I posted about this briefly on the Operation 5-10 thread, but I thought it deserved its own thread. This morning I had something of an epiphany. The past week and a half I've been back in weight loss mode to try to get to the bottom of my maintenance range before the holidays (which I expect to push me back up to the top of my range). You know what? Eating for weight loss is easy.
It's easy for me to eat 1400 cals/day . . . for a week. It's easy to do it for two weeks. It's even easy to do it for three weeks. What's HARD is continuing to do it for an extended time period.
In September 09 I went from maintenance mode to weight loss mode to try to get rid of the weight I'd gained from my thryoid problem and from slacking off. I watched my calories and logged and weighed everything until February of this year, and I lost 9lbs. But by February, even though I was still up 8lbs from my original goal weight, I was at the point where I said screw it, I can't handle the weighing and measuring anymore, it's driving me nuts, and I went back to maintenance eating and revised my goal weight up 5lbs and my red line up 5lbs, which made my weight at the time of 139 within maintenance range.
Maintaining is both easy and hard. I've been doing it long enough now that it's mostly habit, and checking in at 3fc to remind myself that I still need to be paying attention. It's also easy to become complacent and slip up more frequently than is really acceptable, leading to slow gain.
In any case I was able to maintain between 137-139 from February through September of this year with no problem. After going on vacation though my weight was up at 140 and I said, okay, I'm at red line and the holidays are coming so I need to be at 135 before the holidays if I want to stay in my range. So, back to weight loss mode. My weight is already going steadily down with only a week and a half of weight loss eating. I know how to do this. I know exactly what needs to be done to lose weight.
I almost wonder if this is the approach that we should be advocating for people who are new to weight loss. Work hard and lose weight for 2 months, then practice maintenance for 6 months. Then lose for 2 months, maintain for 6 months. That way people would get experience working at maintenance, without burning out on losing.
I'm curious to see what other people think about this. Are there others of you for whom weight loss is easy, but only for a certain period of time? Is this why we maintain by "yo-yo dieting on a very short string"? Because it's easy to lose weight for a couple of weeks, so we just have to catch it before we gain enough that it takes more than a couple of weeks to lose again?