Dear Kayla,
I am on day 14 of my cycle, so near ovulation. I have been terribly bloated for a few days, and I am assuming it’s due to my cycle. I am struggling mentally, though. My pants are tight and I am uncomfortable. I’ve been fasting for 8 weeks and have gone from 202 pounds to 187.8 as of this morning. I feel like I’ve gained everything back, and I’ve worked so hard! I am fasting for 20 hours per day and opening my window from 2-6 pm. I open with a snack and eat dinner later. Wondering if you’ve ever experienced this? I haven’t felt bloated like this since I began fasting 8 weeks ago.
Signed,
Nicole
Dear Nicole,
Thank you for this excellent question. It touches on the mental game of weight loss. The funny thing about the mental game is that it usually comes to the forefront once you start winning the physical game of weight loss. You are winning the physical game, by the way. In 8 weeks, you lost 14.2 pounds, which is 1.7 pounds per week on average. You are killing it! Congratulations!
Let’s talk about how to play the mental game, because if you don’t master it, it will derail you. The mental game deals with emotions and worries and motivation (or lack thereof.) Emotions are important. Ultimately, it is emotion, not logic, that makes us take action (or not.) We need emotions to keep us taking steps forward. But those same emotions can get us off track, like they are threatening to do in your case.
We are always going to have emotions because we are human. And to advise that we simply ignore our emotions would be foolish. What has helped me is to listen to my emotions, and then check them against objective measures. If the objective measures say something different, I tell myself I’m most likely dealing with hormonal irrationality.
Many times on the weight loss journey, I found myself exactly where you are. I’d be losing weight, feeling great, until BAM! I’d wake up feeling bloated. My stomach looked bigger. My pajama pants felt tighter. Panic rose as I headed to my morning date with the scale. Maybe I shouldn’t weigh in today, I’d think. But I had committed myself to weighing every day no matter what, so I’d get on the scale. Too many times to count, I saw I’d gained 2 or 3 pounds overnight. These moments, in hindsight, were the most dangerous ones to my weight loss success. It was in these moments that I felt the most tempted to quit. Or to take a break from weighing. Or to switch things up in my plan. Thankfully, in 2016, I did none of that. That year, I started the habit of sitting myself down for a reality check.
The first thing I would do was update my weight tracking spreadsheet and look at my current 7 day average. I would then look at what my 7 day average had done over the past six weeks. I put less importance on yesterday’s 7 day average, and a lot more importance on the 7 day average from six weeks ago. This would calm me down, because it would remind me I had been making progress. I would tell myself to stay consistent with my plan for another week and then return to the spreadsheet and analyze again if I felt the need.
Let’s look at your objective facts. On day 14, you were ovulating, and you felt bloated, and you felt like you had gained everything back. Your letter does not say that the scale showed any sort of gain. If it showed no gain, then your emotions were not based on objective reality, and thus, you can safely ignore all those anxieties. A phrase that has helped me immensely is: you are not your thoughts. Just because you have thoughts or feelings about something does not mean that they’re based in reality. Thoughts come into your head for many reasons. Just because they come in does not mean they’re worth paying attention to. (Side note: here’s an interesting article about intrusive thoughts.)
3 Things That Helped Me When Emotions Threatened to Derail My Progress
1. Keeping a journal
In my journal, for each entry I include the day of my cycle that I’m on. In the notes section, I jot down any troublesome symptoms I’m experiencing, like worrying or anger. If my weight was up significantly, I jot down what I ate, or whether I feel stressed about something. This has helped me to spot patterns. Around day 20 of my cycle, I have a noticeable increase in negative emotion. I more easily feel overwhelmed, worried, and stressed. I’ve made a day 20 rule: I try to ignore my emotions, make no major decisions, and keep on trucking with my general plan.
2. Routinizing My Check-ins With Reality
I made a habit out of checking in with myself each morning, asking myself if I had stuck with my plan the day before. This helped me to be confident that I was being consistent and helped me resist the urge to change things up. Each month, I sat down and did my checkpoints. Inside my checkpoints Google doc, I inserted a progress photo, typed in my 7 day average for that day, and listed all the subgoals I had achieved that month. These check-ins gave me a firmer grasp on objective reality, because I was doing them consistently. Only doing check-ins when you’re feeling emotiona makes them far less effective.
3. Stopping Obsessing Over My Stomach
I had a bad habit, in the early days of my weight loss, of staring at my stomach. It was and is my main “trouble area,” and I spent too many hours to count thinking about how big it looked and how I needed to lose weight so that it would be smaller, etc. Every time I would see a higher number on the scale, I’d start fixating on my stomach. Until one day, I finally realized I was being ridiculous. I can’t remember the ah ha moment exactly, except that I finally decided to knock it off. From that day on, I told myself that if I caught myself staring at my stomach, I was to find something constructive to occupy myself with instead. Life is to be lived, and that kind of nonsense I will not tolerate from myself.
This is a process. Well over 5 years into maintenance, I sometimes panic that I’ll gain all the weight back. Or that water weight fluctuation this morning wasn’t water weight after all, but real true weight gain. When this happens, I simply sit myself down, take a deep breath, and check-in with reality.
Sincerely,
Kayla