Should I be a maintainer?
 

I'm still about fifteen pounds from the goal weight I picked when I started and twenty-three pounds from a normal BMI, but I'm finding that I'm thinking more and more like a maintainer....

My weight just seems to refuse to budge down. I've been hovering between 187 and 192 since August 1. Am doing great with my fitness goals, I recently learned that my body fat percentage of 34% is considered normal for my age, and when I met with a nutritionist, she told me that I'd probably be better off increasing my calories a bit.

I've been evaluating how I feel about the whole thing, and I feel like I'm happy enough with where I am right now. I shop in normal stores, am physically fit, like the way I look, and am stable. But I don't like that I haven't reached a normal BMI. And while I haven't been losing, I have to be very careful and think about every bite just to maintain. After 20 years of morbid obesity, those all feel like triumphs.

Also, I feel like I need a TON of support, and most of that support I get here. And I feel mournful and bereft when people seem to disappear from the forums, even though I know that that's the nature of online forums and virtual friendships. Sometimes it scares me how much I depend on the old familiars around here.

All of which makes me think that maybe I should just start calling myself a maintainer. If I lose more weight, that will just be gravy.

On the other hand, it seems like I SHOULD be able to lose the last twenty pounds or so and I'm really puzzled why my body just hangs on to the weight.

How do you know when it's time to maintain? Are there any maintainers who stopped before they reached their "official" goal? Can you be a maintainer and still lose, but slowly?

Welcome to maintenance!
Of course you can join us here! As it has been said before, anyone that loses a pound and keeps it off is a maintainer.

Maintaining looks like losing. Keep eating healthy, tracking, exercising. See where that brings you. You may keep losing.

:welcome2: and, just as Michele said, anyone who loses some weight and keeps it off is a maintainer.

As for losing those last however many lbs. sometimes our bodies just say no.

I am a prime example of that. My original goal weight was 125, a number I kinda pulled from the air. It proved to be impossible for me to go that low, given my work, lifestyle, body comp, etc. I was ravenous and dizzy and weak all the time every time I got down just below 130.

So I revised the goal to 130. I can get down really close to it but can't seem to quite lose those last 1-3 lbs. to be at goal.

My body is happiest at 133-135. I would love for that range to be 127-130 but I would have to monitor myself every minute to do that.

And that's not living, for me. So I keep doing what I'm doing and manage to stay within the 133-135 range most of the time.

Dagmar :dizzy:

Uber, I think it's going to be hard for you to call yourself a "maintainer". But yeah, I sure think you could! ;) I wish CFmama were around to tell us how she's doing coming back after purposefully maintaining. I have to think that if you maintained for a significant period of time without trying to lose weight, if you started up again in six months you might actually drop weight.

It's a hard mental leap to go from losing to maintaining when you aren't where you thought you'd get. I know...I'm there. ;) Your words say you are maintaining, but your heart is still losing. Truly maintaining means finding a calorie count that allows your body to remain stable. Another option would be to keep eating the same calories you are now, but drop the expectation that the scale will go down. Can you do that? I'm not sure I could. I'd still wake up every morning secretly hoping the scale has dropped.

Originally Posted by ubergirl:
Also, I feel like I need a TON of support, and most of that support I get here. And I feel mournful and bereft when people seem to disappear from the forums, even though I know that that's the nature of online forums and virtual friendships. Sometimes it scares me how much I depend on the old familiars around here.

Uber, I feel the same way. I'm obsessed with 3fc. Some days I feel like I'm hanging by a thread and really need 3fc. I'm also feeling like I don't have alot of support IRL these days. I've been searching for some new like minded girlfriends that are at the same place in their lives as me but it's tough. Where are they? And if I find them, why are they not interested in doing anything fun?

Originally Posted by ubergirl:
How do you know when it's time to maintain? Are there any maintainers who stopped before they reached their "official" goal? Can you be a maintainer and still lose, but slowly?

I called it officially my goal about 12-15 lbs heavier than I am now. I was feeling like I had become a little too obsessed with losing and needed to back off a little. I eased up slightly (the food, not exercise) and continued to lose. Sometimes out bodies choose our weight, not us. :hug:

Absolutely! I called myself at "goal" and a maintainer at 148 lbs back in July and this morning I'm at 138 lbs. Not completely intentional but somewhat. If you'd like to keep losing I'd set you cals to your "goal weight". So if you want to weigh 175 lbs then set your cals for maintenance of someone who weighs 175 lbs or what you think they'd be. Eventually, it may take months and maybe some adjustment later, but eventually you'll get there. 3FC and support in general is key to maintenance as well. Congrats!

