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.

                                                      
Marketing interests foster the belief that all we have to do is use their product to “get the excess weight off”. They'll kiss our behinds, not because they care about us, but to get our money.

I use the term “marketing interest” to define someone who has a product or an idea that they would like to make financially profitable. It could be a food, a drug or supplement, a book or other publication, a diet organization, an exercise machine, an event such as a marathon, personal services like a trainer or nutritionist, a politician, or even …. gasp!… a medical doctor or facility with a specialization involving the condition of obesity.

Advertising also now gives a more positive spin on this process by substituting the term “get healthy” for “lose weight”; thereby making certain that the concept Slim equals Healthy, and Fat equals Sick. During the past several decades, this language has been adopted by popular culture, which was an extremely successful marketing ploy. It has resulted in the majority of society … including those in the medical profession …now accepting that concept as an absolute Truth of Life. An informed person who dares to question the basic reality of that premise now faces mass opposition.

Most of us who struggle with obesity, desperately want to be “normal weight”.
We want to be “attractive”, “trim”, “fit”, “toned” and “healthy”.
We want an easy way to accomplish that goal. A way that doesn’t take much thought or a lot of time and effort. We want it to come “naturally”. So, we are easily seduced by the false promises of a simple, effortless way.   We can also be seduced into agreeing to make a lot of effort for a very limited time.

Phrased anyway you like, essentially, this is a lie.
And, not a “harmless” lie, but to use a term I frequently heard as a child…
It’s a lie “straight from the pits of Hell”.
As long as we believe there is….somewhere….an easy way, it becomes almost impossible to commit oneself to the hard work and constant struggle that it takes for weight-loss and maintenance of that weight-loss.

People who are clearly fat commonly express the concept that that they
don’t want Thoughts about Weight/Food/Exercise to "Rule their Life".

I have no way to help anyone toward that Goal of Mindlessness,
because Thoughts about Weight/Food/Exercise have ALWAYS "Ruled MY Life."
I'm not a person with the genetics it takes to be naturally thin, or even naturally normal-weight.  I did not spend any less time Thinking about those issues when I was Fat than I do now.  The difference is that when I was Fat my Thoughts were not accompanied by consistent Action, while during my weight-loss period ...and now inside Maintenance...
my Thoughts about those issues now tend to be productive and positive.

Sometimes, ... if we choose to ...  we can make hard work enjoyable, and that is the direction I’ve chosen to take with my dieting hobby.

Most people sometimes feel a strong inner drive to be “perfect” despite the fact that perfection is an impossible and often self-defeating goal.

Just like in every area of life, whatever diet, food plan, or way-of-eating, that one chooses can never be followed perfectly. Each of us makes many independent daily food choices based on what we feel best fits with our own lifestyle and personal eating philosophy. We aren’t all the same, and I believe that we shouldn’t try to be. However, there are a few helpful things that we might want to keep in mind while making those daily food choices.

Perfect is the Enemy of Good.

Everywhere we read conflicting information about what foods we should eat, which micronutrient or chemical contained in food should-we-choose-to-eat-or-not-eat to make us normal weight, and keep us from illness or death (i.e. healthy).

Our modern world will never be perfectly free of contaminants.

Okay, it’s the collective fault of society, but there is no going back. Also, life-spans here in the modern world are longer and more disease free … overall for more people … than life-spans were in our recorded past. So since we can't have perfectly pure food, the operative question in the real world is: Which of the available food choices are acceptable for me to realistically consume in my own life? What won’t make me fat, sick, or kill me?

Risks outside our control tend to get exaggerated.

We are frequently told that we should not eat this or that food substance, AND we are frequently told that we should eat these specific food substances.

People tend to get very worked up over what is perceived as the latest “chemical threat” in our food. Instead, we need to focus on the large risks that are within our control, … like focusing on the AMOUNTS of the readily available food that we eat … rather than exaggerating the smaller threats of what specific foods contain, just because the way that these micronutrients or other chemicals are handled often appear to be outside of our personal control.

New in the news is not new in the world.

When the news media highlights a “chemical threat” the tendency is to think the threat itself is new; that the consequences are unknown, and in the future. But if some chemical in foods does actually contribute to the risk of disease, it’s been doing so for years. That risk isn’t something looming in our future, it’s already in the present, and already part of the life we now live.

Perfectly pure food is not available on this planet. Instead of focusing on the latest news media hype, we need to do the best we can with the food supply we've got.

So lets focus on eating readily-available food in ways that will provide us with a personally satisfying lifestyle while understanding that EVERY person cannot achieve a slim, shapely, fit and toned body; that most diseases are simply a risk of life; that our bodies are designed to wear out; and that death will eventually arrive for everyone.

What is “Junk Food” anyway?
Is it an "edible food-like substance"? The opposite of:

“real food”
“proper food”
“healthy food”
“organic food”

Not necessarily.  
Junk food is slang - an informal term - for food that contains a high level of calories from sugar or fat, with little protein, vitamins or minerals.

The definition of Junk is anything that is regarded as worthless, meaningless, or contemptible; trash. The definition of Trash is anything worthless, useless, or discarded; rubbish, So Junk or Trash is something worthless. The opposite of that would be Treasure, as the definition of treasure is a valuable or precious possession of any kind.

There’s a wise old proverb that says: “One man's trash is another man's treasure”, meaning that something that one person considers worthless may be considered valuable by someone else.

Whether something is trash or treasure is a matter of an individual’s perception. This proverb is applicable to current popular culture and its food issues.

The most common viewpoint is that junk foods include salted snack foods, candy, sweet desserts, fried fast food, and sweet carbonated beverages. Although every person has their own list of foods that they call junk foods, society uses the slang term “junk food” as though we all agree on exactly what these specific foods are.

