigger, but on the whole, your life is pretty good. There is a famous story of Alexander the Great, who upon landing on the shores of Persia, ordered his men to burn the boats, thereby removing all realistic hope of retreat. If your income was contingent on your ability to stay at a certain BMI, regardless of your beliefs about the BMI and whether you are an "outlier" or not, you'd get there and stay there. You would find a way to stay there. You might bitch and complain about it, but given the option of unemployment or BMI, my guess is most people would pick BMI. In a way, it's no different than doing your job. If you don't do your job, you get fired. Come hell or high water, when crunch time comes, you'll find a way to get that job done because you know the personal stakes are high.

Finding that intolerable state is what motivates successful change. Eventually, you may come to enjoy the new life you've created. I can't think of a single ex-smoker who regrets quitting smoking. I can't think of a single person who, after successfully losing weight and keeping it off, regrets making sweeping changes to the way they live. They tell me that the process of quitting/changing really sucked, but that they would never trade their old life for their new one. One patient of one of my mentors, after quitting smoking, kept putting the money he spent on cigarettes in a large jar. A few years later he bought a massively expensive sports car (I can't remember the make/model), which he enjoys far more than any cigarette he ever smoked (or so he tells me.) It doesn't mean you have to live a painful life forever. But enacting change without consequence of failure, I think, is embarking on a journey to which there is always a convenient exit.

So, as unpleasant as it is to contemplate, my challenge to those of you serious enough to take it, is to find that pain. If that means making your life intolerable to failure, then perhaps that's not a bad approach. Find ways to put yourself in situations where getting out is more painful than staying in.

It's 2012. Find your pain. Burn the boats."


So  (Kim here again) I guess my quest is to find that pain....without it looming there as a consequence, relapse is inevitable. Has that been my missing link all along? SOMETHING has! I have the knowledge and the tools...I keep "getting it done" but then I end up back where I started. I can't seem to keep it permanent, and I am far from alone on this. Inevitably the consequences of gaining it all back have not been PAINFUL enough to keep me on the straight path. PEOPLE magazine this month  features several former BIGGEST LOSER stars and how/why they've maintained (or not) their weight loss. It also revisits "They lost half their weight" PEOPLE featured subjects from each of the last 10 years, and the obstacles they face in maintaining (or not) their weight loss. 


One more piece of the puzzle.


All very relevant to my 2012 theme of balance. I need to find the balance between the pain of being overweight/under-fit/unhealthy, and the physical, but more importantly emotional pain of working my butt off, and depriving myself of a few of the things I like in order to achieve homeostasis. I am convinced that will be the only way to get myself off the yo-yo roller-coaster. I've been setting myself up with fabricated consequences each time (which obviously don't stick), but haven't gotten deeper, to the core. Only by gathering all the puzzle pieces will I be able to assemble and complete it....



Have YOU struggled with this? OR have you found your balance...identified the pain you never want to revisit so that it is looming before you as a consequence if you stray from your path? I would LOVE for you to share your thoughts and insights!