My original goal was 175 and when I got there, the weight was still coming off fairly easily, so I decided to go for a normal BMI. Once I hit 158 I declared GOAL. Then for the next 6 months I still lost weight ever so slowly down to 140. I've remained there every since with a few blips along the way.

Originally Posted by :
My weight just seems to refuse to budge down. I've been hovering between 187 and 192 since August 1.

Originally Posted by :
I'm really puzzled why my body just hangs on to the weight.

NOW, if I would have got to 175ish and continued to work my program and stayed faithfully within my "losing" calorie range, day after day with no cheats and total dedication and not a pound dropped for months, I probably would have called goal (or dropped my calories if they were not too low already).

I've been MIA for the last month because I have too many irons in the fire. I have 2 boys (one is a Senior) with many activities, I hosted 3 very large holiday gathering, started back to work after being a SAHM for 18 years, too many jobs in the church, elderly in-laws, and just the basic "stuff" to do around the holidays, so I don't know what's going on with you at this point...but I'm assuming that when you say you have no clue why your body is holding on to the weight that means you have been totally dedicated to your caloric intake. How many calories do you eat daily? You said your nutritionist told you to up your calories, did you? Is that when you stopped losing?

Originally Posted by Lori Bell:
My original goal was 175 and when I got there, the weight was still coming off fairly easily, so I decided to go for a normal BMI. Once I hit 158 I declared GOAL. Then for the next 6 months I still lost weight ever so slowly down to 140. I've remained there every since with a few blips along the way.

NOW, if I would have got to 175ish and continued to work my program and stayed faithfully within my "losing" calorie range, day after day with no cheats and total dedication and not a pound dropped for months, I probably would have called goal (or dropped my calories if they were not too low already).

Lori Bell,

Well, I can't say that I've had no cheats and total dedication since July 30th when my weight loss stalled out. September and October were a little rocky for me-- I moved to a new city, moved my whole family, changed jobs and changed my whole routine. All of those things affected my ability to focus and while I was pretty good, I was not perfect. Still, in September and October I managed to shed a couple more pounds. But then in November, I got perfect again, and then got frustrated when I not only didn't lose, but started to bounce up. Now, that has happened to me in the past, where I bounced up for a while and then eventually bounced down, but this time, I used it as an excuse to eat off plan for Thanksgiving, and the fake bounce turned into a real bounce of several pounds. But on December 1, I really ratcheted down again, and here I still sit. I guess how I feel is that even when I put in my maximum effort for weeks at a time, nothing seems to happen, and that gets me frustrated and makes me less motivated. It's like the things that have always worked for me don't work for me anymore.

Regarding the nutritionist, I met with her a couple of weeks ago. It was a free employee benefit offered at my workplace. She was very smart and not a nut at all, and basically I went through what I was eating every day and discussing that it wasn't working, in hopes that she would suggest where to trim calories, and instead, she told me that she didn't think I had room to trim more calories given my exercise level, and that I might want to think about eating a little more-- the old "starvation mode" theory, I guess, but this was a very educated woman (I work in a university medical center so we tend to get the creme de la creme for this kind of thing...) She told me my best bet to lose more was to increase the amount that I lifted weight in order to rev up my metabolism, and possibly to add back about 200 calories....so I didn't up my calories and then stall, in fact, when I first stalled, I dropped my calories to 1000 a day and stayed there for a month. I lost zero pounds that month. Still it is possible that I'm primarily stalled because of the on and off days especially back in September and October, and I may just have gotten unduly discouraged about my plan continuing to work...one to two pounds a month is so little that one good bloat and I feel like I've accomplished nothing, but still two pounds a month, over the course of a year would be 24 lbs, which would get me to a normal BMI.

Maybe I'm just not patient enough.

Loser Mom,
I know what you mean about support friends IRL. I have plenty of friends, but no one who can relate to my journey. Part of my problem is that I moved, and so all of the people who knew about my weight loss are no longer around. The people who I spend my time with now have always known me as more or less normal weight. I do talk about weight and nutrition with the "skinnies" in my office, but they don't know anything about morbid obesity and they don't know that I was morbidly obese just eighteen short months ago. I feel like I depend on the people here because they really get it.

Originally Posted by :
She told me my best bet to lose more was to increase the amount that I lifted weight in order to rev up my metabolism, and possibly to add back about 200 calories....so I didn't up my calories and then stall, in fact, when I first stalled, I dropped my calories to 1000 a day and stayed there for a month. I lost zero pounds that month.

Originally Posted by :
Maybe I'm just not patient enough.

