Eleven plus years of working to maintain my weight within my goal weight range has taught me that the only right road in Maintenance is the one I create for myself. 

I research dieting issues, listen to dieting advice from others, and do various short-term-diet-experiments, but ULTIMATELY,  What, When, and How, I eat involves a continual personal evaluation and balancing of my own Values.  

DietHobby is my digital Scrapbook. It advertises nothing, sells nothing, charges nothing, and accepts no donations.  It is my own personal website which exists to help me further my own personal Dieting Hobby, and it reflects my personal experience in weight-loss and maintenance.

One-size-doesn’t fit-all, and I address many different ways-of-eating whenever I find them interesting or applicable to me.

For me, Dreams and Goals need to be based on REALITY, which means they need to be based upon a sensible and practical idea of what can actually be achieved or expected.

I have a clear idea of my own personal weight goals, and have an image of how I want to look and feel at my Ideal Weight Goal.  I also have an intense desire to BE there - not only Reach that Goal, but Stay there Forever. 

However, what I’ve learned is that ...
Life involves Balance and Trade-offs which are based on what each of us “brings to the table” (genetically & otherwise), as well as what each of us values the most. 

There are many different definitions of what is individually “beautiful” and also of what is “healthy”, and ….for many people here on earth,….. a BMI number doesn’t define either beauty or health. 

Not only do people define Beauty & Health differently, there are many differences in how highly various Food and Eating issues are valued within each individual life. 

Advertising, the media, and the Diet Industry tells us that “thin” is the most beautiful and healthiest body type. Most people who reach a weight at the bottom of their BMI range would be considered “thin”, and some might even consider those people to be the “healthiest” that they could be, because of their low weight.  However, there are others who define “Beauty” and “Health” differently, and THOSE people would prefer and choose different weight-goals.

Here is a picture showing my own personal ideal Weight Maintenance Range.



As part of my own “dieting hobby” I’m always reading and learning about various diet plans, non-diet plans, ways-of-eating, and lifestyles. My many diet experiments have helped me to develop a deep understanding of my own personal preferences. I like some diets and diet “experts” better than others, but I continually work to remain open to new or different possibilities.

The DietHobby ARCHIVES contains many articles that talk about the specifics of my own eating and weight struggles.  Every year I become more and more convinced of the truth of the following statements made by the obesity specialist, Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, M.D.:

"at the end of the day if you don't like the life you're living while you're losing weight, you're virtually certain to gain it back."

Physiologically, Plateaus don’t exist.  Unless it’s a TEMPORARY trick of the scale, …....... if you’re not losing, either you’re burning fewer calories than you think; you’re eating more than you think; or some combination thereof. 

However, although there’s no Plateau, there IS such a thing as a “FLOOR”. 
If you’ve truly stopped losing weight, there are really only two questions you need to ask yourself.

1. Could I happily eat any less?
2. Could I happily exercise any more?

If the answer is "yes" then you can tighten things up, but If the answer to both is "no", there's nothing left for you to do. 

This is because if you can't happily eat any less and you can't happily exercise any more -- then it's unlikely that this will ever become part of your permanent behavior.

For me, maintaining a large weight-loss involves striking a balance between how I want my body to look and to feel at a specific size; AND how little food I am prepared to eat indefinitely. 


But what’s personally important isn’t a Constant. As Life Happens our Values tend to adjust to fit into our present Realities. 


The body is designed to wear out, and if we live long enough, we will die from old age. 

Here in my 73rd year of life, my thinking and my goals are more short term than they were in my 60s, 50s, 40s, 30s, 20s, or teens. 

I find that now I tend to value my physical comfort more than my physical appearance, and that I’m far less willing to spend time experimenting with ways-of-eating that I don’t find enjoyable.

At this time I still place a high value of keeping my body somewhere inside my “normal” BMI range, and I am still willing to eat very small amounts of food indefinitely to do so. 

However, …. if the only way I could maintain that body size was to eat only 5 bites of food twice a day for the rest of my life, would I be willing to do that??? ….If the only way I could maintain that body size was to entirely eliminate specific foods from my life … whether it be sweets, carbs - refined or otherwise, meat, or dairy products like cheese or butter?????? 

My own personal answer is:  No!!!  

Neither of those things would be an acceptable trade-off for me.  It’s a matter of values.  
In order to be able to moderately eat those foods, I would choose to accept being a larger size.

   
................How moderate?  
................How much larger? 



That’s where the individual balancing of values comes into play.

Note to those of you who are interested:  This week I’ve started a different diet experiment which involves eating approximately six tiny meals per day, while working keep my calorie intake at or below my energy burn.  I plan to post food pictures here at DietHobby under the title: “Tasters Choice” which is inside my Photo Gallery, under the Heading RESOURCES.
 

Running to Dinner

What is commonly believed to be “Fact” about weight loss, including weight-loss and health, has no basis in evidence from Scientific Research.

