My mother used to follow a low-carb diet, right up until, as she put it, “that woman killed her diet doctor.” She was referring to Jean Harris’s murder of Herman Tarnower in the early ’80s. Tarnower advocated for a relatively low-carbohydrate diet for rapid weight loss (called the Scarsdale Diet, should you want to do more research on this). I couldn’t tell, in all honesty, that the diet did my mother much good. Of course, my mother also hid chocolate bars around the house so that she could find them when she wanted them in the middle of the night (I inherited her insomniac proclivities, but I don’t eat chocolate at night).

As anyone who’s been paying attention to this blog for a while knows, I’ve been working on slowly, steadily, painfully losing weight for the last almost-five years. I’ve been maintaining a sixty-pound weight loss for about a year and half now (after losing for three and a half years), but I dream of losing another ten or so pounds. Maybe fifteen. But… I’ve been steady for a year and a half, which is not nothing.

I eat very carefully these days. I rarely eat sugar. I don’t drink much alcohol, maybe once or twice a month. My preferred beverages are seltzer, tea (hot or iced, no sugar), water. I eat very little bread. Some potatoes, some brown rice. I even eat quinoa. I eat lots of fruit. I eat nuts. Green vegetables. Avocado. I eat meat. I use olive oil and butter to cook with. I ask myself if I’m hungry or thirsty before I eat. Mostly I avoid fried foods and mostly we cook at home, whole foods that aren’t processed at all. I try not to eat unless I’m actually hungry. This seems to work to maintain my weight. There’s that word: “maintain.”

Can you tell I’m a little frustrated to be stuck at this weight? Just a little.

I’ve been reading up on metabolic biochemistry. A friend recommended  Nina Teicholz’s The Big Fat Surpriseas a study of the food industry’s influence on so-called scientific research on nutrition and health over the period since World War II. Some of it I knew because I was a biochemistry major (undergraduate) and Professor Gene Brown (of MIT) was a stickler for facts. I was advised, back in the early 1970s, that eating trans fats in the form of margarine and other hydrogenated oils were going to be a serious health problem. Prof. Brown was an advocate of liquid oils like olive oil and also for butter. His drawings of the membrane transport disruptions caused by trans fats have stuck in my brain ever since. (Of course, I went off to find illustrations, but could not.)

Teicholz covers trans fats. She covers the low fat high carbohydrate diet recommendations for the US government in detail. And she covers the reasons why low fat diets don’t work and are bad for you too. Very persuasively.

I went on from Teicholz to Gary Taubes’ Why We Get Fat, which also covers real science, very persuasively.

Both Teicholz and Taubes make convincing cases against sugar and refined carbs and in favor of a meat-and-fat-based diet with some greens thrown in for micro-nutrients. Taubes suggests that everyone’s tolerance for carbohydrates is different and that some people can eat lots and maintain a healthy weight, and others cannot. While I realize that this is a small-scale experiment, that’s exactly what I’ve noticed with Dancer and Rush. Yes, they’re dogs, not people, but dogs co-evolved with humans and pretty much eat what we do. Rush and Dancer get the same meat, the same oils, the same vegetables… and Dancer gets way less carbs than Rush. If I give her more carbs, she puts on weight.

I joke to people that, metabolically, I’m a Prius. I really don’t require a lot of fuel. I honestly would prefer to be a Suburban or a big truck, that burns a lot of fuel, but I’m just not. It appears, from these two books, that I may be better off further reducing my carbs (which means, mostly, less fruit) and increasing the amount of proteins and fats that I eat. It seems like something I can try.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about leaving Weight Watchers in search of a program more appropriate for my goals. These days, at age 60, I’ve decided to take athletics and fitness seriously. I want to continue to improve in running; I am trying out the sport of triathlon (because I’m cross-training with cycling and swimming anyway, as a way to keep fit and balance my muscles without getting injured) (and because I’m hoping it will be fun). Yes, I’m sixty, so I’m late to this. (I regret having given up my competitive running back in my twenties, but I couldn’t run and have the jobs I had then–so the running went. Intriguingly, I’ve recently been reading a history of the early days of women’s running, and at the time I thought I was slow, but really, I wasn’t that slow, so I’m hoping I can become not that slow again. Back then, I was running with a pretty fast crowd. Some of the women I ran with went on to hold records.)

