Our guest blogger, Tricia, provides a word-for-word account of the Very Low Calorie Diet (VLCD) program at Dean Clinic, part of the Comprehensive Weight Management program. If you’ve been reading along, you know that’s a fake name, but she’s absolutely a real person.
At this point of the program, Tricia is still down 41 pounds. But now comes a new wave of challenges: Real foods, cookouts, making the right choices and clearing out old notions about food and dieting.
Week one in transition. HELP! This is no cake walk. All the dire warnings from JoDeen have come rushing to the fore.
On most diets, if you have gotten this far (down 41 pounds over about 17 weeks) you are well into the groove of doing things differently. In this program, you gradually transition back to food, learning exchanges along the way so you can develop a new way of eating. Key word: gradually.
Intellectually I totally get it, but my diet brain seems wired in two modes: black and white. There have been many moments over the last week where I somehow translated “gradual transition” into “Hey! Now there’s food!”
It has been much harder than I expected removing the training wheels from my food plan. I added in my fruit exchange. That was easy enough. I mean, an exchange of half a banana is not too complicated. And I could already have some protein and vegetables. Simple, right?
Um, no. Not at all. Vegetables dressed up fancy (read: salad) get more complicated, and bratwurst sort of seems like a protein if you skip the bun (especially at the cookout we had with friends last Friday). But what about the fat?
Now is the time when I have to sit down with the exchange book I got from the nutritionist and PLAN each day’s food. It all sounds so simple, but if I had that skill set I would probably never have gained so much weight in the first place.
It is becoming even more clear now why the classes I’ve been attending in this program are so CRITICAL. They address the whole picture: our culture’s grossly distorted portion sizes, balanced nutrition and the importance of adding even a little exercise. I now realize that what I valued most was all the discussion about the emotional side of eating — the unhealthy eating habits and the mindlessness of most snacking.
Mindless snacking reminds me of one of the (bazillion) diets I was on in my past. I had a set of audiotapes recorded by a woman with a very (very, very) Southern accent. I recall her spiel about M&Ms. “Y’all don’t need to eat a whole bag of M&Ms (pronounced im ‘n imz). Savor (saaaaaver) just one M&M. You can only taste it in your mouth, not in your stomach, so y’all don’t need to be in such a hurry to gulp everything down. Slow down and savor.” It was great advice. Still is. But I can’t recall it without the audio running through my head. Saaaaaver that im ‘n im. She almost made it sound spiritual. To this day, however, I have never met anyone who can eat one M&M at a time.
My weight loss has stalled while I have been getting a grip on this next phase of the program. As long as it does not go up, I feel OK, but it is clear I have a lot of mental work to do. Theoretically weight loss continues in transition because calorie levels are still low. My static number is a scary reminder that taste-testing the Waldorf salad at the party and having broccoli that has been hanging around in a mayo dressing are small cheats that add up. None of those things is bad, per se, but it is easy to see how little tastes can morph back into mindless eating.
This week has made me very aware of how deeply ingrained my attitudes are about food and weight. Dean’s comprehensive weight program has an excellent resource person, Jean, who will meet one-on-one (if you request this) to help work through attitudes that may interfere with the healthy eating needed to maintain weight loss.
I am now working with Jean to do some mental housekeeping. It reminds me a bit of the work my husband and I have been doing on our house this year. We started by painting the outside and landscaping. Once that was spiffed up, we really began to notice what was needed on the inside. We did some painting here, some flooring there, added a new chair, organized the garage, replaced a screen door. With each addition things gradually came together and are looking great outside and getting better inside.
Then came the BIG challenge: The closets that might have qualified us for a guest appearance on Hoarders. Once those were all totally cleared and managed, our home felt complete. Even though closet doors could hide the fright within, we still knew all the junk was there. Now we can breathe a relaxing sigh when we settle in our chairs to enjoy an evening.
It’s much the same with dieting. My outsides are looking more spiffed, but I still have junk in my mental closets that keeps me from feeling comfortable. Jean is my closet-cleaning coach. And she’s good!
I saw a Ferris wheel outside the mall last week. I remembered that feeling of being in one of the cars and enjoying the slow, controlled ride up to the top. Then things change in an instant. You’re on the downside feeling out of control as gravity shows no mercy. I feel like I am in the gravity stage of my weight-loss program. I am securely belted in by the great folks managing the weight program, but even they can’t control gravity.
Stay tuned for the wild ride ahead!
To see all of Tricia’s posts and her journey through the Very Low Calorie Diet program, use the word “Tricia” in the search box above.
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