Time Will Tell...

If anyone here is guilty of extreme impatience while trying to lose weight, raise your hand...

I have both of mine in the air right now, haha. Because I'm one of the most impatient people ever. You'd think it has gotten better after 2+ years losing weight, keeping it off, putting a bit back on, and trying to get it off again. Not so much.

As I've mentioned in my previous blogs, I'm doing the New Rules of Lifting for Women, which is technically a 6 month program. 6 MONTHS! That's a seriously long commitment. And Phase 1 is at least 6 weeks long, which is also for me a long time to "let things play out". I feel like on MFP with tickers and weight loss numbers and calorie counts in full display, it's hard to see the scale stagnate even if that's expected to happen. I love logging a loss as much as anyone, but it's a huge shift in mindset to move away from tracking my progress on the scale and tracking it through measurements, new weight lifting records and how my clothes fit. I'm the only person who sees the number on the scale, everyone else sees the other things. But it's still hard to move away from.

I have 6 workouts left in Phase 1, which will likely take me 2 full weeks to finish. I'm hoping to finish Phase 1 by Easter so I can take that long weekend off and start Phase 2 when I return. I'm also trying to move away from the mindset that I MUST lose weight. At this point, my muscles are still developing and they're going to take a while to start burning more fat. My body fat won't disappear overnight (unfortunately, at least not medically unassisted). I'm hoping that after doing this for a month or more I'll start seeing the changes. This week is a terrible example as I feel like I've got an ocean of water weight (my stomach feels huge).

But, the main point is that I need to trust the program for longer than 3 1/2 weeks. A lot of people on here make the mistake of changing things every week and that's entirely too short a time to see if what they're doing really works! Breaking a plateau is not something that can be done overnight. If you're body took a few weeks or months to settle into a plateau, chances are it will take a few weeks to break out of it. Plus this doesn't even take into account replacing fat with muscle mass, something only non-scale measures will tell.

So if you raised your hand about being impatient, coming from someone who completely understands, it's OK but stick with what you're doing! As long as it's healthy and it's something you can keep up for more than a week (crash diets and working out 3 hours a day definitely don't fit into this description), it should start to work. There's always a chance it won't and you'll need to try a new approach, but let your body have the time it needs to do it's thing. In the meantime, I'm going to give it the best chance I can at working by focusing on not messing everything up this weekend. No eating bad meals when I go out for dinner, limiting how much I drink, and hopefully running a 5K on Sunday if the weather holds up.