Maile - adding my thanks for your post, I really needed it this morning! I have been struggling with the idea that I should weigh less - I saw a pic the other day of me when I first went in the military. I weighed about 110 and was super fit (just out of basic training). Of course, I was also 17. I thought "I'd like to get back to that." Totally unrealistic for me at 52 but the last few days I've been carrying that pic in my head and thinking I haven't done well enough.

Yes, I could probably get down to 110 again - but do I really want to? Learning to be the weight I am now and maintaining it is a steep learning curve for me.

Thanks for the information and you gave me a lot to think about - that's a good thing!

Maile: I am so glad that you posted this about picking a goal weight. I have always felt the same way as this article. But, that doesn't mean that I didn't have my panic moment when I was getting close to my goal weight, thinking that I should go lower. My body too always seems to want to sit at a certain weight that I can't get past. And when I am exercising regularly, it seems to not move. I always think of what my coach continues to tell me, even in maintenance, its the measurements that count more than the number on the scale. Especially with exercising so much, I could weigh 10lbs less without exercise and look the same. So, I go more by that and the size I am wearing then that number on the scale. Its easy to get obsessed with the numbers. When you are overweight for a long time, then lose a lot of weight, I panic every day about getting heavy again. But, I'm learning to relax, enjoy my life, have a treat once in awhile, exercise regularly and choose healthy eating for the most part, drink my water and try not obsess about a few lbs coming on. We have the tools to live in a healthy way and maintain a healthy weight.

One of the wonderful maintainers (or maybe it was the 50+ people) suggested the Dukan site for calculating true weight (what they consider a maintainable weight). It has me about 7-10 lbs higher than I was hoping.

But, in the end, if that is the weight that is maintainable for me, then so be it. I'll still be shooting for 150 to phase off, hoping to perhaps get to 145. But if 157 is more maintainable for me, I won't complain. It is STILL way smaller than I've been in my adult life! And if I can learn how to stay off the diet roller coaster, then I'll find weight happiness there.

Next stop: back on P1 on July 28th. I've sure learned a LOT about maintaining (and weight fluctuations) while I've been healing my thyroid. And I gained some (as the doctor said I should) but have stayed relaxed, knowing this, too is temporary and I can return to P1 to get up lbs off. My weight fluctuates the MOST when I have carbs (not the green veggie sort). I've learned how truly carb sensitive I am. And at the same time I've been learning how to surrender those foods and edibles (things you can eat but have no nutritional value) because I just want to FEEL GOOD!

Well, I am back on Phase 1 for a while. I have a few up pounds and I don't want anything to get out of hand. I had a "caloric temper tantrum" Friday night and realized that dairy may be a trigger for me. I am all about the ricotta cheese these days. I have it with my breakfast and then crave it, or things like it, all day long. I need to cut it out cold turkey and think carefully about adding it back in. Talk about tastes changing -- before IP, I had no use for dairy whatsoever. Weird.

Is it weird that I feel a strange sense of relief being back on P1? Am I like those ex-cons who commit another crime because they have become so acclimated to prison that they want to go back?? Perhaps. :smoking:

Doin' time in P1 . . .

Sylviesgirl: Your comment made me laugh. One of my friends considers the scale to be her parole officer! I found that even returning to P1 was a great relief initially. You feel in control. You know P1 will work on getting any up pounds off. We know this as we all used P1 to reach maintenance.

Thanks to all of you who enjoyed the article. It was not written by me, but by another person. However, it is one of my favorite articles as I learned that there was an achievable weight verses a maintainable weight.
My initial goal weight was 142. I reached that and went down to 128. I changed my goal weight to 128. I went through a stressful time with my mom and went down to the low twenties and even the teens. That was too low. I then returned to 128..even 130 as I calmed down and started more weight training. I worried about my weight being too high..but found my clothes were fitting better and I was gaining muscles. Then I read that article and it gave me great satisfaction to see that 130 was a better weight for me. This is my maintainable weight. This has been a very easy weight for me to maintain.

Lisa: I like your term weight happiness. That is what we are looking forward to. I am carb sensitive also! I hope your thryoid is getting better.

Hawaii69: I also found that exercise does not cause that scale to move down. However, I think the added muscles and increased metabolism, make it easier to maintain. I am glad you are seeing a difference in the way you fit clothing.

RuthAnn: I liked that article also..and it did give me a lot to think about. Learning to be the weight you are now, is a big learning curve. You can always adjust your goals in the future, if you see a need.

Pishposhappesauce: I am glad you liked the article. This whole weight loss and maintenance is a learning process. There are many emotional and physical factors that enter in when you try to determine a realistic goal for your body.
Like you say, a maintainable weight my be just fine and healthy, even if you can achieve lower.

