KateB,
I know that one of my past dieting/healthy lifestyle mistakes was that idea of "I can't wait to be done with this diet!" What I've really learned and am trying to consistently integrate into my life is that this really is a lifestyle for me. Yes, in the beginning, it was about losing weight and the number I wanted to be on the scale and inside the tag on my pants. Now, it's changed. It still is about the number of the scalen and the pants tag, but it's also about making conscious choices which help me to stay within a weight range. I don't really have anything I can't have, I do have things I choose not to have. Yet, even those things are things I'll have once in a while, so I don't feel like I'm being too rigid. I've been lucky; I've tried to eat things I know I shouldn't have (i.e. chocolate cake) and have learned that I can have them if I share them with others. When I go "off program", I have made it a conscious choice, not something I do to cheat. However, I go off program for an item, not for a day or even for several hours at a time. I know I could make that kind of choice, but I also know that it could be the beginning of the end, and to be truthful, I think I look pretty damn good and I KNOW others are watching to see if I can keep this going. I'm going to keep it going for a lifetime!
I think I'll always be a maintainer in training. I keep learning things each time I read others posts and each time I step out and make a change or struggle to make a good decision that could impact my weight or the way I feel about myself because of the choices I make.

I know my mindset about lifestyle change is different today. In the past, I've said lifestyle change and I meant it. But I still thought my lifestyle would change again when I went to maintenance. It wouldn't be an "off the diet and back to my old way of eating", but I think I really expected "maintenance" to be significantly different than losing and more like "regular eating". I didn't look ahead and anticipate how it would be different. I expected to start thinking about it the day I reached goal.

What's different now is that I've had the benefit of reading about the experiences of people maintaining. I know that the difference between losing and maintaining is not much. So I have to learn on the way what I can and can't live with ongoing. It puts a decision about whether or not to indulge a little occasionally in perspective. I knew I had to do something that didn't cause me to feel deprived. And it really changed my perspective on time. It's better for me to have a slow goal that I know I can reach than a fast goal that will frustrate me. And I really feel that I'm maintaining the loss of the weight lost so far. I never felt that before. I only felt the pressure of reaching the goal. That's a lot of why I know this time is different.