To be honest, it IS a big shock to your system actually getting to target. You are so focused on "getting" there that actually hitting it can be a real mindblower. "Ok, what now?" - for me, I got there and thought "Not done", and didnt really settle until I got to about a stone lighter, and I am happily here now and can maintain it reasonably well. Its not without its pitfalls, and I still see every item of food in terms of its syn value, which I suppose helps, but can be quite annoying to work out that this is REALLY it, and to not go back where you were you still have to think in those terms.
You arent suddenly going to get thinner and turn into one of those people who can eat their body weight in pizza and never gain an ounce. If you were programmed that way, you wouldnt have got overweight in the first place.
I think its vital to remember (and this applies to those losing, as well as those maintaining) that being slim DOES NOT qualify you for permanent long term happiness. And equally, that fat might be a symptom, rather than a cause, for your unhappiness.
As you look towards your target, its very useful to explore how you feel about yourself, remind yourself of your progress, and how losing weight in itself, regardless of how much, or for how long, is a HUGE achievement in its own right.
You might only have 4lb to lose, you might have 400lb, but to lose them, you have to make the right choices, act positively on your own behalf, and thats hard to do, if you have a deep down belief that you arent worth the effort or worth caring about.
So every time you get on those scales, and see them drop, a little, or a lot, remember how positive what you are doing is, and how you ARE worth the effort. Not because of what other people want for you, or how they might see you, but because more than anything else, you want to make sure you take care of yourself, because no-one else will ever try as hard as you can to do that.
Treat this as an exercise in regaining an element of control over your life, your body. Thats hard to do too, especially if you are happier abandoning control because "you just dont have any" - you do have control, we all do, over the choices we make and the thoughts we have of ourselves.
Would the voice in your head say the sorts of negative things to your best friend/partner that it says to you? I doubt it, firstly, it wouldnt be brave enough to risk the friendship/love by doing it, and secondly because it values that person enough to treat them with love and kindness. Its a cowardly voice, it attacks its nearest "soft" target - which is you, and me, (you may be able to tell that I am speaking with the benefit of hindsight here!) because we BELIEVE what we tell ourselves, because its the only opinion we have and therefore it must be right. It takes some doing to actually challenge those thoughts and put them into perspective, but if you can do it, its a really useful tool to chip away at the negative thoughts and make you feel more positive about things.
I think the journey to target has actually been the most self-exploratory one of my life - because I have had to peel back the layers of protection, and leave myself exposed to the harsher elements of life. Its very easy to invisage running away from them, back into the cake tin, into the supermarket to stock up on "treats", because there you are on safer more comforting ground. But to succeed at this, long term, you have to push past that urge and recognise it as what it is.
Here comes one of my strangely inventive metaphors again...
Its like having a jumbled 10000 piece jigsaw in your head, and having to painstakingly pick each piece up, inspect it, make sure its ok, and find the place where it fits. I am probably 1/3 of the way through sorting through the jigsaw, and I am 18 months into the weight reparation exercise. Often even now, the mental equivalent of having a few more pieces flung onto the unsorted pile will instinctively trigger me into thinking I should go sort this out with kitkat caramels, because they really are the only thing that make sense at that point. Much like me, with the jigsaw metaphor, have a syn free kitkat caramel on me.
Anyway, after that TL : DR effort on my part, good on you for staying awake to the end, if you managed it. It was a bit of a conscious stream of thought.
To summarise. MLM thinks too much. But I hope some of what I said makes some sort of sense, to someone, other than me!! :8855:
