Quantum weight loss

I don't remember how I first came across Steve Pavlina's articles on his Dexterity Software site. But they certainly struck a sympathetic chord with me. I've carried a few on my Palm and re-read them regularly. So I was excited to recently discover that he has taken what seemed to be an important interest for him and developed it into his main business, with a new website sporting a free article section (including some reworked versions of earlier Dexterity articles) and a fascinating blog (which boils down to almost a free article a day!). Go have a look, there is great stuff there!

So these last days, I've been loading tons of his articles and blog entries into my Palm and reading them on the go, whenever I have a spare moment. There is one such blog entry I can relate strongly to: it's called "Making a Quantum Leap". In it he describes how hard personal growth is, and that it requires constant effort and inspiration over a long time, until you at last reach the point where you make a "quantum leap" into a new state of being. He gives the example of trying to lose weight, and here is where it touches my personal experience.

I've been very slowly and gradually gaining weight over the years, nothing spectacular, but I ended up somewhere around a maximum of around 90kg (which for my 1m80 represents a BMI of 27.8 or overweight). These last years, I realised that I was getting a bit too heavy and wanted to get rid of some of these overenthousiastic kilograms. But somehow the nice life seemed to prevail and nothing really changed, regardless of some reading and halfhearted efforts.

Until last August, I stumbled on the book "Eat to Live" by Joel Fuhrman in an eReader newsletter, as I recounted here. And suddenly, something clicked. I've adapted my eating habits and started steadily losing weight, quite spectacularly at first. So much so in fact, that after a bit more than 2 months, I reached the BMI upper limit for "healthy" weight (25 or 81kg, see here). And it hasn't stopped. These days I'm hovering just below BMI 24 (between 77 and 78kg), and I have the firm intention to bring it down to 75kg, which I set as my target weight.

I'm confident that I won't backslide and drift back up to my old weight, because somewhere in my head, a switch seems to have been turned. As I always tell people who wonder how I did it, I don't follow any diet, I've just altered my eating habits. These new habits are something I'm quite happy with, I still eat with pleasure and joy. But what I eat is healthy. So there is hardly any temptation to change that. I've made my quantum leap.