Great topic, Jan! The most important lesson that I learned about weight loss and maintenance – by far – is that this is FOREVER. The diet is never going to be over and I can never go back to eating and living the way that I used to – unless I want to go back to 257 pounds.
Since I'm a professional dieter
, of course I heard ‘this has to be a lifestyle, not a diet’ a million times, but I never really believed it. In my heart of hearts, I was convinced that once the weight was off, I could go back to my comfortable life of eating cookies and reading books and I’d never gain a pound. Reaching goal
was the goal and everything after that was happily ever after. Life past goal was kind of vague and soft-focus, but I was convinced that maintaining my weight would be easy and effortless. After all, I’d say to myself, what could be easier than just staying at one weight?
The reality is that life after goal for me looks pretty much the same as the year that I was losing weight. I do the same amount of daily exercise, eat the same foods, weigh and measure, use Fitday, plan ahead, and use all the tips and tricks that I learned while I was losing weight. The only difference is that I may eat 200 or so extra calories a day, not in treats, just maybe an extra apple and bowl of oatmeal. Somewhere in the past 3 ½ years, it did indeed become a lifestyle without me realizing it. I can’t imagine living any other way; I don’t even
want to live any other way.
That’s the reality of what it takes for me to keep the weight off. It’s not what a lot of dieters want to hear; they want to believe that after a few weeks of deprivation dieting with the latest
EZ, quick weight loss diet, they can go right back to pizza, candy, donuts and being a couch potato. I’ve occasionally gotten flack from dieters – still overweight - who are completely convinced that they will be ‘cured’ of all their eating issues once they reach goal; they imagine goal as a wonderful food utopia where they naturally and intuitively will be able to maintain their new weight without thought or effort. In my experience (and it seems like that of most of the other maintainers here), that’s just not going to happen. Unfortunately!
So – the most important lesson that I’ve learned is that
losing weight is simply practice for maintenance. The losing phase is the warm-up for what really counts -- keeping the weight off for the rest of our lives. But the second most important lesson I've learned is that the rewards for our new lifestyles are immeasurable! My new lifestyle has NOTHING to do with deprivation - it has EVERYTHING to do with living, really living and having every day be the best day of my life.