Here we are again. I postponed updating the blog because there was another website I’ve had to revamp for ages, and I wanted to get out of the way. Now that it’s done, it’s time to pay attention to that little baby here again.
These past days, I’ve been pondering an article that has been circulating on other blogs and on the 3FC forums, where I regularly post, and although it’s likely to be taken with a grain of salt (the study was done on 10 people only), I found it interesting nonetheless, if only because it highlighted a couple of things that were already pretty logical to me.
In a nutshell, the research presented in this article (link below) used data from the National Weight Loss Registry to try to isolate explanations as to why some dieters were successful in maintaining their weight loss, and not only for a couple of months. (The NWLR takes into account people who’ve lost 30 lbs or more, and kept it off for one year or more.) It basically divided people into four ‘groups’, each of those displaying a different kind of brain activity, and two things sprung out of this: that the ‘B-types’, the methodical, organized people, were more likely than others to keep the weight off, and that all successful maintainers had also gone through an epiphany of sorts, an important change in their lives, that had allowed them to finally take control of their weight (so maybe this would correspond to the ‘D-type’, there, the risk-taking ones?).
This has got me wondering: if a person is not predominantly a ‘type B’, does it mean she’s doomed to fail in losing the weight and keeping it off? Are those such closed categories? Personally, I don’t think so. It’s true that from my own experience and that of others, having some kind of organization–logging your food intake and exercise progress, doing it for the long run and not only when it strikes your fancy, etc.–is a really important key. However, being an analytical person rather than a methodical one probably isn’t such a handicap in the end, and I suppose that one can also ‘develop’, in a way, a couple of organized streaks (if only to use them for weight loss matters only!). The article itself mentions this as well: we can teach ourselves to become a little more efficient in such areas. Now the question is: will that last? Can we make it last?
My own answer to this would be: tough luck, we have to make it last, deal with it or stop moaning about your flabby arms and thunder things, K. But maybe this also has to do with my nietzschean and darwinist persona, convinced that what doesn’t kill us can only make us stronger, and that I need to be strong to survive. I’m not for self-defeating thoughts, I’ve gone past that point in my life, and I’m sure not going back. Anyway, I don’t know to which extent such a study could turn out to be exact and truly revealing; it is still intriguing, because no matter what, I do agree with the methodical part and the wake-up moment–how many of us have expressed a decisive turning point, a ‘click’ in their heads, almost, after which they found themselves finally ready? Isn’t it that, all that simply?
Is it all in our heads? Perhaps. But in the end, I still tend to think that “what’s in our heads” has probably less to do with the biological brain itself than with the way WE choose to envision our weight loss journey. After all, you may be a perfect B-type, yet still be convinced that you can’t succeed, that you’ll be doomed to a ‘life of deprivation from the good foods’, and so on. Being organized doesn’t have anything to do with that, does it?
-Kery, still pondering
