Weight Loss Wednesday : Set Point
on February 22nd, 2012 at 10:00 amYesterday was Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday. I originally wanted to try and make some sort of traditional food to celebrate, but in the end all I could think about was chocolate. I know, what else is new?
I thought about making something chocolatey and then decorating it with purple, gold and green. That would have been festive! But it just seemed like it would be too much effort to try and find something natural to make those colors with.
Sometimes I am just too impatient for my own good.
I was supposed to get to babysit these ragamuffins with Aubrey tonight.
But I guess it’s actually next Tuesday. I love Tawnya, but she’s a nut. 
Ooh chocolate and nuts. That sounds awesome right about now.
She realized that her Bunco night is next week, not this week. So instead of babysitting we stopped by to see everyone and just hang out for awhile. Four kids always leads to a NOISY house. Gotta love those silly kids. Good thing they don’t have chocolate to add to their silly antics.
Chocolate… I’ve just had chocolate on the brain recently. And no, not raw cacao nibs. I tried them recently at a food tasting and they were horribly bitter. Thankfully they were also sampling dried gogi berries too and I was able to get that awful taste out of my mouth.
But enough about candy, I’ve eaten my fair share of chocolate and goodies lately. Including this.
To be fair, I was just super excited about finally finding jelly beans that weren’t made on the same equipment as wheat. So eating two snack size bags two days in a row is just fine by me. And Rasinets are always good of course.
Wait, we were supposed to be moving ON from candy.
Previous Weight Loss Posts:
Recently I got the March issue of Elle in the mail. Although, can I just say that I always seem to forget how many ads magazines have. I subscribe to enough of them that this shouldn’t surprise me, and yet every time I’m amazed by how many pages I have to flip through just to get to even the Editor’s Letter.
It might not matter to me if I didn’t have the habit of ripping out the ads. As long as no articles are on either side of a page, it gets ripped out by me. Buh-bye ads! You’re in the way of my reading time. Too many to rip out tends to make the magazines not want to stay together though.
But I really like Elle because it covers a wide variety of topics. The nutrition/weight loss articles usually peak my interest first. This one was especially interesting.
I’ve been reading more and more about our bodies having a “set point” otherwise known as the weight that our body wants to naturally settle at. It’s a weight that you can maintain without too much effort. In my weight loss efforts I’ve hit plateaus numerous times and it was always frustrating.
But plateaus don’t have to mean that you’re doing anything wrong. It may just be your body freaking out! Okay, that’s not as scary as it sounds. It’s just that for our ancestors when the calories were cut way back it wasn’t because of a conscious decision to do so. It was because food was scarce so the body fought back by hanging onto the fat stores for survival.
So basically with weight loss you’re fighting against evolution. Sneaky devil, it’s always there to screw with us!
You can fight against it. I certainly have. I think every 20-30 pounds I had to fight to get lower. I knew with each step that I wasn’t ready to be done yet. Recently it has taken a ton of effort to stay low though. Am I supposed to weigh less or is this the end? That’s what I haven’t figured out yet.
That’s the funny thing with weight loss. I feel like there really isn’t a concrete end. Even maintaining isn’t really an end. I know my diet isn’t as clean as it can be. And I don’t strength train as often as I should. So things could definitely be better than they currently are. I just have to decide if the extra effort is worth it to me.
On a completely unrelated note, if you’re ever babysitting your nephew and trying to make him laugh by putting on all of his clothes, make sure no one has a camera. Not that I would know anything about that…
C’mon now, I share enough of my craziness. That doesn’t mean you need to take my picture every time!
What do you think about the “set point” theory? Does your current weight take a lot of effort to maintain? What’s your favorite kind of candy: GO!
