[mylittleella]

I read about this and started today.

Instead of a very low number of daily calories, you eat the number of calories now, that you would use to maintain your desired weight. Makes sense to me.

Anyone doing anything like this?

[Only Me]

It is an interesting idea. You would have to be satisfied with a very slow weight loss for it to work. There's also the difficulty of knowing what your maintenance calories will be. Almost no one fits perfectly into what one of the online calculators tells them.

I know that I'm way too impatient for that to work for me.

[bargoo]

I think it makes perfect sense, I didn't know about it until I was almost at goal so I didn't do it. I hope I never have to go on another diet but if I do I would definitely eat maintenace calories from the beginning
You can find formulas for finding your maintenance weight. For my height and goal weight mine is about 1400. calories.

[Nibbles]

I know I've seen a couple of people on the forum doing it that way. I'm sure it works just fine, and the benefits are obvious. (You get to eat more...you don't have an adjustment period...etc...)

I might consider something like that when I'm much closer to goal (withing 20 lbs or so). At this point, I really want to see faster results.

[mylittleella]

I'm doing it. I read about the book Calorie Queens here which is about eating your maintenance calories to lose, so I ordered it.

Thanks for the input everyone. I just can't suffer through very low calorie diets anymore. That's just me - I was horrified when I realized I'd rather stay fat than starve myself anymore, which is what low calorie diets do for me. So we'll see if this will work for me. If I lose 1/2 lb. a week I'll be satisfied. Heck, I'll even take a lb. a month if in the long term it will get me to goal. No rush here. I've decided I'll have to count calories in one form or another the rest of my life, so it might as well be enjoyable.

[kaplods]

Of course you can't KNOW with absolute certainty what your maintenance calories will be, but you can make a guess and start there, knowing you may have to adjust it later on (but you're stuck with that no matter where you start).

When I started "this time," I started at much HIGHER than my ideal weight maintenance calorie level. For decades, I had always only ever dieted by drastically cutting my calories, and I was never able to stick with it long enough to get all the weight off, and I inevitably ended up fatter than I started. To me, "dieting" (as I was taught to do it) was making me fatter and fatter so I had to stop (and when I did, my weight stabilized, reinforcing my theory that dieting was making me fatter).

When I decided to try again, I knew I had to do it differently, and so I decided to try deliberately losing weight slowly. I was skeptical (because I never questioned the assumption that slow weight loss was demotivating weight loss) but I didn't really see an alternative (except to do what I always did, and get what I always got).

I didn't even cut calories at all at first, I just started making changes I was willing to commit to indefinitely, whether or not weight loss resulted at all. I changed my focus from losing rapidly to "just not gaining... and maybe if I had some energy to spare to lose 'just one more' pound."

When I became comfortable with one change, I added another.

And while the results were very, very slow, the process felt effortless because I had made the changes so gradually.

This only works if you don't follow the cultural stereotype of heaping misery upon yourself when the weight doesn't come off quickly. You can choose fast or easy, and sometimes fast doesn't work at all - so you HAVE TO choose easy if you want to succeed. I didn't have much choice, because whenever I try to do fast (even now, after succeeding at losing more than 100 lbs) I am miserable and the weight doesn't come off fast enough to overshadow the misery.

Right now, I'm eating around 1800 calories. This is probably fairly close to my maintenance level, but that's just a guess. My "true" maintenance level might be 1600 or 2500 (that's just a guess, but it could be even higher or lower).

You can start with your guestimated your maintenance level, or you can start higher or lower, it doesn't matter as long as you're consistent and reasonably satisfied with the progress you're making.

All that matters is that you find something that works for you, and ultimately to realize that if you do what you always do, you'll get what you've always gotten. If "traditional" weight loss hasn't worked for you, consider breaking tradition. We're encouraged to believe that failure is always a result of lack of will power and motivation, so we're not encouraged to try new and unusual methods. We're taught to keep trying what has always failed for us in the past, but to change our belief system, not our behavior. That can work for some, but others have to find a different way.

I never seriously considered low-carb, because I had only every tried the most extreme low-carb and I felt terrible (and even passed out). I had to find a middle-of-the-road path that quite frankly is rarely advocated by professionals or common wisdom (or is paid lip-service with a blurb or two about trying it, but no practical information or suggestion). Slow weight loss isn't respected in our culture (you never see a magazine article or television interview of someone who lost 150 lbs, but took ten years to do it. We only want to see the "cheetahs" of weight loss, not the "tortoises."

It's far better to be a successful tortoise than to be a miserable failure as a cheetah. I've learned to be very happy to be a tortoise, because no matter how much I wish I could be a successful cheetah, cheetah-hood just doesn't work for me (in fact at this stage in life, I can't be a cheetah even if I were to eat absolutely nothing. I can only manage rabbit. So I have to put every bit of energy into the weight loss and STILL I don't reach anything near cheetah speeds).

I think one of the reasons weight loss statistics are so dismal is that we really push everyone to be a cheetah, or at least put forth cheetah effort. We don't even acknowlege the tortoises, or worse we dismiss their efforts and call them unmotivated, or ridicule them for being lazy, crazy, or stupid.

[mylittleella]

kaplods, first of all, congratulations on your awesome weight loss.

I absolutely agree with every word you have spoken in your post. Your post is so awesome I am going to print it out and reread it, just to remind myself that I can be successful taking a different road. What a motivating post that rang so true for me on so many different levels.

Thank you. I know I have made the right decision.

[mylittleella]

p.s. Kaplods, something that made me chuckle that I remembered in reading your post: I had originally joined Weight Watchers for their new points plan in 2011. To make a long story short, I quit, because figuring their points using 4 different factors to get one point value is too convoluted for me. Well I hear that for 2012 Weight Watchers has lowered their daily points allowance because folks were complaining that they were losing TOO SLOWLY.

Yeah, cheetah-hood never worked for me either, and this time around I'm doing it on my own, my own way. I've dieted enough over the years to know how to do it. This time my own individuality thrown in will be the winning factor.

Thanks again for the best post on weight loss I have ever read.