I think you have all the information you need to know what you should do. Sounds like you panicked and then dropped your calories down while still exercising. :dunno:

If you want to call yourself a maintainer now, that's fine. But I think Eliana has some good points. :)

Jay

Originally Posted by Eliana:
Another option would be to keep eating the same calories you are now, but drop the expectation that the scale will go down. Can you do that? I'm not sure I could. I'd still wake up every morning secretly hoping the scale has dropped.

Well I'd say that's what I'm doing now. I'm basically eating the same way I always have, since I started losing. But it isn't EXACTLY the same, I've learned, that with great caution, I can be a little bit more flexible-- my kids got Sees candy lollipops for Christmas-- I checked the calories, saw that one sucker had 80 calories, ate it, and the rest are still lying around. I was a binge eater and now I don't binge. I did not get to 295 lbs eating a little too much tilapia and the occasional half a baked potato with buttery flavored spray. I got there eating all kinds of mostly sweets in quantities that defy imagination.

Now I have a healthy eating pattern that I stick to day in and day out, so my only challenge now is checking portion sizes and avoiding the occasional situation where I am at a restaurant or am not cooking at home. If I get too many calories now it's because I ate an extra yogurt or add a serving of bread at lunch-- so to me, especially since I exercise, I should eventually get to a normal weight eating like this.

So maybe I am starting to think like a maintainer.

Originally Posted by JayEll:
I think you have all the information you need to know what you should do. Sounds like you panicked and then dropped your calories down while still exercising. :dunno:

If you want to call yourself a maintainer now, that's fine. But I think Eliana has some good points. :)

Jay

I do have some good information, but I don't really feel like I know what to do. I've experimented with dropping my calories and I've experimented with loosening up a little and the net result has been the same: NO CHANGE.

That leaves me unsure of a plan of attack, other than patience and perhaps cultivating a sense of acceptance.

Are you asking what calorie level you should eat at?

Well, not 1000.

Try eating at the level the dietitian suggested. If you want to exercise less in maintenance, that's OK too, but you may need to lower cals on days you don't work out. Basically, think about how you want to live in the long term. How often to the gym, what average intake. Then begins the trial and error to see where your weight stabilizes.

Jay

In my mind, anyway, "maintenance" means when we reach a bodily state in which we have the luxury of making decisions like whether to lose those last couple pounds or not.

Before that, there's an urgency to it. But then we get to a "nice to have" state of mind, and want to see if we hold steady where we're at, truly making it a lifestyle, or just drop a few more with a slower, less-strenuous effort, then we're probably there.

So I'd say yeah, maybe you're there, or at least can recognize that state of mind.

Come join us. I'm inviting you over, as others in this post have done.

I am of less use on your nutritional course of action, as I myself have never counted calories & do not even know what level I'm eating at; therefore I have no business advising others on the mathematics of weight loss & the subtraction & addition of particular calories & their probable effects.

Originally Posted by saef:
In my mind, anyway, "maintenance" means when we reach a bodily state in which we have the luxury of making decisions like whether to lose those last couple pounds or not.

Before that, there's an urgency to it. But then we get to a "nice to have" state of mind, and want to see if we hold steady where we're at, truly making it a lifestyle, or just drop a few more with a slower, less-strenuous effort, then we're probably there.

So I'd say yeah, maybe you're there, or at least can recognize that state of mind.

Come join us. I'm inviting you over, as others in this post have done.

I love this saef...this puts it perfectly!

Originally Posted by JayEll:
Are you asking what calorie level you should eat at?

Well, not 1000.

Try eating at the level the dietitian suggested. If you want to exercise less in maintenance, that's OK too, but you may need to lower cals on days you don't work out. Basically, think about how you want to live in the long term. How often to the gym, what average intake. Then begins the trial and error to see where your weight stabilizes.

Jay

I know I have long-winded posts, but I said that I tried eating 1000 calories for one month, in July. I was living away from home in a house without air conditioning, and it was wicked hot-- 110 degrees, and I didn't have that much appetite, so I used the occasion to really drop my cals, eating mostly fruits and veggies to see what would happen. Since then I upped my calories a little. I didn't lose eating more and I didn't lose eating less. That's what I call stuck.

Originally Posted by Slim CB:
I love this saef...this puts it perfectly!

Yup. Honestly, I think I'm there now. I look pretty good, I feel really good and my lifestyle seems sustainable indefinitely.

But I do get caught up in the number. In my 20s, I looked terrific in the 160s because I'm a broad-beamed, strong, muscular sort. But I feel like I should be able to weigh in the 160s again. Why not? But my body just seems pretty darn happy hanging out here.