The end of October is a challenging time for me.  It marks the beginning of the holiday season of parties and events, which always includes food. Halloween kicks things off and then on to Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years.

Holiday seasons tend to give a great many people the binge bug. From late November through New Year's Eve, the holiday season can seem like a six-week-long smorgasbord. Larger, richer meals, special desserts, a few more h’orderves, another handful of nuts, a glass of punch.

When trying for a balanced diet, It's easy to lose both the balance and the diet.

Opportunities are endlessly staged in front of us ... holiday celebrations, family gatherings and friendly festivities.

It would be great to be able to successfully diet all throughout the holiday season.

It would be good to keep from overeating on special holiday occasions. 

 I’ll settle for reducing my food celebrations to a limited few.

I am working toward making my extra food occasions into one-day-only-celebrations on the actual holiday itself. Because actually:  Halloween is one day. Thanksgiving is one day. Christmas and Christmas Eve are two days. New Year’s Eve is one day. My birthday is in there too, and that’s one day. So that totals six special Holidays for me, and one-at-a-time, I can choose not to eat myself sick on any or all of those days. Six Celebration days is just under 10% of the Sixty-three days between Halloween and New Year’s Day . While overeating 10% of the time is not ideal, it is far better than overeating 30% to 100% of the time.

Even “normal” people tend to gain 5 lbs over the holidays, and then work to take them off in the new year. Unfortunately, here in my 7th year of maintenance, while my own body seems willing to easily PUT ON additional weight, it will then absolutely refuse to drop off that regained weight later.

Nowadays, losing weight is extremely difficult for me. As an older, short, normal-weight, sedentary, reduced-obese, female, my daily calorie burn is so low (daily average about 1050 calories) that I can’t manage to drop it down more than a couple of hundred calories (daily average about 850 calories), and …. according to my own recollection, and my detailed personal records……, doing that makes my body extra hungry, and it also becomes very tired and sleepy, which causes me to lie around more, and sleep longer, and my responsive behavior works to drop my metabolism down near the level of my diet calorie intake….resulting in little or no weight-loss. It’s a vicious cycle, which I’m trying to figure out how to overcome.

If I can lose a bit of weight between now and the end of the year, 

it will be great,
but my own 2012 Holiday goal is to gain zero lbs between now and the end of the year.

                                                 
In the video located at the bottom of this article, USTV anchor, Jennifer Livingston, delivers a well-thought out response to an attack on her physical appearance by an e-mail bully, who declared that Jennifer was a bad model for viewers because of her obesity, and that “Obesity is one of the worst choices a person can make and one of the most dangerous habits to maintain“.

The statement that obesity is a "choice", implies that the opposite is also true. It is a widely held notion that  anyone can simply "choose" not to be fat, despite the fact, that the vast majority of people who "choose"  to lose  weight, actually end up putting it back on (and more). The belief that anyone can lose weight and keep it off if only they "choose"  to do so, is  widely accepted. Even people who have been battling their weight all their lives tend to take the concept as TRUTH.

Most obese people blame themselves for their excess weight, and blame themselves for not trying hard enough or for failing again. It is one thing for the non-obese public to think of obesity as a self-inflicted matter of choice, but it is something entirely different, for a person who has spent an enormous amount of time and effort on losing weight, over and over again, to blame themselves for failing to make the right “choice”.

I know about the difficulty of losing weight and maintaining weight loss from my own personal lifetime experience.  Managing weight is not easy, and the truth is, that....despite the current hype ... weight has never actually been a good measure of health or of a healthy life style anyway.

Is obesity a choice?  The term “choice” implies that one has the freedom to choose from different options which are available to them, and the power to make that option a reality.

We make many different choices during our Lifetime, both small and large. We choose what Results we would prefer to see in our lives. Married or Single? Children? Education? Career? Our small daily Behavior choices have a great deal with determining our lifetime Results… but not everything.

I chose to get up and get dressed today. I chose to blog here. I chose to get married. I chose to get an doctorate. I chose to become a lawyer. I chose to spend 25 years practicing law. I chose to be a homeowner. I chose to become financially secure. It turned out that I had the power, through my actions, to make these choices into reality for myself. Some choices don’t carry that power with them.

I have the freedom to choose to fly like a bird, but I don’t have the ability to make it happen. I can follow through with my choice by jumping from a high-rise building, but the physical law of gravity will interfere to keep me from attaining success.

Most people “choose” to be healthy. Few people “choose” to have cancer, or heart disease, but it happens…to people of all ages ... even to non-smoking, marathon-running, normal-weight, organic-eaters.

Obesity belongs in the Health category. The condition of obesity involves genetic predisposition, an environment of stress, sleep deprivation, sedentary e...

Beauty is Not Age Related
This morning I saw an anti-aging ad for a moisturizer
which told me that I need to fight aging on 3 different levels.
I don’t think so.

What does a beautiful old woman look like?
  See Mother Teresa.
The wrinkles of character that Time gives to a woman are Beautiful.

It's not a sprint to the new thin you.
It's outrunning the old overweight you for the rest of your days.

  Anyone who has spent much time here will know that weight-loss maintenance is an extremely issue to me, and this is my own personal basic focus. I find the following article worth sharing here at DietHobby...

Keeping up to keep weight off
                              -by James Fell, Chicago Tribune July 11, 2012

I've lost 50 pounds of fat and put on 20 pounds of muscle. It was quick and easy. Then I was abducted by aliens, and they told me the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot are the ones making all those crop circles.

The first sentence above is actually true, but when I went through my fitness transformation it was an endless process of behavior change that took so long it seemed almost criminally unfair. I've seen many books promising six packs abs in 12 weeks. For me, it took more than 12 years, and even then I only managed a four-pack.

And yet I've bucked the trend of yo-yo dieters, sustaining a substantial weight loss for almost two decades. I'll share my secret at the end, but first let's examine why all those magazine covers, internet ads and Jillian-Michaels-filled infomercials promising quick and easy weight loss are about as realistic as getting stock tips from tea leaves.

The reason is that if weight loss is your goal, your body is going to launch a multipronged assault against you to keep the fat right where it is. Failing that, if you lose weight, your physiology will launch a vicious counterattack to get it back. It becomes an endless war of your mind against the rest of your matter.

Motivated yet?

Weight loss is about creating caloric deficits. There are 3,500 calories in a pound of fat, so if you cut 500 calories from your intake you'll burn off a pound of fat each week, right? Wrong, because your metabolism starts rapidly downshifting.

"The calorie deficit decreases after the first day because energy expenditure starts to slow down immediately in regards to this restriction," explains Eric Ravussin, director of the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge. La.. "What is a 500-calorie deficit on day one is less so on day two, and even less on day three, and so on."

Early on, a significant portion of this is simply due to a reduced thermic effect of food, Ravussin explained, which is the extra calories you burn via digestion. When you eat less, your body burns fewer calories because its digestive system has less work to do. Also, "When you lose weight this is going to lower your resting metabolism during the entire day," he told me.

And it just keeps compounding. "By the 30th day of calorie restriction," Ravussin says, "what started off as a 500 calorie pe...