About One Little Cookie

My name is Sandy Daigler and I’m a radical weight maintainer. What do I mean by that? I mean that I’ve lost 100 pounds and kept it off for four years. The National Weight Control Registry defines weight maintenance success as losing at least thirty pounds and keeping it off for at least a year, so I guess I qualify! According to the research, less than 3% of people who lose a large amount of weight are able to do what I’ve done – if you’re wondering why this percentage is so tiny, let me say that my experiences in the last four years make me wonder how anyone, including me, is able to do this at all.

It’s a commonly held belief that long-term weight loss is nearly impossible and the statistics seem to support that idea. We’ve all heard how our biology and psychology conspire to keep us heavy. I can say from personal experience that the body and mind can be formidable foes when it comes to weight, but there’s an even more difficult terrain that I’ve had to travel, namely the social culture of food. In our social and cultural life, food is love, food is ritual, food is how we show we belong. Because we’ve grown up with it and because it’s ubiquitous, we can’t always see our food culture. It’s not something to be observed and analyzed; it’s just the way it is. And, in the United States at least, food culture seems to have little relation to health.

Unless you make a conscious effort to connect food with well-being, it’s easy to fall prey to the cultural narrative. In that story, a cheeseburger with fries is a good lunch. A hot fudge sundae is your reward for a trying day.“Normal” eating means consuming extremely large quantities of bread, pasta and potatoes; vegetables and fruits are mostly missing in action. If you have the strength to reject that story, to eat in a different way that makes you feel good and keeps your weight in a healthy range, you will be labeled as odd, difficult, perhaps a little crazy even. If anyone has ever sighed loudly and said to you, “Oh come on, one little cookie won’t hurt,” you know what I’m talking about.

Those of us who have lost large amounts of weight have no choice but to buck the cultural tide if we want to maintain our weight loss. It can be discouraging and disheartening, but maintaining a large weight loss is not impossible – it’s only hard. In my observation, it’s made unnecessarily harder by the culture that surrounds food, which is especially ironic when you consider the daily drumbeat about “the obesity epidemic.” In this blog, I hope to illuminate and dissect our collective attitudes about food, with the hope that someone out there will read this and realize that health is a real possibility after all.

Because, contrary to popular belief, one little cookie can make all the difference.

6 comments:

  1. Hi, Sandy. I've just finally caught up with your blog, all the posts I think, and can just follow at leisure with my Google Reader as you post. I just wanted to say I appreciate your story and want to be where you are. I'm currently over forty pounds below my highest weight (eight years ago) and have wobbled twenty or more pounds back and forth for the last four years. But overall I'm keeping most of it off and going for more. Your realistic inspiration helps me. Thank you.

    nutritarianrecipes.blogspot.com

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    1. Hi Cindy! It's great to meet you. I'm so honored that you read the entire blog and so glad to hear that what I've shared has helped you. I checked out your nutritarian blog and totally agree that nutrient-dense foods are much more satisfying that processed foods. I have a similar diet to yours, slightly higher in calories, but not much. Your other blog looks interesting too. I'll check it out this weekend.

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  2. Hi Sandy
    I have just come upon your blog and am in the process of reading it from the start. I had been doing well on Primal (MDA) for a couple of months and then life got a bit busy / messy and I fell off the wagon. Just back on now this weekend..I found Primal to be rather easy once I got going and generally felt better, slept better, was losing weight slowly, sanely. Thanks for sharing your story and ideas!
    Katie
    NYC

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  3. Welcome Katie! It was a relief to find something that worked for me, so I understand how you feel about Primal. My eating plan is one I worked up with a nutritionist, I wouldn't call it Primal, but I do limit carb intake. Whatever works, right? I look forward to seeing you here in future posts!

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  4. Sandy, thank you for sharing your journey! I've been deperatly seeking inspiration in my own battle for health. You've gained a follower!

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    1. Emily, welcome! I checked out your blog and was really excited to see that you're a writer and that you just published a novel. That is awesome! Congratulations! I have been working on a novel off and on for a while, so it's great to meet another writer.

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