Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

Call it what you will. Slipping, falling off, not staying on, or the more technical term, relapse. It happens. It happens all too easily for women who are trying to lose weight.

Is there anything you can do about not keeping your weight loss regimen clipping right along without this kind of failure to stay the course? Yes there is.

First off, can you recognize the signs of such a forthcoming relapse? Or are the basic symptoms of the approaching relapse too subtle and subjective for you to put your finger on? Don’t be put off. You should know there are always indications of slipping and falling off before relapse occurs. There are any number of signs, like motivational changes, weakened commitment, or small failures to keep to your weight loss routine?

Then to prevent a total falling off you will have to do something about what you discovered to be a sign of impending relapse. So examine the sign of relapse carefully. See why it’s there at this point in time. Did you not stick to your weight loss plan today, for example? If so, why so? Was there something that caused you to violate your plan? Think carefully. What was it?

Going back up the chain of events from outright relapse, to signs of impending relapse, to causes of these pre-relapse signs is the way to identify what led to what. Once you know this, you have the best chance of applying a fix at the very start of the downward turn and preventing both the signs of relapse from occurring and preventing the relapse itself.

by Maria's Last Diet

All throughout the weight loss process, you will be committing various lapses. Front and center will be your eating lapses. If you chose to lose weight by dieting, your lapse will be violating your diet in some way. The lapses if you rely on portion control will revolve around eating bigger portions than you intended.

If you step back from food for a moment and look more closely at yourself and not the food and your eating, you will discover that besides obvious lapses with food and eating, you are also making personal lapses. These personal lapses, like being dishonest, covering up what you did, and making excuses, will also cause you trouble losing weight.

The corrective for this is to get honest with yourself. So in the midst of the weight loss process, you will be working on making yourself a better person.

by Maria's Last Diet

As you may already be too painfully aware, return to weight-gaining eating behaviors after weight loss is a common occurrence. Because of how prevalent relapse is when you are trying to maintain lost weight, you should make relapse prevention strategies a top priority.

It’s best if you detect the likelihood of relapse as early as possible. Signs of potential relapse are often there even when you are in the process of losing your unwanted weight. In fact, this is a perfect time to intervene and take preventive action because the relapse has not yet reached its full potential.

Here are a couple of early warning signs of a relapse that could occur during the weight loss maintenance phase. Of course each and every weight loss lapse can turn into a relapse. A lapse like a diet cheat can be handled so it stays a lapse and does not turn into your old, weight-gaining form of eating. Stress is another precursor of relapse, especially if for you stress leads to eating too much food or eating too many fattening foods. Learning to deal effectively with the stresses in your life should prevent relapse.

Do you get the idea? What are your very own early indicators for probable relapse down the road? See if you can pick out 3 to 5 of them and then construct immediate actions you can take to reduce the likelihood of relapse later on.

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.

What you are trying to do when you go about losing some weight is to get rid of your old ways and establish new ways. What you almost always find, however, is your old ways are still there somewhere, and they reappear when you don’t want them to.

Let’s say you’ve worked hard at changing your need to soothe yourself with snack food after a hard day at work and taking care of the family. For weeks now you were successful at not snacking while watching TV at the end of the day. But there came a day when you somehow let down your guard and all the old cues were there: nighttime, days end, TV, kids in bed, hard day at work and at home. Before you knew it, you reverted to type. Snack food as usual. Afterward, you vowed that you would work doubly hard to not run to snack food again. And indeed for the next few weeks you had to do all you could to avoid getting back in the snacking routine.

What could you have done to make relapse prevention a more certain enterprise? Well, instead of just being so on guard about eating snack food, you could have tried to learn some other non-food ways of coping with your feelings at the end of a hard day. What else besides snack food might float your boat when all is said and done at the end of a day? Could you have a few strategies ready, maybe even ones that you have tried out beforehand, and know they work for you?

The return of old ways is practically inevitable in any new learning situation. The old learning is primary. It was there first, and it had lots of opportunities to be associated with many different aspects of you and your life. It helped you through difficult times, and when a difficult time occurs again, you have a natural tendency to call on what helped you before. Only now you are trying to learn to tackle the difficult time without resorting to eating too much food or eating fattening food, because you want to lose a lot of weight. To counteract the return of old ways, it’s best if you don’t just guard against them. Make sure you teach yourself some non-food ways to cope with the difficult time. Practice them beforehand and have them at the ready when you need them.

by Maria's Last Diet

Put this under having a relapse.

When are you most likely to relapse—and return to your old ways of eating too much food and eating too many calorie-rich foods? It’s when you’ve beaten the odds and lost all of your unwanted weight. It’s when you least expect to regain all that lost weight.

Trying to maintain lost weight is having to fly free, free from all the reinforcement and reward you’ve gotten from dieting and losing your excess weight. In the maintenance phase, the reinforcement and reward just aren’t there the way they are when you’re dieting and the pounds are coming off, and you hit milestone after milestone.

Preventing a relapse to your old ways while you are maintaining your weight will mean that you will have to develop new reinforcements and rewards for maintaining. Can you think of how you might reinforce and reward your maintaining behavior?