Maintenance is KEEPING the Weight Off. We are almost at the end of 2012, and I’ve been reviewing my own personal 2012 “diet/way-of-eating/lifestyle” Efforts and Results.

My Eating Behavior wasn’t Perfect, and my Results were even further away from Perfect. 

I’d like to be about 10 lbs lighter, and during 2012, despite many, many Efforts, I didn’t achieve the Results that I believe that my eating behavior deserved.

I was unsuccessful at losing the weight my body regained over the previous 4 years. However, Today, in the last week of 2012, I’m only about one lb higher than I was during the first week of 2012, which actually is excellent maintenance.

Behavior I’m proud of in 2012 is ... that I continued working on my weight-loss maintenance for another 12 months. I did my very best to eat in a way that would cause weight-loss and keep me from regaining my weight. I entered all my food into my computer food journal, DietPower. I entered my weights, and kept additional charts & records updated even when I felt sick-to-death of the weight Results I kept seeing.

I’ve continued to do my best to make Dieting an enjoyable Hobby.  Some of the ways I’ve done this is to continually search for new information; read diet-related books; try out new recipes, and write and make videos here at DietHobby.

I’ve now maintained my current weight-loss for SEVEN years, and am now starting on year EIGHT.  As stated in the article below, avoiding obesity requires “lifelong management”, and to achieve continued Maintenance success, I can never stop my Efforts. 

There have been many days when I got tired of the whole thing, and wanted to live “normally”, but I am a “Reduced Obese” person. A person with a disability like amputed legs will always have to make “lifestyle” adjustments, and I am in the same boat. I can never expect to handle food the way a “naturally thin” person does. My own experience has taught me that eating like a “normal” person will put my body back into morbid obesity. 

“The only weight loss that matters
 is the weight you can keep off.” 

Weight Loss-Maintenance
                Dr. Arya Sharma

“We are bombarded with anecdotal instances of how easy it is to lose vast amounts of weight. Not just the ‘weight-loss industry’ … think of TV reality shows, popular magazines, and fad diets.

We celebrate people for losing weight. We seldom check to see if they are still keeping it off. I am always asked by patients, “How much weight can I lose and how fast can I lose it?” I tell them that that’s the wrong question … the only weight loss that matters is the weight you can keep off.

This is why we introduced the term ‘best weight’ … the lowest weight you can realistically maintain. Your ‘best weight’ depends on your individual circumstances. Everyone’s ‘best weight’ will be different.

The public, but also health professionals and policy makers. need to understand that when you focus on ‘weight loss’ you get ‘weight loss’ – when you focus on ‘maintenance of weight loss’ you get ‘maintenance of weight loss’.

Another point is that we often frame weight regain as ‘failure’ when it is really the only natural expected consequence of stopping the treatment for a chronic condition. Even worse, the failure is often framed in the context of the treatment.

If you take a drug … lose weight … stop the drug … regain the weight …we would attribute the failure to the drug and not to ‘stopping’ the drug. No drug or treatment works when you don’t take it.”

I tell my patients, stopping your food journal it is like stopping your medication.

The principle is that you’re never done.  The idea you’re going to do something for a while and then stop doing it is not going to work. So you’ve got to find something that works for you that you can keep on doing.

The bottom line is that obesity is a chronic condition that requires lifelong management. So don’t do anything that you can’t afford to do, or that is so time-intensive that you’re just going to run out of time to do it, or so onerous that you’re just not going to stick with it.

                                 Dr Sharma’s Obesity Notes, www .drsharma. ca

The end of October is a challenging time for me.  It marks the beginning of the holiday season of parties and events, which always includes food. Halloween kicks things off and then on to Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years.

Holiday seasons tend to give a great many people the binge bug. From late November through New Year's Eve, the holiday season can seem like a six-week-long smorgasbord. Larger, richer meals, special desserts, a few more h’orderves, another handful of nuts, a glass of punch.

When trying for a balanced diet, It's easy to lose both the balance and the diet.

Opportunities are endlessly staged in front of us ... holiday celebrations, family gatherings and friendly festivities.

It would be great to be able to successfully diet all throughout the holiday season.

It would be good to keep from overeating on special holiday occasions. 

 I’ll settle for reducing my food celebrations to a limited few.

I am working toward making my extra food occasions into one-day-only-celebrations on the actual holiday itself. Because actually:  Halloween is one day. Thanksgiving is one day. Christmas and Christmas Eve are two days. New Year’s Eve is one day. My birthday is in there too, and that’s one day. So that totals six special Holidays for me, and one-at-a-time, I can choose not to eat myself sick on any or all of those days. Six Celebration days is just under 10% of the Sixty-three days between Halloween and New Year’s Day . While overeating 10% of the time is not ideal, it is far better than overeating 30% to 100% of the time.

Even “normal” people tend to gain 5 lbs over the holidays, and then work to take them off in the new year. Unfortunately, here in my 7th year of maintenance, while my own body seems willing to easily PUT ON additional weight, it will then absolutely refuse to drop off that regained weight later.