No matter how many people believe a lie, it will never become the truth.

Repeating an untruth as though it were true, over and over, will never make it true. 

Also, wishing, hoping, or believing that something is true won’t magic away objective facts.

A current event along that line occurred when aides of the new president recently denied the reality of certain specific objective facts even though photographic and other verifiable evidence proved that those facts were True.  Even though the truth was clearly visible, the White House denied it.  One aide even defended their false statements as being an offer of “Alternative Facts”.  After that new political term was used to justify Falsehoods, Lies, and Untruths, it was corrected by a tweet from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary saying: “A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality.”

Below is an accurate article showing how the marketing of  “Alternate Facts” has been effectively applied to Weight-Loss isues.


When We Talk About Weight Loss Research
                    
              by Ragen Chastain of Dances with Fat

One of the reasons that I’m no longer interested in attempting weight loss is that my review of the literature informs me that it simply has no basis in evidence as being an effective way to either lose weight or become more healthy (which are two separate things).  When I say that, people often object insisting that there are studies where people have lost weight.

The problem is that any old research where a couple of people lost weight won’t do (go ahead, review the literature.  I think you’ll be shocked to find how often the average participant lost a few pounds, gained back half of it before they stopped tracking, and then the authors declare the study a success.)

The research we would need for weight loss to meet the criteria of an evidence-based medical intervention is twofold.  First, we would need a study where the majority of the participants lost the amount of weight that we are told we need to lose to change our health and maintain that weight loss long term (over 5 years).  If we had those studies – and we don’t –  we would then need some proof that weight loss actually caused health improvements – and this study already brings that into question.

This rules out the National Weight Control Registry because they’ve chosen to study 10,000 people who experienced weight loss while completely ignoring the up to 800,000,000 failed attempts that happened in the same time frame.  Then they just look for things that the 10,000 have in common. So when they say things like “eating breakfast contributes to weight loss” what they actually mean is that they asked the 10,000 people who succeeded what they did, and a majority of them said that they ate breakfast.  Note that they didn’t ask how many of the up to 800,000,000 people who did not lose weight also ate breakfast – that would be important information to have since if a majority of the people who didn’t lose weight also ate breakfast then breakfast may have absolutely nothing to do with it.

Imagine if I got together everyone who had survived a skydiving accident when their parachute didn’t open and started looking for things they have in common.  Even if every single one of them wore a green shirt and had oatmeal for breakfast, I cannot say that wearing a green shirt and eating oatmeal will allow you to survive a skydiving accident, nor can I ethically start Ragen’s School of No Parachute Skydiving “free green shirt and oatmeal with every jump!”  When your entire sample is a statistical anomaly, your research is useless. When all you’re looking for is random coincidence among a select group of outliers, you’d be better off using your research money on lottery tickets.

Other times, people bring up studies where phase 1 was weight loss and phase 2 was maintenance, the study lost between 40% and 70% of participants during or after phase one, and then the researchers continued on as if the remaining people were the complete study group.  Not ok. Why did all of those people quit?  How will their experience be accounted for?

Often the remaining subjects start gaining back the weight they lost so that at the end of phase 2 the average participant has gained back half of their weight with a net loss of less than 10 pounds.  Or they only follow up for a year or two when we know that most people gain their weight back by year 5.

People list study after study and all of them have one or more of the above problems, which I or someone else in the discussion points out.  At that point, the person listing the studies often gets frustrated and says something like “Why don’t you like my studies?” or “You just don’t want to believe.”   If they examined it, I think they’d find that their frustration isn’t with me, it’s with the fact that they’ve been sold a lie and they bought it at full retail price.

I certainly know that frustration, when I did my first literature review of weight loss research I expected to find that all diets worked – I was just looking for the “best” one, the one that had the most solid success.  I was so shocked at what I found that I read through all of the literature again.  I simply couldn’t believe that this thing – weight loss – that had been marketed to me more aggressively than anything else in my life had no basis in evidence. 

I couldn’t believe that doctors had been giving me an intervention which had been shown repeatedly to almost always end in failure, and the majority of time had the exact opposite of the intended result.  When I found out that there weren’t even any studies that showed that weight loss caused changes in health I was just stunned.

It took me a lot of time and a lot of work to accept the truth.  It was hard to find out that I’d been lied to (on purpose and inadvertently), it was hard to find out that the thing that I’d been promised would solve all of my problems was never going to happen. 

In many ways, at least for me, Health at Every Size was about giving up, but that’s what I do when I find out that I’ve been harboring a mistaken belief.  That’s what scientists (well, good scientists) do when their research does not support their hypothesis (however strongly held or widely believed it might be.)  They don’t suspend the rules of research and logic and argue for a belief that they can’t support with evidence.

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DietHobby has more of these short videos under the heading: Words of Wisdom