The 5 Secrets of the 5%

When you belong to a community like thedailyplate.com, you become the recipient of all sorts of information – most of it pretty good information – about dieting, exercise, eating, etc. The people in my groups are always sharing websites and articles with each other. Of all of the articles and websites I have read since I began this journey, the most helpful to me was The 5 Secrets of the 5%.

The premise of the article is that only 5% of people who try to lose weight are both successful and able to keep the weight off long-term. I don’t know how scientifically accurate that statistic is – it certainly feels accurate for those of us trying to lose weight and keep it off! But that is another topic. The point is, those who do lose weight and keep it off long term have certain things in common – certain characteristics or behaviors that enable them to succeed. The article summarizes those 5 “secrets.” Now, you can read the article for yourself, and I encourage you to do so, but I can summarize it as the 5 P’s:

Publicity – If you want to succeed at this, you cannot do it by yourself. Join a group, recruit supporters, write down your goals and share them with people you know & trust. Make an accountability partner, or an exercise buddy. Join a website where others are walking the same path you are.

Pay Attention – You need to track what you are doing – either on paper, on a website, with a tape recorder – something! It is so incredibly easy to be unaware of your own eating choices. Tracking or journaling keeps you aware of what you are doing, which helps keep you from sliding into old habits.

Positive Attitude – Not to be a Pollyanna, but you are not going to succeed if you have a fatalistic, Eeyore attitude about this. If you tend to be a pessimist, you need to find some supporters who are optimists. You need to tell yourself positive messages daily – write notes to yourself, send yourself ecards – whatever works to keep a positive mindset.

Patience – You didn’t put on this weight, or get out of shape, in 30 days; and it is not going to take 30 days to get back to healthy. Concentrate on small changes, baby steps…don’t try to change everything at once because you will fail and get discouraged. Reader’s Digest did a campaign a couple of years ago called “Change One Thing.” The idea was you just change one thing at a time, and one you get comfortable with that change, change something else. Not a bad strategy.

Permission to Fail – If you think you are going to do this without making any mistakes, well, think again. Let me break it to you now – you ARE going to fail. You are going to blow it, and the only thing that matters is whether or not you get back up after you do. The only difference between success and failure is how many times you get back up. So forgive yourself, and get back on track.

Think about those you know (yourself included) who have tried to lose weight and failed. It is easy to pinpoint which of these 5 things they (you) missed along the way. I think (and this is my personal opinion only) that practicing 3 or even 4 of the 5 things is not enough. You have to consistently apply all 5 at the same time to have any ongoing success. Start today, and consciously apply the 5 P’s. You might be surprised at your own success.

4 Month Blog Break

Wow – they say “time flies when you are having fun.” Well, I say it flies whether or not you are having fun!  It has been 4 months since I last published a blog post, but it feels much shorter. I stopped blogging at the advent of summer, intending to take a quick break, but the break stretched out just a bit. Several reasons, really – for one thing, my husband and I have ramped up the fertility quest and I have been on a variety of medications that make me feel like I have a mild case of the flu mixed with a bad case of PMS. (Irritatingly, these meds also make one gain weight, but I will get to that in a minute). Secondly, it is a widely held myth that teachers spend their summers lounging around a pool eating bon bons. HA! The teachers I know either travel in the summer (those with money other than their teaching salary) or work their hiney off during the summer (if not for pay, then “to get things done”). I fall cleanly into the second category. I spent the first month (half – we only got 8 weeks this year) of the summer working summer school – something that pays $25/hour because they know that if they paid any less they would be unable to recruit teachers! Summer school is awful. But I wanted the money to fund the fertility effort, so I worked the first session. I never even considered working the second session, because doing so would have given me exactly 9 days of summer vacation – 3 days between Spring and Session I, 2 days between Session I and II, and 4 days between Session II and Fall. Ummmmm-no. Not gonna happen.

