The hardest days are the ones before anything has changed

There is one word in that title I want to put in enormous flashing lights.

Before.

Before anything has changed.

Because something will change if I keep doing the things required for long enough. That is the bit I need to remember when I am four days into a new attempt, staring furiously at the scale as though it has asked me when the baby is due.

The beginning is absolutely the hardest part for me.

Oddly, I usually arrive at it feeling magnificent.

I have made a spreadsheet.

Obviously.

There are dates. There are targets. There is colour coding, all within the same tasteful shade family. And whenever I hit a goal, I colour it in with that shocking green Excel fill that looks like pond algae. Nothing says personal triumph quite like radioactive swamp.

I have worked out what I will weigh by various important occasions, including dates so far into the future that the woman living them is practically a distant relative.

I have made a Pinterest board full of motivational quotes.

I have bought new food containers, because apparently my existing plastic boxes are incapable of containing carrot sticks with sufficient commitment.

The fridge is full of things like edamame beans.

I am READY.

Day one: Tremendous

Day one usually goes rather well.

Everything is new. I am focused. I eat the salad. I make sensible decisions. I experience the smug little glow of a woman who has finally got her life together.

This is it.

This time is different.

By bedtime I have essentially completed weight loss.

All that remains is for my body to catch up.

Day two: Some concerns

Day two is less glamorous.

I wake up and remember I have to do all of yesterday again.

Still, hope remains high.

At some point I inspect myself starkers in the mirror from several angles to see whether yesterday’s salad has done anything about my love handles.

It has not.

Frankly, I find this disappointing.

Twenty-four hours of exemplary behaviour and absolutely no visible restructuring of the torso.

But I remain reasonable.

It’s only day two.

I can prevail.

Days three and four: Hmmm…

This is where things become dangerous.

I have now made several decisions I would rather not have made. I have eaten things I was not particularly excited about. I have declined things I was extremely excited about.

And where is my reward?

Nowhere.

I look the same.

My clothes feel the same.

Nobody has stopped me in the street to ask for my astonishing transformation secrets.

The scale may not have moved at all.

This is the stage where effort starts feeling terribly one-sided.

I am doing my part.

My body appears to be on annual leave.

And because there is no visible proof yet, my mind starts interpreting I cannot see anything happening as nothing is happening.

Those are not necessarily the same thing.

But they feel exactly the same when I am standing half-naked on a bathroom scale at seven in the morning.

Then the scale finally does something

Perhaps day five arrives and suddenly there it is.

A surprising drop.

A whole kilo, let’s say.

OH.

Well.

Apparently I am exceptionally good at this.

Naturally, I rush back to the spreadsheet.

Previous targets are now embarrassingly conservative.

At this rate I could probably lose 1.5 kilos every week. Why did I ever doubt myself? I begin mentally adjusting goal dates with all the statistical restraint of a woman who has received one favourable data point.

I am delighted.

The diet works.

I work.

Science works.

Life is beautiful.

Then day six arrives.

The kilo is back…

What in the name of elasticated waistbands is going on?

Yesterday I was a weight-loss prodigy. Today I am apparently the only human being in recorded history whose body is completely immune to eating less.

There follows a lengthy internal enquiry involving the scale, my metabolism and mathematics.

Maybe I should have my thyroid checked.

My mum takes thyroid tablets, so obviously this has now become a strong diagnostic lead.

Meanwhile, yesterday’s miraculous kilo may have had very little to do with a neat kilo of fat disappearing overnight. Water shifts, food moving through me and the general administrative affairs of my digestive system can make the scale behave like a drunkard.

But I do not want an explanation.

I want my kilo back.

This is the danger zone

This bit is dangerous.

Really dangerous.

Not because something terrible is happening to my body, but because almost nothing convincing has happened yet.

I have already done enough dieting to be irritated by it.

I have already said no to things.

I have already had the salad.

I have already marched around the house with the air of someone being persecuted because there are biscuits in a cupboard she has chosen not to open.

And I have almost nothing to show for it.

This is where the red lights start flashing.

ABORT. ABORT. ABORT.

Maybe this diet is wrong.

Maybe I need fewer carbs.

Maybe I need more carbs.

Maybe I should only eat between the hours of 2.17pm and 4.42pm while facing north.

Maybe my body has entered some sort of secret agreement not to lose weight under any circumstances.

This is the point where I am most likely to dismantle the whole thing before it has had time to do anything.

And if I could grab hold of anybody standing in this stage right now, preferably before they ordered the ceremonial “well, sod it then” takeaway, I would tell them this:

You have to get through this bit.

Grind your teeth.

Batten down the hatches.

Do it like a machine if you have to.

Dead eyes. Analogue brain.

Breakfast. Fine.

Lunch. Fine.

Walk. Fine.

Dinner. Fine.

Bed.

Repeat.

You do not need to be inspired by it. You do not need to believe every morning that this is definitely going to work. You certainly do not need to inspect your stomach from the side six times a day looking for developments.

You just need to stop changing the plan every time the evidence fails to arrive on your preferred timetable.

Because if what I am doing is actually putting me in the position to lose weight, then these are the days doing the work.

The annoying days.

The unrewarded days.

The days when I look exactly the bloody same.

I wish I could somehow send a message back to every version of myself who gave up in this bit.

Do not leave yet.

This phase is not evidence that it is failing.

This is the bit you have to get through before you get to see what all those boring little choices have been doing.

If I have to go through it like a machine, then so be it.

No dramatic reassessment.

No emergency new diet.

No deciding on Thursday that perhaps Monday’s plan was fundamentally flawed.

Dead eyes.

Analogue brain.

Just keep doing the thing.

Because the choices I am making now are the ones that can start showing themselves a week or two from now.

And then something starts happening

Not necessarily with trumpets.

It might just be a weigh-in that makes me look down twice.

Oh.

That’s lower.

Then a few days later, another one.

Not enormous. But lower again.

Then perhaps another.

And suddenly the brake has come loose and we’re rolling, baby.

Now I am interested.

Now I start watching that downward line on my spreadsheet like it is the FTSE 100 and I own the entire company.

And the green algae starts spreading.

One goal.

Then another.

Then another.

Suddenly the ridiculous spreadsheet that felt rather optimistic two weeks ago has evidence on it.

Actual evidence.

Then other little things start creeping in.

My waistband does not feel quite as vindictive.

I catch my face in the mirror and wonder whether something around my jaw looks slightly different.

A top falls a little better.

I put my hands on my waist and there seems to be marginally less waist to put them on.

I walk up something that usually annoys me and realise I am not breathing quite as dramatically at the top.

Tiny things.

Potentially imaginary things at first.

But things nonetheless.

For some, those first little signs might appear after a week or two. For others, it may take longer, depending on things like age, starting point, diet and activity levels.

And once those things begin appearing, the whole experience changes.

Because now I have evidence.

That is why I think motivation so often arrives after the first result.

At the beginning, motivation has nothing to feed on except hope, Pinterest quotes, new Tupperware and an offensively organised spreadsheet.

Afterwards, it has proof.

I have done this for long enough to know that the dangerous part is not always the long middle.

Sometimes it is that first miserable stretch when I am doing everything differently and nothing looks different yet.

That is the bit I wish I had understood years ago.

Those days are not wasted days before weight loss starts.

They are part of it.

The choices I am making while staring resentfully at an unchanged body are the same choices that can start showing up later, once enough time has passed for me to actually see them.

So now, when I hit that early stage and my brain starts screaming that nothing is happening, I try to remember one word.

Before.

I am not in the part where nothing changes.

I am in the part before I can see it changing.

And those are two very different things.