<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  I gained 45 pounds last year when I was pregnant, much more than the 25 to 35 pounds recommended for normal-weight women. After I gave birth, my weight initially went into a gratifying, stupendous free fall. But then, when my son was three months old, it skidded to a stop with 10 pounds to go. While I&amp;#039;d never been Hollywood-actress skinny, I was always thin enough\u2014you know, healthy, able to wear jeans without Spanx. Previously, my weight had fluctuated by only a couple pounds without much struggle. I felt indignant\u2014petulant: How could my body betray me like this?  Contemplating retaliation against my muffin-top, I pick up The Beck Diet Solution, by Judith S. Beck, PhD, a cognitive therapist (and the daughter of Aaron T. Beck, MD, the founder of cognitive therapy). The book, intriguingly, contains no actual diet\u2014meaning no gross recipes for salmon dishes and cabbage soup. It&amp;#039;s a guidebook for sticking to any nutritious diet and keeping weight off permanently. The cover claims it will &amp;quot;train your brain to think like a thin person.&amp;quot; Reading over her list of habits of thin people, I realize I used to have a lot of them\u2014not eating past the point of satiety, not eating for comfort. &amp;quot;Most thin people, especially women, stay thin by being incredibly careful about what they eat,&amp;quot; she writes. &amp;quot;They decide that fattening foods are either entirely out of bounds or, more likely, they indulge in them only occasionally.&amp;quot; She adds that thin people will often say they don&amp;#039;t work at maintaining their weight because they&amp;#039;re just so used to restricting themselves, it&amp;#039;s second nature. Over the past year and a half of pregnancy and breast-feeding, I&amp;#039;d stopped thinking thin. My husband and I were having dessert several nights a week and drinking (gallons) of coffee with cream and sugar. I used to exercise every day, but I hadn&amp;#039;t been to the gym once since my son was born. Clearly, I&amp;#039;d been deluded pre-pregnancy when I thought I wasn&amp;#039;t working to stay thin; and I was deluded thinking that I could lose weight now without effort.  Knowing I&amp;#039;m too busy to calorie-count, I order a diet meal service that sends 1,500 calories of food daily, which they tell me should translate to a one-to-two-pound weight loss every week. I lose a few pounds right away, but then plateau with five pounds still to go. So I begin throwing out the snacks they send\u2014the food is starting to sicken me anyway, with its anemic sameness\u2014or giving them to my husband or babysitter. I gain a pound. &amp;quot;Sometimes people put on weight when they&amp;#039;re happy,&amp;quot; the sitter suggests, trying to be helpful. Great, I think, I&amp;#039;m like Santa, fat and jolly.  I start to wonder if there has been some permanent change to my metabolism because of aging or a hormonal shift. I call up Robert H. Eckel, MD, an obesity researcher at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. &amp;quot;For 40 percent of women, the weight gain after pregnancy is staircased to future obesity,&amp;quot; he tells me. &amp;quot;If you&amp;#039;re less active, you may have dropped off your metabolism a little bit.&amp;quot; But he sees no reason why I can&amp;#039;t lose the weight through normal diet and exercise and warns that the longer I keep the excess flab, the harder my brain will work to maintain it. &amp;quot;The brain gets used to more fat [on the body],&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Fat is a sustaining biology.&amp;quot; The idea of permanent changes to my brain scares me. Were the extra pounds putting my health in peril? Eckel tells me that a body mass index (or BMI, a standard measure of weight versus height) over 25 does put you at risk for conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure. Between 22 and 25, &amp;quot;there&amp;#039;s a very soft slope of risk.&amp;quot; BMIs between 18 and 22 are ideal (below 18 is considered too thin). I do some calculations and find, to my surprise, my BMI is already in the ideal zone (for me, at 5&amp;#039; 4&amp;quot;, that zone translates to a weight range of 105 to 128 pounds). Still, would it be even better to be on the lower side of the safe zone? &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think there&amp;#039;s any evidence that losing from a BMI of 21 to 19 is beneficial,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;If you&amp;#039;re concerned this is the beginning of a trend or there&amp;#039;s a lot of obesity in your family, if you feel like you&amp;#039;ll look or feel better at a lower weight, then lose the weight.&amp;quot; But, he adds, there&amp;#039;s no health reason I should do so.  Members of the Calorie Restriction Society would disagree. Inspired by animal studies that found that slightly underfed (but not malnourished) mice tend to live longer, practitioners of CR, as it&amp;#039;s known, eat highly nutritious but very low-calorie diets. They would say losing those five pounds, if I did it the right way, would absolutely translate into improved health. A review study recently published in The Journal of the American Medical Association concludes that while the jury&amp;#039;s still out on whether CR prolongs life in humans, maintaining a BMI at the low end of normal (the mean BMI in one CR group was 19.6, which for me would mean getting down to not just my pre-pregnancy weight, but my bride-orexic wedding-day weight) is associated with benefits including markedly improved blood pressure and cholesterol levels and the heart function of someone 16 years younger. But when I contact the study&amp;#039;s lead author, Luigi Fontana, MD, PhD, research assistant professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, to discuss his work, he says you can&amp;#039;t put an exact number on optimal health, that it depends on body frame, ethnic and genetic background, and what you&amp;#039;re doing to maintain a low weight: &amp;quot;If you&amp;#039;re lean because you&amp;#039;re running 50 miles a week but you&amp;#039;re eating junk food, is it the same as when you&amp;#039;re lean because you&amp;#039;re eating a very healthy diet?&amp;quot; Instead of aiming for a number, he encourages me to lead the healthiest lifestyle possible, exercising moderately and choosing whole grains, vegetables, beans, and fish over &amp;quot;empty, calorie-rich foods&amp;quot; that don&amp;#039;t fill you up.  