I’d considered deleting that from the post, since I recognized it might sound weird to other people. I can’t remember why I left it in, but there’s a reason why my mother’s refusal to weigh herself in front of other people sticks out in my mind:
Her scale has been kept in the pantry of every house she’s ever owned.
This means that some of my earliest childhood memories include being kicked out of the kitchen and made to hide in the living room while my mother weighed herself, before we were allowed to have breakfast. This was such a constant that I was an adult before I realized that most people keep their scales in the bathrooms, not the pantry. To this day, as an adult, I’ll be kicked out of her kitchen if she decides to weigh herself.
I will say that in certain circumstances of weight gain (thinking especially of injury-caused weight gain) it might work. I put on a bunch of weight when I trashed my ankle and needed surgery. I didn’t change my eating at all during that time, but my activity level went down drastically-- and then the weight was hard to get off. I lost 15 pounds to a bad bout of food poisoning (which I would not wish on my worst enemy), and found the weight easy to keep off by just resuming my normal eating/exercising habits-- habits which had maintained my weight steady for years. Weight that has crept up based on years of bad eating habits is a whole 'nother ball of wax.
As long as we’re sharing helpful WW stuff, I’ll throw out these sheets I made for my wife a few years ago, since the ones WW gave out in book form were really annoying. This gives you a whole week’s worth of tracking space on one side of a sheet of paper. http://sdmbexample.nfshost.com/ww/ The “front” and “back” are identical except for having the margins on opposite sides so they can be printed back-to-back on 3-hole punch if you’re into that.
It’s possible that WW has redesigned their tracking booklets so they’re not so annoying, making these a little useless, but if someone finds them useful, so much the better.
I want to address this one more time just in case someone has taken these words to heart.
This comment is well-intentioned, I’m sure. But it does not take into account that some mothers are just really, really wrong. They can be totally ignorant of genetics and the other reasons that bodies tend to gain weight to begin with. They can be control freaks who want their daughters to be rail thin. They can be jealous of their daughters and want them to be overweight so that they won’t be competition.
Some mothers are abusive, narcissistic, or even sociopathic. They can be physically and emotionally abusive. Food and weight control can be the means to that end. Their efforts to use commentary on your appearance in order to wound you may last for all of your lifetime if you allow it.
Dieting, weight loss and lifestyle weight management choices vary in success from person to person and may change over your lifetime. The notion that everyone can just put down the fork and lose weight does not take into consideration the compulsive nature of some eating disorders that are matters of brain chemistry and not will power.
It’s 3:00 am here and I will trade these wheat crackers for some lettuce with spicey mustard.
As mentioned above - I am doing weight training 3 days a week and treadmill 3 days a week. My trainer says I am not eating often enough, but it is hard to get rid of decades of people saying “if you eat less you will lose weight”. It is simply not that easy.
Pretty much true, but we all got weighed in front of everybody in the Army and you get over it. I imagine this is true for pro athletes and fashion models and anyone else who has to get weighed regularly.
I do wish that if actresses are going to talk about their weight, they would tell the truth for a change.
Just one piece of advice re counting the calories - make sure you are weighing everything, as opposed to simply using a measuring spoon or cup - you may well find that you are underestimating the calorie count in everything by just a little - and if you multiply that by everything you eat each day, you may be reducing your calorie deficit substantially. There’s a good video on youtube by Leigh Peele which demonstrates this.