I Have Noticed Many People Returning, Having Regained Their Weight ...

kitaemma

I lost 30 pounds that I gained after the death of my finance, then had to have spine surgery and gained another 25 back, finally ready to just focus on getting myself healthy and now I’m about 15 pounds from my goal, here’s hoping it stays off for good!

shaunshaikh

For me, I had a good routine going, but when my lifestyle changed through promotion at work, doing MBA part time, getting married, having kids, I abandoned the routine rather than adjusting it. I've now created a routine that fits my current lifestyle.

RUNucbar

I would not have changed anything!! I regained because of the antidepressants I was taking and because I couldn't log while sectioned after a suicide attempt. It was what I needed at the time so I'd change nothing.

timtam163

It's great to see others on here. I have been yo-yo-ing for years, sometimes with the help of MFP, and I think I did several things wrong: stop logging and get defeated when I'd slip up, eat at too high a deficit and then binge, get in shape for other people and not for myself. I am developing more maturity and patience, both of which are necessary for long-term change... I won't say I have it all figured out, I'm stressed out and have been plateaued for a while, but even during this period of stress/depression I have managed to maintain so I would definitely count that as an improvement.

Edit: I would also get more restrictive with my diet over time, transitioning to vegan or paleo or gluten free... the more permissive/flexible I am with my food intake (while still retaining lessons learned from those diets about what is and isn't important to me) the more likely I am to stick with it.

youngmomtaz

For me it was excuses. My thyroid went wacko when I was 5 lbs above where I wanted to be, I was totally trashed as far as energy, could barely walk a straight line or form complete sentences after only 6 hours at work. I used my insane fatigue against myself. “I need food to get some energy”, “too tired to work out” I was actually a safety hazard to myself while even walking but the food was a huge issue. Sporadic tracking, preplanning meals and then eating off plan. Refusing to step on the scale. Soon enough I was up 30lbs. I maintained at 175lbs for a year and have just recently got my head right again. Down 15 with 15-20 to go!

Now I preplan meals, get motivated by my trackers calorie burns even if I don’t 100% trust them, and make sure I am doing everything with a focus on health.

AutumnDraidean

So in 2009, way before fitbit I did South Beach, got down to 150 and was maintaining well enough. Then I took a job I never ever should have taken and was miserable. Ate all the food, gained all the weight and more, quit the job, got a better one. Last winter I got a fitbit and started using MFP. I got down to 170 and then MFP and Fitbit stopped syncing and I was way too irritated to fix it. I threw MFP off my phone and got lazy. Up 20 pounds we went. So about 6 weeks ago I got mad and got serious about it. I was doing ok, but getting irritated with fitbits sad sad food database so I loaded MFP back up to my phone. I expected a struggle but it sync'd perfectly and I am logging food again. If I can keep to my goals I will be happy, I'm owning the idea slowly that this diet is forever.

MissMaggieMuffin

I lost 65 lbs around 17 years ago through Weight Watchers. Then, I got sloppy with my food and beverage choices. Still was very active but 'they' are correct when they say you can't out-exercise a crappy diet. Fifteen years of having a glass or two of wine, telling myself 'it's just another 5 lbs', or 'I ran 10k today so I can have that huge steak' netted out to gaining back 50 of those 65 lbs.
Now within 5 lbs of my goal and, hopefully, both older and wiser in sticking with a good maintenance plan.

HDBKLM

I thought this might deserve a bump for New Year's resolutioners?

LivingtheLeanDream

I didn't regain...
Been here since 2012, in maintenance since 2013.
Logged my food for around 3 years but now only occasionally log it to see how my macros are doing.
I made lasting changes to how I ate and worked out and it stuck

bisky

suzesvelte wrote: »

I have lost lots of weight many times, and gradually re-gained some of it over time, everytime. I am not a "crazy" eater gorging on junk food and sweet drinks - never really have been - indeed what I eat is very healthy. It always was mainly based on food I prepped from scratch with lots of fresh ingredients and my intake has been even better quality over the last few years because I was given a terminal cancer diagnosis and decided to use diet and health to extend my life expectancy. I take that very seriously and eat very well.

However we live in a society where food is easily available, and "treats" are piled high almost everywhere we go, so eating within a calorie target takes constant vigilance. I can gain weight by simply eating out once or twice a week, snacking on a few sweet things now and again and adding "too much" oil to my cooking. It's not much but its enough to gradudally pile the pounds back on.

Using MFP to re-focus awareness of portion control and how small a protion of fat has to be to keep calories under control is working for me again. I really WANT this to be the last time, so I am being very serious about learning how maintainers manage to maintain. What the "best" maintainers in here seem to do is KEEP ON IT -> keep weighing yourself regularly and keep monitoring your intake and crank it up if you gain a few pounds to keep on target far more easily than gaining huge amounts before you start again. Basically you cannot stop.