Weight Watchers is not a good place for an athlete. That’s my opinion. Feel free to ignore.

I like to read blogs, and my blog reading lead me to SwimBikeMom’s blog. SBM is a triathlete who started out at 265 pounds and is now way more fit and way less heavy than that. And a lot faster than she used to be. She’s way younger than I am, and probably cuter. None of that matters, since she is also obsessive about becoming more fit. She’s teamed with a nutritionist to create a whole-person-nutrition approach for triathletes, for any endurance athlete, including cyclists, runners, long-distance swimmers. It’s my opinion that we dog agility handlers also benefit from endurance training. Agility is a long day of walking interspersed with sprints.

The program is called SwimBikeFuel (because we need fuel for our endurance endeavors). It’s a one-month series of daily lessons and a very active Facebook group where the nutritionist answers questions early and often. It’s very expensive, probably overpriced… but.

Why but? Well, because I haven’t felt this good in months, I’m running and cycling and swimming strong, I’ve lost three pounds in the last month, and I’m eating more food, too. There are subtleties here, and the program deals with the subtleties. It’s not (really not) one-size-fits-all.

If you’re interested, you can check it out at this link. If you decide to sign up, use my name (Diana) and tell them I sent you, please.

Yesterday I cancelled my monthly Weight Watchers plan. I’ve considered doing that for months now–since December–but I wanted to be sure. In December, Oprah (who apparently no longer needs a last name) announced that she was buying 10% of Weight Watchers and she was endorsing their newest plan (their plan changes fairly regularly, usually about five years behind the current research) and she had lost 26 pounds. Amusingly, announcing her weight loss has now made it relevant investor information and she has to disclose her weight loss to everyone or no one, because it has become insider information. After all, if she were to gain some of the weight back, Weight Watchers stock would then go down, in theory. It gives public accountability for weight gain a whole new meaning, doesn’t it? I mean, a few people read my blog and a few of those people might be sad for me if I gained some weight back, but it’s not like I have to disclose it in my quarterly earnings statement.

But I digress.

When Oprah took up WW and the newest plan was announced, suddenly it was all about “a new healthy you” instead of about practical weight loss. The information sessions weren’t about fitness and nutrition, they were about checking in with your inner needs and psychological health. There were a few minutes at the end of each meeting where the leaders got to try to sell us WW snacks and crackers, all in lots of crunchy plastic that divided them into “two-point treats” and similar processed bullshit. Costco sells 100-calorie snackpacks, too, but they don’t try to claim they’ll help you lose weight and that they’re secretly good for you, even if they do contain quinoa.

I hate processed food. It’s mostly designed to be addictive, lots of sugar and salt. Here, for example, is one such product. Note that the first ingredient is sugar.

What a brilliant idea WW has! They sell you food that is bad for you while they are pretending to help you get healthy. It makes sure you keep paying those membership fees, even while they make it harder for you to reach your goals.

And meetings? You come to a meeting, you sit down in a chair, you listen to a conversation about food, and you leave. Will someone explain to me why meetings don’t include a group walk? Why WW’s centers don’t have walking groups?

The meeting that tipped me over the edge was a half hour on how to use spices when cooking. Seriously? This is not a good use of my time.

The problem I had then is that I’ve enjoyed having a support group–I like some of the people in the meetings (not the ones that are in denial about their food issues, but the ones who are actually trying to change their lives), and I like the Monday morning accountability.

I went looking for something to take the place of WW, and I found an online sports nutrition group aimed at female tri-athletes (and other serious female endurance athletes–cyclists, swimmers, runners). It’s been a joy. I hate this cliche, but it applies: “I have found my tribe.” If I say that I’m struggling to figure out what I can eat before I bike and swim so that I don’t bonk, there are actual answers, that involve real food. I even asked for advice about those long agility days–and got an answer I’m looking forward to trying.

There’s a month-long (quite pricey) introductory program. I will be posting details once I finish the program.

