Maria's Last Diet

When All is Lost—Your Extra Pounds, That Is—How to Maintain Weight Loss

by Maria's Last Diet

It’s clear there will be lots of short-term effects from your weight-loss regimen. The goal, however, is to achieve long-term, lasting effects. This is where hearts are wrung out to dry and hopes are usually dashed.

What makes it so hard to keep going until you reach your goal weight and stay there—forever?  Weight-loss research shows that the single best predictor of weight-loss maintenance is follow-up support. Counselors giving follow-up support to their clients and continued group participation are the mainstays of long-term weight-loss maintenance. 

Is it possible, though, to provide this kind of follow-up support yourself? One thing you could do to answer this question is to make a list of what a counselor and a support group would offer you in the way of help and guidance. What would they do to help you maintain weight loss? Once you make such a list, see if you can provide this kind of support for yourself.

For more on weight-loss maintenance, please go to The Reading Room and the White Paper, both of which are in the left-hand column of this blog at MariasLastDiet.com. Or, if you want to have an actual book or an e-book to read through and refer to, check out the weight-loss books for women section on the right-hand side of this blog, especially Psych Your Diet: A Daily Dose. Volume 3. Psych Yourself to Keep It Off.

If you need more specific help, email us at hi@mariaslastdiet.com and we’ll point you in the right direction.

 

Differences Between Losing Unwanted Weight and Maintaining Lost Weight

by Maria's Last Diet

The context: a weight-loss diet plan.

What’s involved?

There’s the guide, which is the diet plan, a diet book, or a weight-loss program, or all three. There are the specific foods, the specific amounts, the smaller portions, the number of calories. There’s your mindset: “I’m on a diet”, “My goal is to lose weight”, “I’m fed up with myself for being so heavy”, “I know what to do, just follow the diet”, “It’s all so new and I’m enthusiastic”, “I’ve gotten my energy level up”, “I can see the end in sight”, “I know I can do it this time.”

The context: Maintaining lost weight.

What’s involved?

There is no guide. There are no specific foods, no specific amounts, no portion or number of calorie instructions. You’re on your own, more or less. What about your mindset? “I’m proud of myself for losing all the weight.” “My goal is to maintain the weight I lost.” “It’s all so new and I’m scared that I won’t be able to keep it up.” “I don’t know if I can do this forever.” “I wish I had a maintenance plan to follow like I had a diet plan to follow.” “I’m afraid I won’t have the enthusiasm I got from losing weight now that I just have to keep my weight where it is.” “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

Why is it scarier to achieve staying at goal than trying to reach goal? Is this something you can straighten out? Do you really think there are no guidelines when it comes to staying at your goal weight and maintaining weight loss? What about all the changes you made to your pattern of eating while dieting and being on your weight-loss routine? Can’t you rely on these changes during weight-loss maintenance? Think carefully before you throw up your hands and say how the context of maintaining lost weight is so different from the context of losing your unwanted weight. If it will help, make a maintaining lost weight plan as helpful to you as your weight-loss diet plan, and set your mind more at ease.

 

Preparing Yourself for the Weight-Loss Maintenance Phase

by Maria's Last Diet

It pays to get ready ahead of time for the final weight-loss phase. Don’t let maintaining your weight loss sneak up on you without preparing for it. If you don’t prepare, you will be in for lots of surprises that will test and perhaps sink your resolve.

Experience, especially good experience, makes a big difference here. Believe it or not, you can get some early experience with weight maintenance during the weight-loss phase. You can use diet cheats, weight-loss plateaus, and some of your very good weight-loss strategies to practice for the later weight-loss maintenance phase. 

A diet cheat, of course, is where you deviate from your diet, usually with a treat of something salty or some calorie-rich food (or candy). You could also cheat on a diet by eating seconds or eating too big a portion. In any case, a diet cheat gives you a chance to learn how to recover and get back to your diet or weight-loss regimen. This is exactly what you will have to do during the maintenance phase. You will have to know how to recover from eating too much at one meal or eating too much at the restaurant on Saturday and get back to your usual portion size or usual food. You might even have to compensate for overeating or eating fattening foods by eating less or eating differently for a meal or two or a day or two.

Weight-loss plateaus, which are a natural part of the weight-loss process, are another early opportunity to practice weight-loss maintenance and gain experience in what maintenance will be like. During a weight-loss plateau you’ve stopped losing weight. Your job then, for the time being, will be to keep your weight where it is and not gain more. You have your diet or eating plan to guide you, but you also need to keep your head. Weight-loss plateaus can wreak havoc with your confidence. They can make you terribly frustrated, or worried, or angry, or any of a lot of different powerful emotions that might throw you off your weight plateau, but in the wrong direction. 