Now that seems like a shock, and rather tedious, but I reckon we have to do that, and realise that THIN people actually do that too. They may not talk about it, but they will have little techniques they use to moderate their intake and compensate for over-indulgence. They might even lie about it, they might say "they can eat anything" - but that is nor true for many people. There might be a few outliers with faster metabolism, etc. Same as some of us maybe have slower metabolisms, but basically in our culture of abundance, being slim requires constant effort.

I have also been reading the Beck Diet Solution which was recommended in these forums. This author is a doctor who helps many fat people. She really gets into the head of a fat person and shows you how "thin" people think and manage to stay slim. I strongly recommend this book if you want to change the way you THINK about food and eating as a maintenance as well as a loss thing. It is very helpful to realise that THIN people DO exert vigilance, even if you don't notice that they do. This book is teaching me to "think like a thin person" .. and it is very enpowering. Most of my "bad" habits are based on faulty logic and a sense of "unfairness" about how hard it is to stay slim. Giving up that sense of injustice might be my biggest step to successful loss and maintenance.

I hope so!

Thank you for posting that. I will have to read the book.

netitheyeti

I was on a different website (for calorie counting) years ago - I regained some of the weight partially, I think, due to poor health and not being able to exercise anymore combined with some anxiety/depression, which typically makes me overeat... it wasn't a sudden huge gain after I stopped logging everything, it was more of a "gained 2-3kg due to stress eating, then didn't manage to lose 100% of that before the next 2-3 weeks of not doing well", over the course of 5 years or so

mburgess458

I lost 30-35 lbs right after college through starting exercising and eating very little (cutting out things like pizza, sweets, carbs with dinner, etc.). As soon as I got to my goal I pretty much went back to my old ways and gained it all back in a within 5 years or so. A few years later I did the same eating very little thing again (cutting out lots of foods in a non-sustainable way) and lost the same 35 lbs a second time. Went back to old ways and started a stressful job and gained it back again within a few years.

3.5+ years ago I started losing weight using MFP. I have been at my goal weight for almost 3 years now and I'm still using MFP and have maintained within 5 lbs or so. I don't weigh anything but I eyeball and track everything everyday and check my weight daily. If I start to gain I'll know long before 35 lbs of weight gain. I think I'm in much better shape for maintaining now than ever before. This is sustainable for me. Using MFP takes a couple of minutes a day now since I eat the same things most of the time.

saragd012

Mine was due to stress and general laziness. I maintained so well for about 2 years but then I got engaged and things became more hectic planning a wedding, still did pretty well but it was harder. So pretty much right after the wedding we went into "treat yo self" mode and started eating treats and not working out as diligently as we used to. I gained 8 pounds back, caught myself, and stopped the gain but didn't lose the extra. So now I'm back for accountability. Tracking forces me to consider everything I eat and stops me from the mindless snacking (because how the hell do you log 3-4 handfuls of peanut butter pretzels accurately?)

amfmmama

I did really well, tracked exercised, and was all in.... until I wasn't. Bottom line, I made changes, lots of changes, but I did not make the change that mattered... the lifestyle change....so when I stopped it was easy to go back to the place I came from. Not just easy, but down right comfortable.

fitoverfortymom

Thank you all for sharing your stories. I'm approaching maintenance soon, and this is really helpful perspective and insight.

Tacklewasher

fitoverfortymom wrote: »

Thank you all for sharing your stories. I'm approaching maintenance soon, and this is really helpful perspective and insight.

Same. Still a bit of a ways to maintenance for me, but this has been a good thread to read.

Mellykay88

I didn’t read all of the posts, so someone may have already said this, but I wanted to give my take on WHY people don’t maintain. I’m 120 lbs into my weigh loss and am a long way from maintenance, but I hope to prepare myself for that part well before it gets here.

I’m a drug and alcohol counselor, and if we look at obesity and over-eating through the lens of addiction, it makes sense that people regain (relapse). In the addiction treatment field we look at how people change and progress through the “stages of change” from pre-contemplation (not thinking about change at all) to maintenance. Addiction is viewed as a life long illness that requires continuous work. When a person relapses, they leave the maintenance stage and regress to a lower stage. This doesn’t always mean that they go back to the beginning and have to start over. Instead, in most cases, they learn something from the relapse and work back to maintenance. With each relapse or slip they learn more (though depending on circumstances it may take years to get back on track). From reading stories about weight loss, I feel this a pretty good comparison. Many of us will relapse (regain), but if we have a good plan, we will learn from our mistakes and get back on track. Hopefully, we will eventually experience long-term change (recovery). Addicts are encouraged to continue going to meetings for support and I think that for those of us who have lost weight or are losing, support from people on similar paths is crucial to long-term change.

