Weight Maintenance and the Wardrobe Refresh

No, I didn’t change my mind about hiring a stylist or rebooting my closet after I published my last blog post 3 months ago.  However, before investing substantial funds in a wardrobe refresh, it made sense to get back to my fighting weight – the one I feel most comfortable with in my clothes.  And then, it made sense to make sure I could maintain that weight – nothing more depressing than a closet full of new stylish clothes that you only got to wear once or twice.  This may be a TMI post, but I suspect some of you may find yourself in this situation too so I’m just going to lay it all out there.

I had put on about 12 pounds over my max goal weight by the end of last year.  On me, 12 pounds means at least a dress size and even differences in my face and feet.  Not fun and doesn’t make for great pictures or especially video.  So I decided to do something about it and I wanted to do it quickly before I lost too much momentum on rebooting my closet.  That something was the HCG diet.

Most quick weight loss diets are not particularly great for your body and in my opinion HCG is no different, but probably not much worse than others either.  It’s not my first time to do it (and probably won’t be my last), but I can tell you from experience – it does take off the pounds if you stick to it.  The challenge of course is keeping the weight off once you lose it.

As I mentioned, I’ve gone on this diet a few times and at least 3 of those times, I’ve managed to keep the weight off for an extended period (several months) afterwards.  The following yellow box provides a little information about my experience with HCG, but I’m not an expert nor am I advocating the diet so please research on your own if you want to learn more.

The material point is that each time I’ve gone on this diet (or just about any other one for that matter), I promise myself, I’m never going to let things get this out of control again.  That promise has proven difficult to keep and weight maintenance has been a life long struggle for me so it is one of the issues I want to tackle with the Closet Reboot project.

At my age, weight is about more than just how I look in my clothes or even which clothes fit.  Bouncing up and down 10 to 20 pounds is hard on your body from your organs to your skin.  And while in my experience diet is the main component governing weight, exercise and stress factor in too.   You’ll see in my weight variance chart below some spikes where I got above my goal zone mostly because of bad eating, but also some dips below my goal zone from extreme stress.  Neither are optimal.

I can live with a 3 pound variance above or below my goal weight, but any more and I start feeling bloated and any less and I start looking a bit drawn.  As you can see in the chart, this morning I bounced up above my range so I’ll need to be very good for the next few days to get back in the zone.  Otherwise, I’ve done fairly well in the 76 days since I hit my target weight mainly just from keeping the carb count low, but also staying active.  And, to help incentivize myself to stay in this zone, I’ve promised myself that I will not begin my closet reboot until I’ve spent 90 days here.  I’ll forgive my 4 bobbles (3 below and 1 above) if the scale reads the right way for the next 2 weeks.

OK, so how am I going to stay in the zone?  In both my professional change management consulting (see MistyKhan.com if you’re not sure what that is) and personal experience, true transition is all about forming new habits.  What can my closet house to help me stay in the habit of eating healthy?  I have a few ideas:

• High quality and well maintained scale
• Bottled water stash
• Inspirational or Affirming visuals
• Daily fitness aids (e.g. yoga mat, weights)

Of course all these items have to be visible and easily accessible.

I already have the scale and it has been pretty helpful.  I have a Fitbit Aria 2 which seems to be fairly accurate on weight compared with my doctor’s scale even if not so much on body fat percentage.  I don’t know of a scale claiming to measure body fat percentage that works particularly well so I’m alright with that.  What I really like is that the Aria 2 is online and will automatically synchronize with my Fitbit watch and online database – great accountability with my trainer and fitness friends!  I’m in the habit of weighing myself every morning around 5 am which may or may not be good – a lot of trainers recommend weighing weekly instead.  Since I like to track trends and I love data, I’m inclined to think more data points are better than less (note preceding Goal Weight Variance chart).

As for the other bullets, I’m not quite there yet and could really use some ideas so please leave me a comment if you have one!  I also have several experts lined up to to interview for this topic so look for future posts and videos regarding their input and solutions soon.

I also have a plethora of posts sitting in my Drafts folder waiting to be completed – make up brush selection and cleaning, the Spring Mommie Series event, and a fun Premier Designs event facilitated by Angela Britt and hosted by my friend Julie McGuire.  My designer Pamela O’Brien and I also met recently to discuss my closet renovation and video schedule for 2018 – we’re super excited to get those planned and filmed.  In the meantime, please leave me comments about your weight maintenance challenges and successes – I can certainly use the help!