Nowadays, losing weight is extremely difficult for me. As an older, short, normal-weight, sedentary, reduced-obese, female, my daily calorie burn is so low (daily average about 1050 calories) that I can’t manage to drop it down more than a couple of hundred calories (daily average about 850 calories), and …. according to my own recollection, and my detailed personal records……, doing that makes my body extra hungry, and it also becomes very tired and sleepy, which causes me to lie around more, and sleep longer, and my responsive behavior works to drop my metabolism down near the level of my diet calorie intake….resulting in little or no weight-loss. It’s a vicious cycle, which I’m trying to figure out how to overcome.

If I can lose a bit of weight between now and the end of the year, 

it will be great,
but my own 2012 Holiday goal is to gain zero lbs between now and the end of the year.

                                                 
In the video located at the bottom of this article, USTV anchor, Jennifer Livingston, delivers a well-thought out response to an attack on her physical appearance by an e-mail bully, who declared that Jennifer was a bad model for viewers because of her obesity, and that “Obesity is one of the worst choices a person can make and one of the most dangerous habits to maintain“.

The statement that obesity is a "choice", implies that the opposite is also true. It is a widely held notion that  anyone can simply "choose" not to be fat, despite the fact, that the vast majority of people who "choose"  to lose  weight, actually end up putting it back on (and more). The belief that anyone can lose weight and keep it off if only they "choose"  to do so, is  widely accepted. Even people who have been battling their weight all their lives tend to take the concept as TRUTH.

Most obese people blame themselves for their excess weight, and blame themselves for not trying hard enough or for failing again. It is one thing for the non-obese public to think of obesity as a self-inflicted matter of choice, but it is something entirely different, for a person who has spent an enormous amount of time and effort on losing weight, over and over again, to blame themselves for failing to make the right “choice”.

I know about the difficulty of losing weight and maintaining weight loss from my own personal lifetime experience.  Managing weight is not easy, and the truth is, that....despite the current hype ... weight has never actually been a good measure of health or of a healthy life style anyway.

Is obesity a choice?  The term “choice” implies that one has the freedom to choose from different options which are available to them, and the power to make that option a reality.

We make many different choices during our Lifetime, both small and large. We choose what Results we would prefer to see in our lives. Married or Single? Children? Education? Career? Our small daily Behavior choices have a great deal with determining our lifetime Results… but not everything.

I chose to get up and get dressed today. I chose to blog here. I chose to get married. I chose to get an doctorate. I chose to become a lawyer. I chose to spend 25 years practicing law. I chose to be a homeowner. I chose to become financially secure. It turned out that I had the power, through my actions, to make these choices into reality for myself. Some choices don’t carry that power with them.

I have the freedom to choose to fly like a bird, but I don’t have the ability to make it happen. I can follow through with my choice by jumping from a high-rise building, but the physical law of gravity will interfere to keep me from attaining success.

Most people “choose” to be healthy. Few people “choose” to have cancer, or heart disease, but it happens…to people of all ages ... even to non-smoking, marathon-running, normal-weight, organic-eaters.

Obesity belongs in the Health category. The condition of obesity involves genetic predisposition, an environment of stress, sleep deprivation, sedentary employment, abundant and omnipresent energy dense foods, unhealthy body-image promoting media, and one’s individual physiological and psychological makeup.

Some people have bodies that can overcome their health environment, and some don’t.
After surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, some people with cancer go into remission. Most don’t.
After dieting, and even surgery, some obese people become normal weight and maintain there.
Most don’t.

Much of the 25 years I spent as a lawyer, my personal appearance and attitude was similar to what we see of Jennifer Livingston in the video below, except that often I was even heavier. Although 20 years of Therapy didn’t make me thin, it did teach me to love and respect myself fat. I am pleased to see the self-respect that Jennifer portrays here.

I spent a great deal of my life being Obese. At present, I am fortunate enough to be normal weight. I didn’t “chose” to be fat, and then change my mind and “choose” to be normal weight. Always, being normal weight was my personal “choice”. From age 9 to here in my 60s, I’ve worked for my entire life ... through dieting, therapy, exercise, and even surgery and more dieting  … to make that option into a personal reality. The weight I am now is a Result of everything I’ve experienced, and all of my lifetime actions linked together. Before this present time, I was obese, not because I "chose" the option of obesity, but because I did not have the power to make the option of normal-weight a reality.

Beauty is Not Age Related
This morning I saw an anti-aging ad for a moisturizer
which told me that I need to fight aging on 3 different levels.
I don’t think so.

What does a beautiful old woman look like?
  See Mother Teresa.
The wrinkles of character that Time gives to a woman are Beautiful.

It's not a sprint to the new thin you.
It's outrunning the old overweight you for the rest of your days.

  Anyone who has spent much time here will know that weight-loss maintenance is an extremely issue to me, and this is my own personal basic focus. I find the following article worth sharing here at DietHobby...

Keeping up to keep weight off
                              -by James Fell, Chicago Tribune July 11, 2012

I've lost 50 pounds of fat and put on 20 pounds of muscle. It was quick and easy. Then I was abducted by aliens, and they told me the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot are the ones making all those crop circles.