Good advice, but instead I dive headfirst into crazyland, beginning a so-called detox diet that promises up to 10 pounds of weight loss in a week and involves rice protein smoothies or brown rice and veggies for every meal, as well as gallons of vegetable broth. I also add in some exercise. My son and I used to spend a half hour cuddling in bed before breakfast, my most cherished time of the day, but now a few days a week, I cart him down to the jogging stroller for a quick morning run. Gluten- and dairy-free diet food is not easy to find on the fly, so I often go hungry. I&amp;#039;m so starving, in fact, that I find myself weeping at the slightest setback at work and spending my evenings in a semicomatose state on the couch in front of reality TV. Luckily, my husband is away on business, or I imagine there would be significant marital discord. After a week, I get on the scale: I have not lost a single pound. My son is behind me, laughing as he unspools the toilet paper from the roll. I sit down on the edge of the tub and watch the Charmin pile up. &amp;quot;I give up,&amp;quot; I say out loud.  I call Beck, expecting a stern pep talk, based on the don&amp;#039;t-kid-yourself message of her book, encouraging me to stay the course until I get back to my old weight. &amp;quot;It may not be worth it to you,&amp;quot; she sighs instead, after I relate to her my ever-dwindling food intake from the meal service down to broth. &amp;quot;Why would you want to go lower than 1,500 calories a day? You can&amp;#039;t really have a life on less than that.&amp;quot; Well, I tell her, my plan wasn&amp;#039;t to stay on the diet forever, of course. Once I&amp;#039;d lost the weight, I&amp;#039;d go back to more normal eating habits. She pointed out how idiotic this thinking was: If I was having a hard time losing weight on such an abstemious diet, I would immediately gain the weight back once I started eating again. It was time to face facts: Since I was exercising less than I used to, attaining and maintaining my old weight might be impossible in my &amp;quot;a.k. [after kid] life....You need to figure out a calorie and exercise level that you can reasonably keep up for your whole life,&amp;quot; she says. And then, be happy with whichever weight I end up at, as long as it&amp;#039;s within my healthy BMI range.  But how? I whine. How can I be happy when I know that my old body is out there (not to mention the now too-small wardrobe that clothed it), mocking me? &amp;quot;Start thinking of this weight as your ideal weight,&amp;quot; she says. When I get on the scale, she tells me, don&amp;#039;t hope it&amp;#039;s gone down\u2014be glad if it doesn&amp;#039;t go up. Buy new clothes and get rid of my old clothes that don&amp;#039;t fit: &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re just not realistic anymore and they&amp;#039;re making you unhappy,&amp;quot; she says. Review my values\u2014am I willing to spend more time away from my family to exercise and cook low-calorie meals? No, I&amp;#039;m not. &amp;quot;Think about if you had a daughter,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;how would you feel if she was a smidge unhappy every day over five pounds?&amp;quot; Forget the putative daughter; I picture my real-life, gloriously chubby, gleefully happy baby son someday having his joy undercut by a bad body image. My heart squeezes; the idea is physically painful. Still, I can&amp;#039;t stop thinking about those five pounds\u2014irrelevant to my health, undetectable to my husband, unrelated to my success as a human being. Beck had mentioned the concept of &amp;quot;subclinical eating disorders,&amp;quot; behaviors that don&amp;#039;t quite meet the diagnostic criteria for eating disorders but come close. Could that be my problem? I call up Jennifer Nardozzi, PsyD, assistant clinical director of the Renfrew Center in Coconut Creek, Florida, an eating disorders treatment facility. &amp;quot;Eating disorders are extreme behaviors,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But normal-weight women dieting to lose five pounds, talking about how you hate your body\u2014it&amp;#039;s become so common it seems like normal behavior, but is it normal?&amp;quot; Nardozzi thinks women&amp;#039;s obsession with always being just a shade thinner is less about weight and more about collective angst. &amp;quot;I think of it like an iceberg. The part you see sticking out is where we&amp;#039;re all saying, I wish my hips were thinner or my stomach were flatter,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But I wonder what&amp;#039;s going on underneath. Women have made so much progress, but still, do we really feel empowered to change our world? We&amp;#039;re unsure and we distract ourselves by focusing on 10 pounds.&amp;quot; She reels off a list of warning signs, including behaviors (are you skipping meals? Avoiding social outings?), thoughts (are your thoughts about weight and food obsessive?), and functioning (are you light-headed at work? Irritable in your relationships?). I am sobered to realize that I can check off every one of those risk factors. &amp;quot;My challenge to you,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;is to figure out what those five pounds represent. I don&amp;#039;t think it&amp;#039;s really about the weight.&amp;quot;  I&amp;#039;m too hungry to think straight, so I go to my favorite bakery and buy a brownie and some chocolate milk and sit on a sunny park bench. It&amp;#039;s been a long time since I sat down like this in the middle of the day. Old people shuffle past me, kids roll by in strollers, and lots of women my age, well-dressed and slender, race by without looking to their left or right. I recognize the expression on their faces. When I have that look my husband will laugh and call me Game Face. I feel like I&amp;#039;ve had my game face on for about 10 months straight now. When I think about my days, I think about the nonstop pace of a factory assembly line: It just keeps flying at me, out of my control. Losing five pounds, I realize, would be a way of asserting control over at least five pounds of my life. Being that thin would be a signal to everyone (perhaps myself most importantly) that I am in charge: I can have a baby, a marriage, a career, and still hang on to my identity. But maybe I can&amp;#039;t hang on to my identity\u2014at least, not the old one. Maybe I need to start thinking of those five pounds as ballast, to keep me steady in my destabilized life. I don&amp;#039;t have the time to spare, but I decide to play hooky for the afternoon. I have to buy some new clothes. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/beauty/health-fitness/advice/a9423/scaling-back-261226/>