What is a weight loss journal? Before I answer that, listen to me: Losing weight is hard. Diets are stupid and ineffective. Exercise is good until your body gets used to it then you plateau. Results are hard to gain and difficult to maintain and frankly, just thinking about it makes me want anxiety pizza.
And maybe you don’t even need to worry about weight loss
Experts are have reconsidered what indicates imminent morbidity and it’s not fat. Given all things being equal except weight, a fat person and a skinny person will have the same chance of dying. Unless one of them moves a lot. Doesn’t matter which one. If the fat guy takes a walk around his neighborhood a few times a week, he’s less likely to croak under similar circumstances as the thin guy who sleeps all day in an easy chair. Trust me, there’s science.
Wait, don’t trust me, I’m not a doctor.
Please see my disclaimer.
But trust me, I’m fat.
Very fat. As I write these words, I am five foot six and weigh 312 pounds. I’m almost round. I want to lose weight. I have in the past, there are 30 pounds of me that weren’t here five years ago, then were three years before that then . . . well, anyway. You know how this goes.
The thing is, I got sick of the yoyoing and sought help. I realized the problem wasn’t my diet, it was my mind. My eating habits, which are very definitely and very clearly associated with my weight gain, had psychological origins. I was eating my way around trauma (spoiler alert, it’s not cinematic trauma; it’s trauma with a small t). I worked with a therapist and experienced a surprising and sudden understanding of the very moment in my childhood when I changed how I ate. The very second when my relationship with food went sideways.
Which is weird. And you may be wondering what this has to do with a weight loss bujo
Losing weight is hard. Diets are stupid. And your mind is probably not in your corner. Getting your head right is the most important part of the weight loss journey. How you eat won’t matter at all if you don’t discover why you eat the way you do.
Which I will write about here, but please don’t make the mistake of taking my word for it
I’m not a doctor. I am not a nutritionist. I’m not a life coach. I am a fat guy with an eating problem working it out publicly. I’m also selling journals, pens, pencils, and more because Jeebis Crass, a man has to make a living somehow.
Finally, a thing about measurement
Therapy taught me to employ attunement, or intuitive eating to help myself change my relationship with food. However, therapy was adamant about weighing in, measuring your waistline, and other forms of psychological torture. Therapy says don’t. The emerging medical stance in America is that weight is not a reliable indicator of one’s overall health, nor is it an indicator in any way of a person’s morbidity.
But I am a chronic chronicler so a weight loss bujo made sense to me
The measurements I use in my Weight Loss Bujo don’t do much except give me a bird’s eye view of how my body is changing. Charting my weight daily does not help me lose weight. It mostly makes me mad.
Writing down my goals every day, however, does. It reinforces the habits I am developing, and entrains my mission statement onto my active consciousness. I think. I don’t know if you caught the whole I’m not a doctor thing, but I’m not a doctor.
Go see a doctor. And by a journal and let’s kick this off.