We all remember the scene in Gone With The Wind where Scarlett swears that she will never go hungry again (as she digs up yams in the dirt of her palatial estate that has been ravaged by the Yankees). If you haven’t seen it, here you go. I sat through a Weight Watchers meeting a few days ago, as woman after woman said they hated being hungry and tried to avoid being hungry, and honestly, I couldn’t help thinking that we all worry way too much about being hungry, when (really) none of us–at least none of us at a Weight Watchers meeting–are in any danger at all of starvation.

I try to think of hunger as a good thing. It means I am running a calorie deficit. A calorie deficit is required if you want to lose weight. It’s okay to be hungry. It’s more than okay, it’s inevitable. I so wanted to stand up and say “yes, you’re going to be hungry, learn to live with hunger, learn to decide how much you want to eat and then eat that much, instead of eating too much, and yes, I know you’re eating too much. How do I know that? Because you weigh more than is healthy.”

I may have to stop going to Weight Watchers meetings. They bring out my nastiest inner curmudgeon.

Back in January, during what I think of as “New Year’s Resolution Season,” I ran across a website called Stickk.com, which is intended to help you keep said New Year’s Resolutions. You can, with a referee or not, bet against yourself as far as keeping your resolutions. If you bet $100, for example, that you’ll lose ten pounds in six months, you can keep the money if you’re successful, but if you’re not, it goes to an organization that you name, presumably one that you do NOT want receiving your money. There are choices like the Democratic National Committee, the Republican National Committee, etc.

You can also just use it to nag you once a week as to how your progress is going–without putting up any money at all.

So I signed up for a weekly report on whether I was meeting my weekly weight loss goal toward losing 11 pounds in 24 weeks. Now this is a fairly small weekly loss–about six ounces–and mostly I find such a tiny weight weekly loss very frustrating. I’d love to lose poundage faster and more easily, but it really is hard to even lose such a small amount (that’s less than an ounce a day).

However, once a week I log in to Stickk and I log my weight, and so far I’ve met or beaten my weekly goal for 7 weeks now, and I’m finding that ridiculously satisfying, because it’s a steady reminder that I *will* get there, even if it’s slower than I’d like.

I was thinking about this long effort to lose weight recently–July will be four years!–and I was mentally comparing it to a long road trip. When you start a road trip, you have to get organized, plan, pack, load the car–and then off you go, swooping over to the interstate and cruisin’ on down the road. You stop, walk the dog sometimes, walk yourself sometimes, sometimes you stop overnight. Then you’re back on the highway and speeding along. But eventually, you get close to your destination and you’re on local roads, and you’re searching for the address, and your forward progress is slow, and maybe you have to circle the block to find the right driveway.

Right now? I’m looking for my exit from the highway–but I still have some distance to the destination. It’s okay that it’s slow–I’ll still get there.

Musing on weight loss: I had an interesting conversation with a woman at the pool today. She was commenting that she needed a new bathing suit, as she had lost fifty pounds. My curiosity was instantly aroused, of course, and I asked her how long it had taken: seven months. She eliminated “seven food groups” that she had food insensitivity to, at the recommendation of a doctor. (Note that I managed not to snort at the idea of being advised to eliminate seven food groups, although now (of course) I’m wondering if “cake” and “soda” count as food groups.) (Seriously, are there seven food groups? I really wish I’d asked what she can eat.) She complained about the cost of a whole new wardrobe. She complained that her doctor now wants her to add in more exercise because her weight loss has “stalled.”

As most people who know me know at this point, it’s taken me three-and-a-half years to lose 57 pounds. I didn’t need to replace my wardrobe all at once–I’m still wearing some clothes (stuff that was *really* tight when I started) and others I replaced as I wore them out. I’ve gotten really good at shrinking sweaters just a little bit (they get warmer when you do that, too).

I have been impatient with my weight loss from day one. But I have come over time to see my very slow weight loss as a huge advantage. Because it results from small incremental changes in what I eat and how I spend my time, I don’t see those changes as temporary. I find myself thinking that I’ve kept those first twenty pounds off for 2.5 years; thirty-five total for 1.5 years… It’s not the loss that’s hard, it’s the keeping the weight from sneaking back–and I’ve gotten really good at that.