Keeping the Weight Off

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