During the losing weight phase, you most likely will have to deal with lots of different issues that could throw you off your weight-loss course. One of the major issues that you will strategize about time after time will be your own feelings, how they affect your eating and your dieting, and what to do about them. This is a task for everyone during the weight-loss phase: how to break the bond between emotion and food, and how to sustain your effort over time. In order to accomplish separating emotion from food and making a sustained effort, you will develop strategies that work for you. You can then keep these strategies and use them later during the weight-loss maintenance phase.

There you have it, opportunities to prepare for maintaining weight loss way before the weight-loss maintenance phase is upon you. Now it’s up to you to do the rest.

 

If You Gain Weight, Are You Still Maintaining Weight Loss

by Maria's Last Diet

What is the point where you say to yourself that you’ve failed to maintain lost weight? Is it when you gain weight, and if so, what is the critical number of pounds that you use to indicate that you’ve failed at weight-loss maintenance? You can see the dilemma here.

Let’s say you lost a considerable amount of weight, and you’ve been keeping off this weight for a few months now. You are able to do this because you are still partly in dieting mode. You’re using your diet for weight control. You are not ready quite yet to fly free—of old faithful, your beautifully wonderful weight-loss diet. Yet you’ve added in a few more carbs and even bravely but wisely chosen some ooey-gooey desserts, since the kids wanted you to share in their dessert fun with them.

Nevertheless, your weight has begun to fluctuate, up a couple of pounds and back down again, and you’re worried. Strictly speaking, you are not on a diet, so you can’t say you fell off your diet, or you had a diet cheat. But being still in the diet mentality, you do think this way; that you fell off, cheated, and slipped up. What you’re afraid will happen is that you will relapse. In other words, all that hard dieting work you did will be for naught.

Take heart. You are right where you should be. This is a legitimate worry at this stage of the game. You’re betwixt and between, not diet free yet and not diet contained either. As you gain more experience (and time) with maintaining weight loss, you will probably lay a lot of this worry to rest. You will see that a few pounds this way or that does not a relapse make. It’s what is to be expected in weight-loss maintenance. After all, even though you may not have thought about it like this, you can’t possibly stay exactly at one weight.

 

Don’t Let Maintaining Weight Loss Be A Downer

by Maria's Last Diet

You decide to go ahead and lose some of that weight you’ve been meaning to lose for the longest time. When you look back a year later, you’ve lost all that weight and are now at goal weight. Now you decide to keep the weight off forever. In other words, you decide to go for permanent weight loss.

Did you know, however, that your decision to lose weight and your decision to maintain the weight you lost were based on two different contingencies? Your decision to lose weight depended on your expectation regarding a future outcome. Your decision regarding maintenance depended on the satisfaction you are getting from the outcome you have right here and now.

So what, you might say. That’s interesting, but what does it have to do with anything?

Here’s what.

If you are dissatisfied with the outcome that you have right here and now, then you might not maintain the weight you lost. One possible reason for your dissatisfaction with where you are in terms of weight maintenance is you held and are still holding unrealistically high expectations. Another reason might be the lack of change. During the weight-losing phase you experienced change, maybe lots of change. Now, during the weight-maintaining phase, your mission is to keep the status quo; no change.

Since your task in the weight-maintaining phase is definitely to keep the status quo, you might want to help yourself think better of this goal by thinking of keeping the status quo as a change in and of itself. In the past, you could not and would not keep the status quo. So now keeping your eating and your weight right where they are, right where they should be is as big a change as any.

 

Dietary Change and Weight-Loss Maintenance

by Maria's Last Diet

Dietary change is one of the changes you will have to maintain if you want to keep the weight off permanently. This would mean maintaining the change in your consumption on things like total fat, saturated fat, fiber, carbohydrates, fruits and vegetables, and sodium. On your weight-loss regimen you probably targeted foods to cut back on or cut out altogether by name or by nutrient intake (e.g., highly salted food, saturated fats). You did this to lose weight.

Now it’s a whole different ballgame when you are trying to maintain the weight you just lost. You are no longer in need of losing weight. So what do you do with the cutbacks or the cut outs you made to lose your unwanted weight? You will definitely have to shift your thinking from a weight-loss mentality to a weight-loss maintenance mentality. This will call for a shift in goals and, of course, a shift in food planning.