Sylviesgirl: I like the idea of trusting your body. As you say what is maintainable may not be what you mentally think you should be. It is hard to stay calm initially when you are first maintaining. I know too well the fear that any up pounds would lead to regaining all 100 plus pounds. My first summer I bought new clothes in small sizes. On the way home I was almost tearful and panicked thinking, that how do I know I am going to keep this weight off and how do I know I will still fit them in the next year? The longer you maintain, the more these fears are diminished.

Evemomma: I have also weighed less as explained and realized it was not sustainable. Of course in years past, at my lowest weights I was still bingeing while maintaining. Now I do not binge. I agree with the idea of not getting rid of absolutely all body fat and accepting curves! I also have to accept loose skin.

Off to watch world cup soccer. Have a good weekend everyone.

Thanks Maile: great post. I know I've been toying with the thought of seeing if I could get down to my 25 yr old weight of 125, as sometimes I look at myself and wonder if I lost anything at all. Weird I know, and it doesn't help that my young friend is swimsuit modelling and I look at her and think could I get there again? I have to stop that sort of thinking, as even if I did get back to that weight, I don't have the skin tautness of a 28 year old :(
I haven't kept a pair of 'fat pants' and now I kick myself because that is more tangible than a look in the mirror when our mind toys with us.

Just in a crappy mood, I got my stupid period 2 weeks late (didn't I say that on a post somewhere, Ruth Ann?) so now I am feeling bloated and in pain. AND my new monthly weigh-in/check in with coach is tomorrow. Yeah... I'm afraid to step on the scale tomorrow morning. This weekend away I ate the chocolate bar (among other things) but at least shared 1/2 with DH, Slipfree. How could I refuse, once he'd seen it, lol :o

Liana

Truest statement ever: Weight loss is in the kitchen, fitness & maintenance is in the gym.

Wow, Maille, that was a wonderful article and this is a great discussion for this thread.

I, too, am going through the question of "ideal weight" and "sustainable weight"

I'm short, so I feel I should be thinner. I lost the 12 "up pounds" and am now a pound or two below my goal. I seem to want to go down another 3 pounds to 120, but the truth is that I've become obsessive about it. I know I'm fine at this weight, 123- 125.

Like Maile, I love the way I eat now, I'm healthy, exercising, and I like my clothes. But I know I have to remain vigilant use the tools I have to continue to maintain. Happy weight. I like that, Lisa!

joysh - I get how you feel, since I'm short too. I see all these short women and 100 - 120 lbs and wonder if I should be there too. I think I'm just going to maintain at this weight for awhile and see how it feels as I build up some muscle. I haven't weighed this little in so long I think I just need to get used to it for awhile.

It's odd - although the standard BMI charts put me at still slightly overweight, the waist to height ratio calculators put me smack in the middle of healthy.

Thanks guys for the great discussions - I thought at the beginning that losing the weight would be the end of it and I'd just move on to other things. Didn't realize I had to change the way I think about me so much! The care and nurturing of myself is really a new skill I'm working on learning!

Canadjineh: It is interesting how you can look at yourself and wonder if you have lost anything at all. Our mind plays tricks on us..Sometimes you can think you look fatter when you are the same weight. I am posting another article that I found inspiring that deals with this. Good luck on your weigh in..that is rough being two weeks late. Your hormones must be out of wack. I had thought about the 120s also but shifted to 130.

Joysh: It is true that one can be obsessive about a number being the perfect weight. You seem to have found a happy maintainable range. Losing that 12 pounds and keeping it off is so rewarding.

So here is another article. You can tell it is summer and I have more time with being off work. I might as well focus on health.
I love this guy's writing and insights.


If weight-loss is a sexy red Ferrari, then maintenance is a frumpy old green minivan. The longer I maintain, and the further I travel from the version of me that lost all of that weight, perspective begins to settle in like dust on the floor - slowly and all-encompassing. There's no higher confidence building experience I've ever had than when I was shedding weight and proficiently controlling my food temptations. The significance was such that even at 225 pounds I was beginning to feel thrilled with my reflection in the mirror. With every pound I lost, I felt more attractive and more confident than I'd felt in forever. In short, the high of being so successful was incredible, whereas the tranquility of maintenance is much more sedate.

