I have to say the answer, for me, is…sorta no. I'm a lifelong weight and diet struggler. At age 59, I can look back and see that my weight has been a major player in pretty much every stage of my life. When I was younger and lighter, I worried about the 15 pounds I should lose. When I was in my 30s and in my baby having phase I gained weight every year until I ended up weighing 250 pounds. After a decade of that, I finally had enough. I just simply stopped eating unhealthy foods. No counting or measuring, no stressing over the scale. I lost 75 pounds, three pounds a month, every single month for two years. I never once went off that eating plan because I wasn't "on" a diet. That was just how I ate, end of discussion. After two years, my body finally stopped losing when it hit the balance between what I was eating and what I was burning. I stayed that weight pretty much without struggle for about TEN years because that was just how I ate now.
Wow, I was a weight loss success story!!!!
Ok, well, wait for it, wait for it…
...life got hard, I had a major health issue that derailed that delicate balance and I started gaining weight again. I was horrified, I went back to my old patterns of desperately dieting again, trying to lose those pounds as quickly as possible. Of course, none of that worked and I finally hit 200 and freaked out. In even more desperation, I started Medifast, lost all of the 25 pounds I'd gained. Whew…that was a close one! I was a success again!!! But, after all that extreme deprivation (an 800 calorie a day diet) my body was seriously out of whack and I had to eat almost nothing to keep from gaining weight. And that lasted about a year and then I started gaining, again…and now here I am back on another weight loss "journey", six pounds over the weight I was when I was so horrified last time!
So, I've been thinking a lot about all this frustration and angst around losing and gaining weight and realizing I've been back in that "going on a diet" mentality, which just does NOT work long term.
The cautionary tale, I think I am telling here, is that traditional diets don't tend to work. Deprivation seems to have a slingshot effect on the body that sends your weight speeding back up to where it was as soon as you lose focus. However, truly, deeply, profoundly putting food out of your life forever, does work. Or it did for me for ten years until I lost focus through illness, got too much sugar in me and couldn't get back off it again.
I think if you can sincerely say that you are completely done with sugar/simple carbs for the rest of your life then you have a good chance of maintaining a weigh loss. Most of us, though, are very traumatized at the thought of never touching anything with sugar again. No birthday cake? No pie at Thanksgiving? That's not a balanced life! I tend to agree, until I think about what we expect from alcoholics--to never again touch the one thing in their life they love the most. And many many recovered alcoholics do just that. Shouldn't those of us with lifelong issues with going up and down the scale be that committed?
Maintenance is no different than dieting, maybe you'll eat an extra couple hundred calories a day but, in general, you just stay on the lifestyle plan for the rest of your life. If you are willing to accept that, then you shouldn't have any trouble maintaining your weight.
That's my soap box for today (and it is all for my own benefit, as I'm talking myself back into a "lifestyle" and out of a "diet!")
Last edited by jean1234; 07-01-2015 at 03:44 PM.
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