Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

Returning to your old weight-gaining and weight-maintaining pattern of eating is something that can happen at any time and anywhere in the weight loss process. You might just have started a regular weight loss routine, only to find yourself going back to your old eating behavior. Or this same relapse phenomenon can occur when you have your weight loss regimen well underway. You are not even safe from return to the old pattern of eating after you reach goal weight and you have been maintaining weight loss for 6 months or a year.

Don’t worry too much about momentary returns to an old pattern of eating. Going back to old ways and then quickly recovering and resuming your new weight-losing or weight loss maintaining eating pattern is very different from returning to old ways and then staying with these old ways. Going back to old ways and then staying with them is a relapse. Return to old ways and quick recovery to your new eating pattern is merely a lapse.

For more on relapse management and prevention, 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.

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

by Maria's Last Diet

It’s well known that at any time during the weight loss process you are at risk for going back to your old pattern of eating. Here are some clues as to when and where and why such a setback may occur.

•    Were other people present and was anyone eating prior to you reverting to your old eating pattern?

•    What activity were you engaged in just prior to going off your weight loss regimen?

•    What emotion were you feeling preceding the eating episode?

•    How stressful was it just before you went back to old ways?

•    How did you try to cope when you found yourself turning back to weight-gaining and weight-maintaining eating?

by Maria's Last Diet

Relapse is usually the rule and not the exception. Some of you who are trying to change will actually succeed. Most of you who try to lose your unwanted weight will not. You may have some success at reducing your weight, but in the end you will suffer weight loss failure and either gain back the weight you lost or gain even more weight back than you lost. So goes the usual weight loss trajectory. After some initial successful weight loss, you return to your old habit pattern of weight-gaining and weight-maintaining eating.

What will enable you to avoid the almost inevitable relapse? Is it a different diet, a better diet, a more sure-fire diet? Is it the exercise routine? Do you have to do a better job of combining exercise with diet? If you’re looking at dieting and exercise as the answer to what will help you avoid relapse and weight loss failure, you are looking in the wrong places. 

As part of the expanded formula for successful weight loss—diet + exercise + using psychology to lose weight = successful weight loss, relapse prevention, as one aspect of using psychology to lose weight, must be part of your weight loss routine.

If you would like more information on relapse management, 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.

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