Maintenance provides a far different perspective on your body and your health related goals - or at least it has in my experience. For example, my ritual weekly weigh-ins and body measuring has become a bi-monthly check-up, with far less glitter and gold flying through the air. It's more of a "oh hey, I lost a pound here, or gained one back there... cool" - mostly insignificant in light of continued exercise and watching portions with limited snacking throughout the week. It's just a different mind-frame altogether. The weirdest thing is that the old voices have begun to creep up more and more as I sail gently through the waters of maintenance. They begin to pick away, searching for cracks in my armor of self-confidence. Hands down, without a doubt, despite very minor (surprisingly practically non-existent) extra skin, and some areas where my body fat seems to still be clinging on for dear life, I know deep down that I've never looked this good in my life. This knowledge is what I allow to prevail over the voices in the darkness, but the voices grow stronger all the time it seems. It's at the point where I'll linger on parts of my body and think "why don't I look as good as I thought I did or used to a month ago"... only to see clearly, with a quick picture taken and compared to a few months past, that nothing has changed at all. Maintenance, for me, has supplied a new challenge in the world of my mental strength, and it's in regard to reminding myself that I do in fact look perfectly fine, and that my eyes are clearly delivering misinformation as to how I should feel about my appearance. We're a fickle people, really. Bigger and better is always on our horizons, and once we reach one plateau, we're constantly eyeing a better place to be when in fact the place where we are right now is perfect. It's wonderful. It's incredible. It's not that I need a six-pack or pecs that could crush walnuts to suddenly make me look good, I know I look good now, and I've shown over the past six months that I can maintain - an impressive feat despite not being able to run the past few months. So for now the voices stay controlled, but I can easily understand now how people I've always thought of as beautiful and perfect can sit back and say they look awful or need to work on many parts of their bodies... it's too easy to beat ourselves up and see our self-perceived imperfections it seems.

Running long distance afforded me the option to eat and drink whatever I wanted while in maintenance mode, so the only real change during my maintenance has been to moderate that stuff the past three months. At first it was tough reeling it in after having let my eating habits relax, but the months of weight-loss habits I formed picked back up relatively quickly, and my daily calories were shaved back down by about 200 without much fuss. Really, 200 calories isn't a difficult thing to cut out in my life. It's a cup of fruit juice, or that extra glass of wine, or that scoop of ice cream that I really don't need. Mind you... I'm 6'1" and am able to eat about 2100 calories to maintain. When I plan my meals right, I'm easily left needing to eat more to meet that quota. I generally fill it with cups of coffee with milk and sugar most days, or those random vanilla dip donuts I couldn't resist a few weeks back, lol, but I figure when I kick back into gear, I'll replace those carbs with protein of some sort. For now I'm not stressing, and just enjoying the minor spoils of maintenance. :D

Despite the somberness of what I've written so far, maintenance is very much one of those plateaus I mentioned above - and when I stop to breathe in the air and take in the view from here, it's an incredible place to be for sure. This summer, for the first time in almost a decade, I'm walking around shirtless at the beach, at pool parties - heck even in my backyard - and I don't even flinch or stop to ponder if I should be embarrassed about how I look. Am I ripped? no. Am I going to win the most attractive man on earth award? no. But, do I feel thrilled to not have to carry the emotional baggage of wishing I was a healthy weight anymore? So thrilled. Over the moon. This past week I spent camping with my wife and kiddos, and going to the beach each day was such an incredible joy. I've got color (and the good kind of color at that!) on parts of my body that I refused to expose to the world and the sun for too long, and that's a huge non-scale victory for me. My chest and back are no longer blindingly white, lol, and it's only the middle of July!

Final thoughts? For those in maintenance, don't let those self-criticizing voices gain any ground in your heart and in your life. You've done too much, come too far, and look WAY too good to give any power to those voices. The perfect body is an illusion, as even those whom we see and think look perfect are in fact constantly struggling with the same desires to look better. You're already perfect... you just haven't realized it yet. Love yourself today, and keep journeying toward whatever future you fancy - don't waste a second feeling like you're not good enough or not attractive enough. You're already perfectly imperfect in the most perfect ways possible!

I love that last line. You are already perfectly imperfect in the most perfect way possible. Very inspiring. I had to laugh at the car analogy. Life is good in a frumpy mini van.

Great article. And I find it funny on a day that I'm feeling fat, this article is perfect timing. We are in the middle of a heat wave so am retaining water and feeling bloated. Everything I wear feels so clingy.So, I appreciate these good points of being in maintenance and realizing that we are not perfect but should appreciate the body we have. I know that I don't look like what I did last year and my new clothes are still fitting. I need to keep reminding myself of this. Its a mind game sometimes but one that I'm determined to win. Thanks Maile! You post great things!

Me, too. I'm having a hard time adjusting, mentally, to maintenance, I think. I am battling some major mind-games -- more than once, I have looked down at my thighs and been convinced that they are huge again. :(

I've had a couple "eating outbursts," too, and am getting kind of shaken. I need to find my way . . . soon.