The first sentence above is actually true, but when I went through my fitness transformation it was an endless process of behavior change that took so long it seemed almost criminally unfair. I've seen many books promising six packs abs in 12 weeks. For me, it took more than 12 years, and even then I only managed a four-pack.

And yet I've bucked the trend of yo-yo dieters, sustaining a substantial weight loss for almost two decades. I'll share my secret at the end, but first let's examine why all those magazine covers, internet ads and Jillian-Michaels-filled infomercials promising quick and easy weight loss are about as realistic as getting stock tips from tea leaves.

The reason is that if weight loss is your goal, your body is going to launch a multipronged assault against you to keep the fat right where it is. Failing that, if you lose weight, your physiology will launch a vicious counterattack to get it back. It becomes an endless war of your mind against the rest of your matter.

Motivated yet?

Weight loss is about creating caloric deficits. There are 3,500 calories in a pound of fat, so if you cut 500 calories from your intake you'll burn off a pound of fat each week, right? Wrong, because your metabolism starts rapidly downshifting.

"The calorie deficit decreases after the first day because energy expenditure starts to slow down immediately in regards to this restriction," explains Eric Ravussin, director of the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge. La.. "What is a 500-calorie deficit on day one is less so on day two, and even less on day three, and so on."

Early on, a significant portion of this is simply due to a reduced thermic effect of food, Ravussin explained, which is the extra calories you burn via digestion. When you eat less, your body burns fewer calories because its digestive system has less work to do. Also, "When you lose weight this is going to lower your resting metabolism during the entire day," he told me.

And it just keeps compounding. "By the 30th day of calorie restriction," Ravussin says, "what started off as a 500 calorie per day deficit has dropped to 300 or 250 calories per day."

In the strictest sense, the math of there being 3,500 calories in a pound of fat still holds true, but in order to sustain that daily level of restricting 500 calories per day below maintenance level requires eating less and less each day to keep up with the drop in metabolism. This is because when you lose weight, "maintenance" keeps shifting downward. But continuing to cut calories more and more isn't a good idea either.

"If you are doing that," Ravussin says, "you are going to reach a level where you won't have all the essential nutrients for health."

And while this can be combated with exercise, it's far from a miracle cure. Claude Bouchard — an internationally renowned obesity researcher also at Pennington — led a series of studies in 1997 that provide interesting mathematical insight into caloric deficits.

In one study, seven pairs of male identical twins were kept on "no exercise" maintenance level calories. Then the researchers added in 1,000 calories worth of calorie burning via stationary bicycling nine out of every 10 days for a 93-day period (a lot of exercise, for certain). They estimated the participants created a 58,000 calorie deficit during the experiment, but the average weight loss — which was all from fat stores — represented the equivalent of only 46,000 calories.

The reverse happens too, as the team also experimented with 12 pairs of male twins adding 1,000 calories of food over maintenance level for 100 days, but only 60 percent of these extra calories turned into weight gain. This is because metabolism goes up, but so do, uh, trips to the bathroom.

In regard to the role of exercise, Ravussin sent me a study he co-wrote, published in June in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, which showed that even when vigorous exercise was included as part of a massive weight-loss regimen for the severely obese in order to preserve fat-free mass, this "did not prevent dramatic slowing of resting metabolism."

"It's much easier for obese people to cut 500 calories worth of food than burn it off from running," he says.

Last December, New York Times Well blog editor Tara Parker-Pope lamented the near impossibility of sustainable weight loss for her and the overweight population in general, reporting that the small percentage of people who are successful require constant vigilance regarding caloric intake and exercise. Canadian obesity expert Dr. Yoni Freedhoff responded to Parker-Pope's post on his own blog stating that a better word than "vigilance" was "thoughtfulness."

Freedhoff has an answer for why figures for sustainable weight loss are so low: We're doing it wrong. Many set outrageous weight-loss goals and choose crash diets and downright "all-or-nothing" suffering to get there. He then referenced a study published last year in Obesity showing that when people actually use their brains and, you know, pay some attention to reasonable and healthy food intake and exercise that 42.2 percent kept off almost 18 percent of their starting weight for the full four years of the study.

Once again, tortoise trumps hare.

Sustainable weight loss isn't about continual pain and deprivation, but changing who you are. You can't sustain something you hate long term. You can't view exercise and healthy eating as simply a means to an end. We're surrounded by 24-hour McDonald's restaurants and never have to walk anywhere, and to live lean in such an environment requires a massive mental shift.

If you hate exercise, it's a multiyear process to become someone who loves it instead. If you love fast food, you need to gradually shift your attitudes (and even your work schedule) toward being someone who loves cooking healthy meals. It's the process that creates the outcome. When you eschew quick fixes and become the process so that regular exercise and healthy eating defines you as a person, then weight eventually comes (and stays) off as a happy byproduct.

Earlier I used the words "war," "assault" and "attack" to describe physiology versus psychology, but to be successful it's essential to view fitness as more of a journey than a battle; one that never ends.

James Fell is a certified strength and conditioning specialist.