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One thing that I found interesting here is that it seems you were always very honest with yourself about everything.
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Honestly, imo this is the most important thing you can do - and it's a fundamental baseline of all the people I've known who've been successful. If you make a sub-optimal decision, YOU are making the decision. It's not being made for you, YOU are doing it. And you need to be willing and able to accept it.
That doesn't mean that it's not okay to make sub-optimal decisions - it happens. But do it CONSCIOUSLY. Recognize and acknowledge what it is. Again, this is somewhere that my poker experience really helped me - objective analysis of a potentially emotional decision-making process. You need to learn to disassociate food from emotion in pretty much every facet of your life. For this reason I don't allow myself to judge my self-worth by the food decisions I make. To me, your self-worth is measured by how you treat people, how hard you work - WHO you are. What you eat is just that - it's what you eat. Nothing more, nothing less. Because losing weight is so hard, people really fetishize the whole process, and that can get unhealthy because they allow it to get so emotional. On my weight loss board, someone got the stomach flu and had to go back onto eating carbs just to get by. They then had a post where they talked about how they "blew it," which is ABSURD. People can use falling off for any reason - out of a simple poor decision or even out of necessity, as in this woman's situation - as a reason to quit. Because they get wrapped up in the emotion of it, rather than just seeing it as a series of decisions that you're making to realize a goal. Here's my response to her from that board. Incidentally, the acronyms WOE and WOL are commonly used there - they stand for Way of Eating and Way of Life. People don't usually call it a "diet," because it is not that - or at least not if you want to be long-term successful. A diet has an endpoint, a WOE or WOL does not. It's an important distinction. That doesn't mean that you'll never increase your carb level - if you follow Atkins properly, you eventually do, and you basically end up eating the commonly prescribed "lots of fruits and vegetables with lean meats" diet, albeit with less grains and no refined sugars. But it is a commitment to NOT going back to your old, ineffective way of eating:
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I'll be blunt here (that's kind of my way...):
That's ridiculous. You didn't blow it. You got a stomach virus and ate some stuff that wasn't on your plan. Calm down, and do NOT think that way. Blowing it is saying "I've fallen off, and I'm staying off," or, "I don't care that I've regained weight."
This is a totally defeatist thing to say. I had mono this year, and when I had mono I ate ice cream because it was literally the only thing I could swallow, and I needed calories. Did I "blow it"?? No. I did what I had to do at the time. When I was better, I stopped.
Don't allow yourself to be mentally defeated and think things like that. What happens if you DON'T have the stomach flu and you fall off? Have you "blown it" then?? No, you ate off plan. That's all. Start eating on plan again.
I really hate that people see this in such an absolute way. It's incredibly unhealthy, imo, because it fetishizes the WOE. A WOE is just that - a WAY OF EATING. It's what you eat. It's not a holy thing that can never be violated, or that if you have the gall to not follow will punish you. It is not an entity that fights you or controls you. It's an effective methodology for losing weight. If you want to lose weight, follow it. Do not rationalize, do not eat badly. But do it because you are doing it - not because it is doing it to you. If you fall off, IT'S OKAY. All you have to do is get back in line with the WOE and everything will work itself out. If you're stalled, just stay in line with it and it will be fine. But do not feel controlled by it, because that will lead you to rebel against it. And do not feel constrained by it, or like you have to live up to its expectations or something, because that is not what it is. It is how you're choosing to eat. If you go off, your next choice can be a good one, it's okay. There is no "blowing it." It's not like it's an exclusive club, where once you screw up - or, in this case, are forced into a sub-optimal decision - you're out. It's your free will and you can do whatever you like at any time. If what you want to do is eat on plan, then do it. If you fall off and decide that you don't want to eat off plan after all, then start eating on plan again.
Just make the best choices you can and everything will be fine - don't worry about "blowing it," as though there's something to blow. Just make decisions that are in line with your plan in so far as you can. If you make a bad choice - or in this case are forced to make a choice that isn't in line with what you'd like to do - just FORGET about it and move on to the next one, and make IT good.
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Another thing is the scale. I went a long time without using a scale and then read about some study that said it was important to weigh yourself frequently b/c it gives you the quickest feedback (and most honest, I would add). Anyway, I agree with the study.
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I totally agree with that. I now weigh myself daily, and plan to do so for the rest of my life. I didn't from age probably 11 or 12 until last year, when I bought the scale. I hid from the truth of the situation, because I felt so powerless against it.
One thing I will say, however, is that I believe very strongly in using multiple forms of feedback. I use the scale, the tape measure, a hand held body fat analyzer and, when I'm really trying hard to lose weight, ketostix (which measure the amount of ketones you're expelling, a sign that you're in lipolysis, as described earlier). I do NOT put too much emphasis on any one form, nor on any given day's specific readings. Your body is just too damned stubborn and weird for that - you can be up or down on any given day for no good reason at all. Here are a couple of graphs from people who've successfully lost weight and kept track of it in a spreadsheet (not me - I didn't keep track in anything but my head):
Note how much both of them bounce, both up AND down. The ultimate goal, however, is what's going on - it's a downward trend. The day-to-day readings don't mean anything, it's the long-term trends that matter. I need multi-day trends across multiple forms of feedback that coincide with some kind of change in my routine before I start to even consider changing anything up, because the day-to-day jumps and dips are virtually meaningless. And if I'm gaining weight but losing inches or body fat %, I am HAPPY, not concerned - it means that I'm losing the thing that I want to lose, which is fat. I don't care as much about losing weight. I do know, however, that the weight will eventually come off if I follow what I need to follow. It can't but come off.
-bb.