Slyvie, today I had my first urge to devour the entire tin of wasabi almonds. Had a few too many, but stopped before it became a slide. Instead of giving in to the panic, I identified the antecedent to the behavior. I waited too long to eat by missing lunch, I am seriously pms-ing, and because of the humidity/heat I have not been sleeping well. I find that even with complex carbs in the morning my blood sugar drops in the early afternoon. One thing I can do to stop an eating "outburst" is to be careful about having a bar or snack with me at all times.

How about you? Can you identify the trigger to your "outbursts"? Try to be gentle with yourself. This is not about perfection all the time, just a majority of the time, lol. We just took off our training wheels, we are bound to have a few scrapes as we learn to use the tools of maintenance. Have you checked out the inspiration thread? Some great words there. :hug:

Maile, great article! It helped with my mood today. I can really relate this man's
feelings. This line really touched my heart; " But, do I feel thrilled to not have to carry the emotional baggage of wishing I was a healthy weight anymore? So thrilled. Over the moon." Thank you for posting it!

Yes, Maile, I am pretty certain that I'm barreling straight into menopause at the wheel of a frumpy 50 year old green minivan, lol. The scale said 137 at the clinic, and I almost freaked :fr:, then I said out loud to my coach, "Well that's not so bad I guess since that's where I went into P3 & maintenance." Saying it out loud helped. Also her reminder that I will be losing the bloat in the next few days, and I actually weighed 134.8 this morning (2.2 lbs down over 24 hours). We decided to not take measurements this round, but will next month (I hope not TOM again).

Today I have promised myself that there will never be booty shorts for me from now on...:rofl:

Liana

Canadjineh: That bloating and water retention that comes with the hormones is absolutely no fun. Good for you not panicking and realizing that it would come off. Hopefully your next visit will not hit TOM again. Menopause is doable but tricky.

Slipfree: that is good advice..Look for the antecedents and use that knowledge. That line touched my heart also..being thrilled not to carry that emotional baggage of being overweight. They guy who wrote it is a sweet young guy who is very emotional about his weight loss.

Sylviesgirl: It is scary to see old habits resurface. The sooner you can return to your new health habits, the sooner you will feel in control. It is normal for these old habits or as that guy calls them, the voices to return and keep calling. Hang in there my friend. You will soon feel better.

Here are some comments from a friend who is celebrating 5 years of maintenance.Also some good resources. She is a calorie counter to maintain. Maintenance is a daily effort for her.

Maintenance for 5 years. It's just keeping on keeping on doing the same thing.

Tracking nutrition really is 80% of it. Fitness is important too, of course it is, but not so much for weight maintenance . . . mostly for mood management and joie de vivre and cardio fitness and muscle toning and flexibility and balance and, ya know, minor stuff like that !!!!

I anticipate that there will be times my fitness activity will be less . . . managing injuries and managing busy times at work and whatever. I know I'll always get back to it and I do. Because it's who I am . . .

I anticipate fluctuation in weight too. And I deal with it. Lowest achievable weight isn't lowest sustainable weight. Vanity is a very big "day to day" motivation -- fitting into pretty clothes, looking good. Or as good as possible. Even at 63 and counting . . . . maybe it shouldn't matter? Sure it does. And if it works to help me maintain for those significant health goals, staying cancer free, why not?

I still want to overeat every single day. I still get grumpy about being hungry every single day. I expect it, I accept it, and I keep telling myself, "Hunger is NOT an emergency. Hunger means I'm going to enjoy my next scheduled meal all the more. Thinnish people (I'm not thin, just thinnish) know hunger is normal." Yeah. Some days I'm more persuaded by these internal advocacy techniques than others.

There it is. Simple, sure. Easy, not a bit.

Key resources for me? Susan Estrich, "Making the Case for Yourself". Dr. Judith S. Beck, "The Beck Diet Solution: train your brain to think like a thin person." Steve Siebold, www.fatlosers.com: his free in-your-face 21 day mental toughness

I love her comment:"I know I will always get back to it and I do. It is because that is who I am." That is exactly how I look at maintenance..detours but I will always get back to it, because being a maintainer is who I am.

How right she is.Maintenance is a constant battle just like trying to lose weight is a constant battle.
I am also maintaining and quite often hungry...but I was also hungry when I was fatter.Now I look at the clock and see the time of my hunger.If it is near mealtime I wait till it is time to eat.Often drink water or eat lettuce till mealtime.
When I look back I remember that I was very hungry all the time when eating high carbs and now maintaining I am not any more hungry,just thinner and I like it that way.
I would rather be thinner and hungry than fatter and hungry.