White sugar and white flour are carbs that become glucose when ingested, and will provide life-sustaining physical energy, just like other carbs. This, when used together with a bit of protein, some fat, and an added multi-vitamin-mineral pill, is a diet that many modern humans use to sustain reasonably healthy lives. We see the term “Healthy” everywhere nowadays, but “Healthy” really only means not-sick and not-dead.

Recently I saw an article headlined: “Junk food is an issue of national security”. And in fact, there appear to be foodie terrorists everywhere ... People who insist on forcing their strong opinions about which foods are trash, and which foods are treasure.

Nowadays, one can’t go for long without being exposed to the assertion ... (everything seems to be believed by someone) ... that some specific micronutrient, such as carbs, or animal proteins, or fats  cause heart disease, cancer and/or Alzheimer’s disease.

Assertations abound that chemicals used in processing foods, or genetic changes in the way food is now grown, or foods fed to the animals providing protein products make many of the major foods unhealthy and unsafe.

There are many opposing opinions on which food micronutrient, or which of the chemicals within foods, will kill us or make us sick. People can’t even totally agree on which ones will make us fat.

In my lifetime, I’ve personally experimented with a great variety of different food plans. Some were labeled “fad” diets. Some were labeled “crash” diets, Some were labeled “healthy” diets. Some were labeled “balanced” diets. Some were labeled “low-fat” diets. Some were labeled “low-carb” diets. Some of these food plans tried to distinguish themselves by redefining themselves … insisting that they weren’t “Diets” at all.

No matter which food plan I was currently on, there were always plenty of “nutritional experts” around to tell me that my current plan was wrong. “Nutritional Experts” across the board have delighted in telling me that my diet-of-the-moment was providing me with too few calories to meet my body’s nutritional needs, and that I absolutely MUST eat at least 1200 calories or more every day. The reality is that I’m a short, light, elderly, sedentary “reduced-obese" female and my body requires LESS than 1200 daily calories to sustain my current normal-sized weight. Despite my low-calorie intake my body isn’t shrinking into nothingness, and my recommended daily multivitamin seems to work well to effectively correct any potential nutritional deficiencies.

One common question that the “experts” all seem to find unique and meaningful about any specific diet is: “Are you going to continue to eat like this for the rest of your life?” As to any one specific diet, I find that question irrelevant, because there are literally thousands of different food plans possible. My personal choice is to engage myself in serial diet monogamy which has brought me from morbid obesity to a normal size, and allowed me to at normal size for quite a few years. Although I’m over age 60, all indications are that I’m still in excellent health.

The truth we all need to face is that the human body is designed to wear out, and even if we are fortunate enough to avoid the major diseases, we will eventually die of old age… Probably by our mid 80s, but perhaps not until we are in our 90s. The time I’ve spent visiting the elderly in nursing homes has taught me that the stretch between death in one’s mid-80s and death in one’s 90s, seldom comes with years of excellent health, and practically speaking, it might actually better to avoid an attempt to extend one’s life span for an extra 5 or 10 years.

So, are the following pictures Junk Food to YOU?

The majority classify the above foods as Junk Foods,
but would you agree with the people
who classify the foods below as Junk Foods?

Bread  (carb)  -   Butter (saturated fat)

Hot Dog in Bun with ketchup and mustard & fried Onion Rings (carbs, processed fatty meat, sugared condiment & fried food) - - - Cheese, crackers & Grapes (animal based fatty protein, wheat-flour carbs & high sugar frutose carb)

 
Roast Beef Sandwich  (fatty red meat, wheat carbs) -  Tuna Salad Sandwich (wheat carbs - mercury tainted protein source?, mayo- fat & carb, chopped eggs - cholestrol)

Beefsteak, green beans, carrots & roasted white potatoes  (fatty red meat, high starch vegetables) - - crisp fried bacon (processed fatty meat with nitrates).

The examples above demonstrate that almost every food seems to contain some micronutrient or substance that SOMEONE can find objectionable.

I often hear people who want to lose weight say,
"I need to start going to the gym."

It’s true that most people need to be more active and less sedentary.
I’m not against exercise or the health benefits it can give one.
However, the idea that a bit more physical activity will reduce one’s body weight or prevent weight gain is a modern myth. It takes a lot more than regular trips to the gym to combat obesity.

In more ways than one, people just have “too much on their plate”.
Too much food, and too many activities.

Food intake determines body size as related to weight-loss and maintenance of that weight-loss.  Exercise determines  how physically "fit" one's body is ... at whatever size it happens to be. One cannot outexercise a bad diet.  To see an example of diet vs. exercise, watch the video at the bottom of this article. Most people with limited time who are struggling with obesity would be better served to focus on their food issues.

For the majority of people, … especially parents with young children, … it isn’t the expense of the gym fee that keeps them away. It’s the lack of time, low self-esteem, poor body image, depression, and sheer exhaustion from their stressful days. The last thing needed is yet one more obligation (meaning: visit to a gym or fitness center) in their already busy and overscheduled days.

If there was an extra hour or so to actually dedicate to going to a gym it might be a more "healthful" choice for them to get an extra hour of sleep or do something more enjoyable and relaxing.

The problem is not that people are too lazy or too cheap to pay for gym membership. The problem is that they are too busy, too stressed, too short of time, too exhausted, spend too much time in their cars, and are too caught up in everything else that makes a “healthy lifestyle” virtually impossible.

Changing one’s lifestyle is more about changing one’s ‘life’ than one’s ’style’.

Perhaps a life in which there is actually time to stop and smell the flowers would do more for busy people to better manage their weight than a workout.

See below for a video on Diet vs. Exercise.