I hope that makes sense. Sorry if I rambled.

shadow2soul

From spring 2016- Summer 2017, I had let my logging become really relaxed. I was eating at places that I couldn't accurately account for and just making poor choices. I gained about 10 lbs or so.
Then in the fall of 2017 I tried Trinessa birth control pills for 3 months. I felt like I was in early pregnancy the whole time and had always felt hungry. During those 3 months I gained another 12 lbs, because I was eating 3k + calories a day. I tried to buckle down and bring my intake down while on it, but the hungry feeling always seemed to get the best of me (I would cave and eat).

Even with that, I am back on track now and I did manage to keep the majority of the weight I had lost off.

teranga79

I lost around 20lbs in the second half of 2014, which put me at a weight I was really happy with. I was ill for a couple of weeks before Christmas that year and could barely eat anything - so when I got to Christmas and finally felt better I decided not to bother logging or being careful as a) I was at goal weight and b) I felt I deserved a treat! I decided to award myself a couple of weeks of eating whatever I wanted without thinking about it. Those two weeks turned into just over 3 years.

DKG28

I reached my goal, and thought after an entire year where I meticulously weighed and logged food, and learned everything I could about nutrition, that my new way of eating was a formed habit. Stopped logging, and it wasn't long until I wasn't controlling my food intake anymore. My biggest problem was that during that year, although successful, I achieved nothing else in my life, and my work suffered. The mental discipline took hours of thought every day, convincing myself to eat the right things in the right portions and cook regularly. It was literally a minute by minute struggle for a whole year. I burned out. And I wasn't doing anything extreme. I live alone, far from family, haven't made friends in the 3 years i've been in my current location, have an emotionally taxing job, don't have access to the types of activities that give me joy and satisfaction (without 4 hours driving to the nearest city with art and cultural events). Giving up eating dessert by the monster portions meant there was nothing left, and I loved my new body, but the expense of maintaining was sapping me of sanity. I've gotten a little bit better connected to my community, and have found some opportunities to do what I love, so now I'm trying to lose the weight again, hoping I'm in a better place to do it in a more psychologically stable way.

Zodikosis

Maybe about 10 lbs of the regain was due to just laziness and not watching myself. The other 35 lbs was due to Paxil and its accompanying side effects. So, I suppose, in the future, I won't be taking Paxil again.

boymom121

I joined Jan 2017 with the goal of getting in shape for beach vacay end of July 2017. I was fully committed from day one and stuck with it the whole time, used MFP everyday, bought a scale for the kitchen to weighfood and was very proud of my progress. Felt great on vacay, felt great in my bathing suit which was my goal! Then once vacay hit it was like Alright I can have a little leeway and enjoyed eating some good food and treats. Shortly after our vacay our living situation changed and then the holidays came and things just got so busy between that and things going on with family I just took a break. My beginning weight was 144, my end weight was around 128-130 when I lost it all and I'm at 140 right now. My weight hangs around on my hips,tummy and butt and I'm 5'4. So my jeans are more snug right now lol. I've been thinking about restarting every since the new year came because I really did enjoy my journey last year and being more active and getting into weights. And I guess it all worked out just right because at the beginning of this week my coworkers started a challenge to get fit and see who can lose the most body fat in a competition for money. So I jumped at the opportunity to kinda kickstart my journey again to get rid of the weight I regained, win some money lol and prepare for our beach vacay again this year! There's a girl here who is kinda a health guru so she brought calipers, measuring tape and scale to weigh in so we can be accurate of where we all stand. Kinda exciting. Our doctor we work for isn't participating but threw in $100 into the growing pot So that's exciting and motivating all at the same time. Those are my reasons for regaining and restarting on MFP.

lightenup2016

This is my 5th round of losing regained weight! I've pretty much used the same method to lose weight--log calories and increase exercise. At some point I discovered intermittent fasting, and that helped as well. The last go-around, I discovered mfp and lost 18 lbs. I enjoyed using the app, increased my exercise sensibly, so it could be sustainable, and breezed through the first several months, Over the holidays 2016, it got a lot harder to lose weight, and I maintained at 135 to 138 for several more months, but was still trying to lose another 10 or so pounds. Then I don't know – – life got more stressful, and at some point I stopped logging and exercising regularly. I began eating earlier in the day, as soon as hunger hit. I watched my weight go back up, and I just figured I would get back to it at some point when life got easier again. Well, I don't know that life has gotten much easier, but here I am again, and trying to look ahead at what maintenance will look like, even through stressful times.

I will say that I do seem to learn something from each time around, as a previous poster mentioned. This time I've learned that when hunger hits early in the day, before I want an actual meal, I can eat just a little bit and no longer feel hungry.

The interval in between gaining and getting the motivation to lose it again seems to be shortening, so I guess that's good!

