It may be gathered from recent remarks that I fell off the wagon a bit as far as the weight control goes.

The timeline here is that I made WeightWatchers lifetime membership in November 2006. I managed to keep fairly close to goal weight for a few months, but as the birth of our second child approached in the middle of 2007 my weight went up again - many bad habits had returned. I managed to stay within spitting distance (ie about a stone) of my original goal weight before the birth, but all pretense of controlling my eating fell away after I got back to work.

Then I hurt my knee in October 2007. I had been running at quite reasonable speeds just before whatever non-specific event triggered my knee pain, but I couldn't run at all after that. And that was it - uncontrolled eating and no exercise. In six months I put on over two stone from my goal weight, almost three stone from my lightest. I was still twenty pounds down from where I had started in February 2006, but it was a depressing time.

Much as I was helped by the WeightWatchers programme, I find myself blaming it for my weight gain. The reason is that I found it almost impossible to stop from losing weight after I made goal, so I never actually learned to maintain my weight.

Until early 2007 the WeightWatchers points formula drew no distinction between men and women. This meant that I was on too few daily points. Then once you hit goal, the recommended procedure is to increase your points by four, and then add two more points each week that you continue to lose.

Given that I was way below where I should have been for points, following the stabilisation procedure did not stop me losing weight - I was more than ten pounds below my original goal when I finally hit bottom, and I had achieved that by bringing in exactly the bad habits that I alluded to above: buying buns at Starbucks, eating lots of chocolate, scoffing cheese...

I think I would do better with the current programme since there are now more points assigned to men: once goal was reached, I would have stopped losing weight more quickly and been able to find a stable point. As it is I have been counting in a somewhat desultory fashion since late May.

Things are moving, though. I am now about ten pounds down from where I was before my knee surgery and I am exercising regularly, even frequently, again. I am hoping that I can approach a plausible weight rather more gradually and slip into a maintenance mode without radical changes in the amount I eat.

Here's hoping, anyway.

Posted by Dunx at August 25, 2008 05:09 PM