It will be up to you, once you reach the maintenance phase of weight loss, to figure out what will be best in terms of the actual food you will prepare, eat, and use to maintain your goal weight. You can rely to some extent on what you ate and didn’t eat to lose weight as a relative guide. You’re going to want to do a more thorough testing, though, of what foods you can now add in to your daily weight-maintenance routine to see if these foods bring about the result you desire.

Interestingly you might already have some good guidelines for maintaining dietary changes. If you look back to your diet cheats and weight-loss plateaus that occurred while you were trying to lose weight, you might get a very good idea of what you were able to tolerate in the way of dietary intake with little or no weight gain. You can try applying this ‘formula’ to what might work best for you for maintaining your weight loss.

 

Can You Be Sure You Will Maintain Lost Weight For Good

by Maria's Last Diet

When can you safely say you are maintaining your weight loss for good? That’s the million-dollar question.

Is weight-loss maintenance like a cancer cure where you have to be in remission for a certain period of time before the odds of recurrence drop way down? It probably is.

What time frame are we talking about when it comes to maintaining weight loss permanently? Should we measure it in months, or are we talking years here? The weight-loss research clearly shows that it takes a long time, at least two to five years, before there’s a significant drop in the odds so that weight problems are truly in remission.

During the weight maintenance phase it’s not only time that matters. There is still a lot of weight work to be done. You’ve got to adjust to no formal weight-loss diet, although it’s a good idea to follow some dietary guideline that will help you maintain your weight. You will have to get used to being without the rewards of weight loss. You might even have to learn how to derive enough satisfaction from maintaining and not losing. Definitely you will have to confront and cope with instances of return to old eating behaviors that made you gain that unwanted weight.

With time and this kind of effort you can effectively put your weight problem into complete remission.

 

Holiday Eating and Weight-Loss Maintenance. Here’s How.

by Maria's Last Diet

Have you reached your weight-loss goal and you are afraid you'll blow it?  Does the thought of Thanksgiving or Christmas strike terror in your heart?

Instead of concentrating on a plan for what you will eat, how about a plan for dealing with the situations that actually cause you to eat too much? As a first step, identify these situations.

• Do you get tired or overwhelmed?

• Do you get uncomfortable in the social situations you always find yourself in at holiday time?

• Are you overly anxious to please?

• Do you feel like you can't be yourself?

• Are certain people difficult for you to deal with?

• Do you get stressed out about the details?

• Are you worried about your primary relationships—partner, children, parents, siblings —and the holidays tend to put a spotlight on all that’s wrong?

Perhaps you can better prepare yourself for challenges like these. It takes some careful thought, some planning, specific strategizing to prepare for these things. If you are serious about keeping the weight off, this is every bit as important as preparing for the actual celebrations.

excerpt from     Psych Your Diet: A Daily Dose. Volume 3. Psych Yourself to Keep It Off. Symmetry Press.

 

A Losing Weight Story. How Often Have You Heard This?

by Maria's Last Diet

When she lost all the weight, she was so pleased with herself.

She had been a life-long casualty of the weight wars. She fought bravely, persevered, lost all that weight, and came out on top. Thin and beautiful, just what she always hoped for herself, tried for, died for, and got there.

That was the past and now was now. She gained all the weight back and then some. She gained all her old vulnerability back as well. What a let down. She couldn’t count on herself, but she wanted everyone to ignore this. She became the same old person again—capable, strong, helping others, bigger than life—and weight-ridden. Diet and exercise together hadn’t done it for her. She couldn’t keep up either one of them, not for long anyway. And the weight was back on.

 

Maintaining Lost Weight and the Danger You Face

by Maria's Last Diet

Here you are. It’s your daily life, and you’re living it just as you’d like to. You’ve lost all that unwanted weight, and you’ve been able to maintain your weight right where it is for a good long time. But there were those occasions when you were put to the test. There was the likelihood then that you would not maintain your good eating habits, and you were afraid that you would regain weight that you lost.

It’s best, if you can, to take the threat of relapse out of your life. It can be done. You can prevent relapse. It actually is something you can work at and accomplish. It’s best to do what you can about the specter of relapsing before it is upon you.

You can plan and practice ways to prevent your return to old eating habits way before there is any real danger. You can do this by first identifying situations that might cause you to revert to your old ways. Then you can see what it is in the situation that is likely to trip you up. It’s best to look outside yourself at all the different elements of the situation. But then look inside yourself too at what emotionally you might be bringing to the situation and to what the situation could bring out emotionally in you.

Getting yourself ready like this is a solid relapse prevention technique. It provides you with the protection you need to keep on living that good life and reap the reward of the hard work you did to shed all those extra pounds.