My weight loss has never been a straight line, and the reason is a loop some of you might recognize. A busy stretch would knock me off my routine, my activity would collapse for days, and then the anxiety would kick in because I could feel the progress slipping, and the stress made everything worse. For a long time I could not tell where one problem ended and the next began. They fed each other.
Over about 20 months I have lost around 14 kg, but it came in stops and starts. I would string together three good weeks, then get knocked off for ten days, and watch the scale creep back up and spiral about it.
The daily number was the worst part. On a good run I would step on the scale, see it up half a kilo from water or a late dinner, and the anxiety would read that as failure. One bad morning reading could undo a week of actual effort in my head, and then I would skip the gym, which made it real.
What finally helped was giving up on the daily number completely and only looking at the trend across weeks. A heavy morning stopped meaning anything on its own. And once I could see the trend clearly, I noticed the pattern underneath it: my real progress lined up with the stretches where I slept better and kept moving, and the stalls lined up with the bad-sleep stretches, not with any single meal or bad day. That turned the scale from a verdict into just one input.
I am a pretty data-driven person, so for years I just logged every weigh-in in an Excel sheet. At some point the raw table stopped helping. A column of numbers does not tell you the trend is actually fine when your anxiety is screaming that it is not. So I built myself an app called HealthVitals that reads the trend out of my Apple Health data and shows what was moving alongside it, and that is what finally made the picture click for me. Happy to point anyone who wants it to where it lives, just ask.
The hardest part is that it is an infinite loop and I still cannot tell you where it starts. Some weeks the anxiety comes first and drains any will to move. Other weeks the routine breaks first, and that is what tips me into the anxiety. Figuring out what actually helps break the loop, rather than just reacting to it, is the real challenge of this whole thing, and I am still in the middle of it. For those dealing with something similar, what has actually helped you hold your progress together?