HoneyBadger302

On December 3, 2016 got a Tib/fib pilon fracture on my left leg. Up until that moment was steadily (albeit slowly) losing and my fitness was returning to (what I considered) awesome levels.

The fracture ended up resulting in the following over the next 10 months: four (4) surgeries; 1 external fixator; 2 plates, 18 screws; removal of all hardware; one infection; 6 weeks of IV antibiotics; 4 months of oral antibiotics.

After the first couple months, I quite caring about my weight or fitness and was mostly worried about keeping my leg attached to my body (infections from these breaks are known for being complicated).

During this time I continued to work (couldn't afford not to), and still was out riding my bike, but that's about all the energy and focus I had available to expend (and sometimes not even for that). Oh, and add in that I'm single AF and other than occasional help with stuff I absolutely could not do on my own, I had NO help around the house or for anything else.

After getting the hardware out in late September, things have healed up and it appears I'm in the clear at least for now (osteomyelitis is something you can never just "forget" about).

Returned to the gym in late November, been back at that ever since. Getting my fitness back was priority #1, but that was finally getting there, so a few weeks ago back to weighing, measuring, and tracking all my food. Using my HR monitor and app to track calorie burn.

I don't regret my choices over the last year. Yes, I could have eaten better and not put on the weight, but to be honest, the comfort food and not worrying about every bite was totally worth the extra weight I now have to lose. It was a choice on my part not to worry about it, and I don't regret that decision.

sjp_511

While I never got to maintenance, I was losing weight. The initial weight loss included a few occasions where I stalled because I got relaxed on logging and making good food choices. But I always found my way back before I had regained any significant weight. Then I got pregnant. I lost all willpower to control cravings and gained back a lot of weight. Then life with a baby - it was certainly a lifestyle change and I struggled to find the energy and desire to get back into my weight loss. Then I got pregnant again. Now that I have adjusted to life with kids, I am back into the mental state to take control of my eating. I am back up to my initial weight and have recently restarted my weight loss journey.

hesn92

I’ve had a pregnancy since then. When I was pregnant I gave zero *kitten* and ate all the food. I also did mfp the first time when I was in college and had a lot of free time for going to the gym. I got my first real full time job and found going to the gym a lot more difficult to fit into my schedule.

slimbyjune18

I simply got out of the habit of logging food, weighing food & standing on the scale. I was pretty glad to have only put on 21lb over three years. I’m 8lb down again now and will not make that mistake twice.

sarahlifts

I gained 25 lbs on purpose.

I lifted all the weights, put 50 lbs on my squat and 40 on my dead lift and I ate all the foods.

It was fun I went from a size US 0 to a size 6. My bulk is over so I'm here to cut. My regular/preferred size is a small 4 barely 2 headed down to 140.

I never left. I just only post to keep myself motivated. I'm always lurking.

Gaining weight for me was a win!!

gentlygently

This is really interesting - thanks everyone for sharing their stories.

My perspective is that I found the first time on Mfp pretty easy - I lost my target 15lbs or so and got fitter too - back in 2011 over about 9 months. I have always eaten reasonably healthy, but I do like cake... And pudding. And wine. And chocolate. Oh and cheese. Comfort eater..

Then I got dispirited and bored (I realised I needed to lose beyond original target, and I was fed up of logging). Then I got sick - hormone issues and lots of comfort eating and water retention. Then I got really (lose your job type) sick. With less routine excercise (walking to the tube station etc etc) and another 2 plus hours a day in bed - pounds continued to creep back on, slowly. When I got a dog - thinking that would increase the routine excercise - I did not realise the trade would be I no longer had time/energy to swim. And I went on HRT. I am one of the few people in this world who has gotten a high energy dog and put on weight. And I have no discipline at all on holiday. So those 15lbs (or more?) here we come again. ..

This time round I am doing rough mental calorie counts. (I have generally only been overeating by 100 a day when gaining). As before I am not following any diet other than less of some stuff (portion size, cake etc) and more of other (fruit/veg etc)

This time I am weighing daily - as I now know weekly/monthly/ no weigh in was no longer working for me. Given my hormone / water retention issues it is interesting (very variable day by day) and more motivating when I can see the long term trends.

And I have swapped my old weekday toast, butter and jam or egg - to porridge with nuts/seeds. One easy change that is Healthier for heart, and lower calories.

So far so good....

Overall my main lesson was that I had to find something different in my approach - to keep me interested, and for me it has been the daily weigh in and a new breakfast.

When I get to maintenance I will have to try a new approach here. Not sure what yet....

callsitlikeiseeit

i was gone basically a year and maintained the 100 pound loss i had (over a 2 year period), without even thinking about it and without logging hardly ever. didnt gain back a single pound. i also didnt eat like i used to. I ate how i had LEARNED to. I mentally kept tab of the calories i was eating.

i came back to finish losing what has to be lost.