When I had my second child almost 2 years ago, I remained active throughout my pregnancy and gained a normal amount of weight. I bounced back pretty quickly between running pretty soon after giving birth, getting proactive about a healthy diet, and nursing him exclusively. I was pretty happy with my postpartum body and was back down to my pre pregnancy weight within those first 6 months.
But then things started to change. I look back and I can think about 50 reasons I should have been able to maintain that weight but every morning when I stepped on the scale I saw the numbers rise. I suddenly gained about 6 lbs in a month, for what seemed to me as no obvious reason. I was never one to 'diet'. I ate really healthy about 90% of the time, indulged occasionally (mostly in the form of high calorie brew) and ran long distances. The perfect formula for weight maintenance; so I thought.
For some reason though, when my baby was about 10 months old I just started putting on weight. Not a ton, only a few lbs in the long run, but a few unexplained lbs to me felt like the world. I got mad. I beat myself up about it. I complained about it and stewed over it and thought about those few lbs all the time. I was not happy about it.
I am a huge believer that if you want to change, you can. Even hard, sometimes unexplainable changes can be done with enough will power and dedication. Yes genetics play an important role in our lives but they don't determine our outcome. So I knew that this odd weight change that I was going through wasn't inevitable. Weird, but not inevitable.
After a few months of being mad that things weren't going the way that I wanted them to, I started to finally look at the bigger picture. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. This is what I was doing which was not only insane but driving me insane. So it was time to make some choices.
If I really wanted to loose the weight, I needed to make some changes to my diet and lifestyle. For WHATEVER reason, my body was clinging on to my calories a little more then it used to, and I needed to combat that. So I started thinking about all the things I needed to do or give up in order to make this happen. While making these lists and reading these articles and going over and over it I realized I needed to make another list.
My priorities.
Why did I feel it was so important to loose these few lbs. Did I need to loose the weight? And most importantly, did I WANT to do what was needed in order to loose the weight? Would I be happy with my quality of life without the things that I enjoyed?
When we think about our weight we can get so hung up on numbers that frankly don't really mean anything. Was I willing to give up the things that I loved in order to accomplish this goal? What was the most important thing to me at this point in my life?
So after a lot of thinking, I decided that as long as I was still healthy and feeling good, as long as I still felt comfortable in my clothes and my body, was still able to go for a 20 mile run whenever I wanted, and still enjoyed what food I ate then the balance of all of this was more important then the few lbs I had gained.
But I still knew in my head, that despite the fact that I was ok with looking the way I looked, I still wasn't ok, for whatever reason, with that number on the scale. So I had to make the choice to throw my scale in the trash.
This was NOT an easy or light hearted decision for me. I even wrote this post a while back about how much I felt it was important to weigh yourself every day. But I knew that my mental well being was more important then any number on a scale, that really didn't mean anything anyways.
Life is about balance. Find your balance and you'll find a contentment that you may have not known was there.
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