Here was my spectacularly great plan:  I'd find ten or fifteen people who lived in Central Texas, had lost over 100 pounds, and kept it off 10+ years. Warning! Contains personal experience, failures, blinds spots, and even a little hope for the future.

Yes, I've lost over 100 pounds since the beginning of this year.

And no, I'm not writing this blog post to tell you how you can lose weight or to sell services or products for losing weight.  One personal learning does not an expert make.

I have no "magic bullets" that you can use to slay problems or unsettling parts of yourself, either.  Unfortunately, I've attempted the slaying of both problems and parts of myself and in both cases, the problems and parts didn't die -- they grew back stronger.  Long after the attempted ""murders," I was glad for these parts' resilience.  But that's a story for another day.

I've had so many questions about what I've been doing and shock at how different I look, I'm taking a few minutes to write a bit about some of the things I have learned so far.

So, you've been warned!  This is NOT your regularly scheduled programming.

I spent the last 6 months of 2010 looking for people in the Central Texas area who had lost 100 pounds and kept it off for 10 or more years.  For all you NLP folks reading this, I was looking for exemplars that I could model.

Here was my spectacularly great plan:  I'd find ten or fifteen of these heroic people, model each of them, pick and choose the strategies they used that I could imagine working for me, and then do whatever they did to loose 100 pounds and keep it off for the rest of my life or whenever I chose something different.  I figured I wanted to have plenty of choices and I had lots of time to devote to the project.

I thought I was prepared to do whatever crazy things they did that had worked.  I assumed that I would run into some seemingly-crazy behaviors because what I wanted to accomplish was so different than my then-current experience.

If it had been surgery?  Sure, no problem, sign me up.

If it had been drugs?  I'm there, let's do it, write me a script and I'll plunk down the money.

If it had been insane amounts of impossibly strenuous exercises?  I would have asked: when do I begin and which gym should I join?

All great plans have the potential for equally great failure, wouldn't you agree?

I did not find fifteen people to model.  I didn't find ten.  After searching high and low, I surfaced with a mere three people who lived in my area and who had lost 100 pounds and kept it off more than 10 years.*

I found plenty of people who had lost twenty, thirty, forty, and even fifty pounds and kept it off a long time.  I found plenty more folks who had yoyo-ed down 100 pounds, back up 100 pounds, and down and up again.  These two categories were so distinct, I'd love for someone with more experience than me to comment on the differences.

I found three people who had accomplished what I wanted to do.

Behaviorially, what they did (and still do to this day) was so consistent across time and across individuals, I just chucked the modelling project out the window and have copied their behaviors, action for action.  I have not had surgery, I don't take any drugs, I don't eat crazy foods, and I haven't turned into an exercise hound.

Other observations:

1. My experience with intuitive eating and strategies for reviewing how food would feel to me in the future is this:  my body was so out-of-balance that I couldn't accurately intuit or review healthy choices.  I didn't know it before I changed my eating habits, but after I changed my eating habits, I could very clearly see that there was a physiological component to me eating too much: it helped me keep my energy at a constant level.  A high-fat, high-carb, processed food choice would feel better to me in the future than an organic, whole food choice at almost any time.
2. Some people use the highly-charged word "addiction" to describe my prior experience with certain foods.  "Addiction" works for me:  food was my best (and many times only) choice for feeling good in various circumstances.
3. Besides the social approval I received when I got married, I've never received as much consistent, overwhelmingly positive social feedback than for loosing weight.  I leave it to others to ponder why this is and what it says about society.
4. Many people assume I feel a lot better now that I've lost weight.  I never felt all that physically bad when I weighed 100 pounds more than I do right now!  I do feel psychologically better for having had some success with a goal that I was treating as impossible.
5. Even in the communities where my exemplars hang out, there is a tremendous amount of pressure to "start now!"  One of the most useful things I did for myself, much to their lovingly-restrained chagrin, was to take time to let myself go through the "contemplation" and "planning" phases that the insightful book Changing for Good mentions.  For me and many people that the CFG authors studied, these phases needed to happen in large part before I started the "action" phase, not during the "action" phase.
6. When I started my new eating habits, I wanted to be less conscious about food, not more conscious.  That's meant creating repeatable habits that I just do, regardless of circumstance.  I eat the same food plan whether I'm traveling, eating out, at parties, at funerals, or anywhere else.
7. I absolutely could not have done this by myself.  That's a whole story in itself, for another day.
8. I still have 60+ pounds to loose and lots of my life left to maintain my weight.
9. I had a really awesome life before I started loosing weight, and I still have a really awesome life!

Thanks for reading.  As always, I welcome all conversation, comments, personal experience of your own, and new ideas and information! ~Katie Raver

*Note to Central Texans who have lost over 100 pounds and kept it off more than 10 years that I haven't met yet:  yes, please leave a comment or contact me if you want to talk! I've been lookin' for you ~Katie