After summer school I entered the “get things done” phase. By happenstance both my mother and my mother-in-law decided at the same time to clean out their junk rooms, and I was drafted to help with each of those multi-day projects. Not that cleaning out other people’s junk is not enjoyable – it is easily more enjoyable than dealing with one’s own junk, because one is more objective. Plus you usually end up with some “treasures” that they want to throw away. My new “treasures” are in my junk room, by the way, which didn’t get touched this summer. Oh, well! We did squeeze in some fun things in July, like going to Schlitterbahn and seeing movies and such, nothing fancy, but I just wasn’t in the mood to sit in front of the PC. In the midst of all this we continued with the fertility meds, which made me draggy.

So July was a blur of cleaning and outdoor activities, and sleeping whenever I could, and on August 6^th I had to go back to work. The first few weeks are always super-hectic for me, because I am a trainer, so I am very busy training all of my new staff on everything; plus training both old and new staff on whatever is new this year (which is a lot, this year). The first week was all “new to the district” folks, the second week was “my campus,” and the third week the kids arrive. The 4th and 5th weeks are full, too, because we have to get all of the electronic gradebooks set up, parent & teacher accounts for the website, open house, yada yada yada. August and May are the wackiest months of the year for me. We actually decided to take a break in August from QuestFertility, which I am glad of. We both needed the financial and emotional break, and I needed a physical break from the meds.

Then, week 4 of classes, just when I thought things were settling down, Hurricane Ike shows up. We had already had one close call this season with Gustav, but Ike turned out to be nothing like a close call – he came right into us and delivered the worst hurricane to our area since the 60’s. (I was here for hurricane Alicia in 1983 – she was a bit stronger, but she was small and it ended quickly.) Ike was a behemoth. We had planned to stay and hunker through it, after all our house is 40 feet above sea level and the area has never flooded since the neighborhood was built, but we woke up Thursday morning to dire mandatory evacuation orders, and on Friday we fled to Austin before it hit, riding on the voices of panicky reporters. My parents and my in-laws also evac’d to Austin, but my brother stayed behind with his family. Fortunately the direst warnings did not come to pass – is the media ever 100% right about anything? - the hurricane never did strengthen to a 3, and it shifted just enough to the east to spare our area the worst of the flooding. We lost our fence and lost a big tree, but those are minor annoyances compared to what the folks in Galveston, Seabrook, Kemah, etc. It will be a long hard road for them, and we know people who lost absolutely everything.

Since we returned home (the Sunday after the storm), we have been mostly preoccupied with clean up, insurance, and helping others who fared worse than us. We were without power 5 days, kids in our area were out of school 2 weeks, and this is my first week back to work.

So, haven’t had much time to blog, or much motivation to blog, especially since my blog’s topic is my battle against diabetes, and I have not been paying a lot of attention to that as of late. I gained 10 pounds this summer - ugh. Sure, I can place a small amount of blame on the meds, but I was also much less diligent about tracking my food and about my exercise. I think I do better when my days are structured, as they are during the academic year, than I do when things are loosey goosey. Plus my walking club (which walks around the interior of the building after school) was n/a for 2 months and it was ridiculously hot, so walking outside was miserable.  Excuses, I know, but not invalid ones. Fortunately my sugars are still quite well-controlled, and I have managed to halt the gaining trend; gotten the car into idle, shall I say, rather than in reverse. Now I need to get it back into Drive. ;-)

 Here are the most important things I learned from my 3-month break:

1. I do much much much better at my eating and my exercise when I am diligently tracking on thedailyplate.com
2. That business about “if you do something for 30 days it is a permanent habit” is a load of bull-doody. I was a habitual exerciser for 8 months but managed to grind to a near stop this summer, and didn't even miss it. Diligence is a constant requirement, at least it is for me.
3. Although I love blogging, and I have missed blogging, and I would probably even argue that blogging is good for me, it is not in my top 10 priorities. And that is ok. Not that I am planning to take that long a break again anytime in the near future. ;)