Losing weight does not mean you have a good plan

PAV8888

Hi @tony56pr! You said above:

tony56pr wrote: »

Diets should be used as a tool. I lost 130 pounds low carb, (more than I planned) That's not really sustainable for life and always. That said, I understand where my weakness is and what I have to avoid so I don't get fat. Anyways, of course calories in/calories out, but for me and many I believe, carbs are an issue, I just cant get full like I should and end up eating way too much. So avoid all junk and try to keep other carbs to minimal. I do better somedays than others, but that's what is needed for me.

Hopefully without putting words in his mouth, what you describe is exactly what @NovusDies addresses in his OP. "

NovusDies wrote: »

What I learned is that a good plan has less to do with the scale and more to do with how easily I can stick to it. If just about any plan can produce results then the real secret is to pick one or design one that I can execute most days without much extra motivation or willpower. It is also important that I never think I have all the answers or that I am stubborn. If weight loss is your primary goal then evaluate everything on how easy you can sustain it and ignore the rest.

And please believe me that I would be saying the same if you had said low fat, or disciplined regiment, or any other number of things instead of low carb in your post.

Because what you're not mentioning is what you're changing and how you're attempting to make things easier and more sustainable for you this time around!

fitnessguy266

PAV8888 wrote: »

Hi @tony56pr! You said above:

tony56pr wrote: »

Diets should be used as a tool. I lost 130 pounds low carb, (more than I planned) That's not really sustainable for life and always. That said, I understand where my weakness is and what I have to avoid so I don't get fat. Anyways, of course calories in/calories out, but for me and many I believe, carbs are an issue, I just cant get full like I should and end up eating way too much. So avoid all junk and try to keep other carbs to minimal. I do better somedays than others, but that's what is needed for me.

Hopefully without putting words in his mouth, what you describe is exactly what @NovusDies addresses in his OP. "

NovusDies wrote: »

What I learned is that a good plan has less to do with the scale and more to do with how easily I can stick to it. If just about any plan can produce results then the real secret is to pick one or design one that I can execute most days without much extra motivation or willpower. It is also important that I never think I have all the answers or that I am stubborn. If weight loss is your primary goal then evaluate everything on how easy you can sustain it and ignore the rest.

And please believe me that I would be saying the same if you had said low fat, or disciplined regiment, or any other number of things instead of low carb in your post.

Because what you're not mentioning is what you're changing and how you're attempting to make things easier and more sustainable for you this time around!

MFP is reputed as a credible, educational, and inspirational source for short, and long term health principles and best practices......i question the validity(of actual long term dieters/healthy lifestyle advocates) with all the "gloom and doom" posts from self-proclaimed experts here that have a supposedly futuristic view into the outcome of every posters optimistic approach to dieting, strategy, etc.....an anticipated behavioral pattern based on "controlled studies" is appreciated, but please stop the "i've seen it before, it won't work" pessimism...individual commitments, goals, outlook on life in general, will vary per person....for the 5+ billion people on the planet.

PAV8888

.double post.

PAV8888

NovusDies wrote: »

... Losing weight can easily mean you have a perfectly horrible plan and calling it a lifestyle doesn't mean it stopped being a diet.... But this time is different. I am more committed. I have more important goals to motivate me. I have more willpower. I am disgusted over letting myself go and there is no way I will continue living this way. Any of that sound familiar? ...What I learned is that a good plan has less to do with the scale and more to do with how easily I can stick to it. If just about any plan can produce results then the real secret is to pick one or design one that I can execute most days without much extra motivation or willpower. It is also important that I never think I have all the answers or that I am stubborn.

The above is the OP of this thread with a couple of sentences removed.

In a previous post I responded to @tony56pr's description of his diet plan by saying:

PAV8888 wrote: »

.... what you're not mentioning is what you're changing and how you're attempting to make things easier and more sustainable for you this time around!

I thought my comment to be quite in line with the spirit of this thread which seeks to differentiate between sustainable and unsustainable plans. However, it appears that you took exception to my comment, @fitnessguy266

fitnessguy266 wrote: »

stop the "i've seen it before, it won't work" pessimism...individual commitments, goals, outlook on life in general, will vary per person....for the 5+ billion people on the planet.

Allow me to apologise for not being a cheerleader in encouraging people to go down the road of the ~80% of general <not MFP forum aware> dieters who fail to maintain a 10% weight loss for at least 1 year.

What I try to do instead is alert those who are willing to be open minded that they may want to put on their thinking cap so that they can figure out how to redirect their great optimism and commitment into working with their biology and individual circumstances so that they CAN become one of the 20% of general dieters who maintain a 10% or more weight loss for at least a year.

And to maybe become one of the even more rare snowflakes who get to move past the 2 year maintenance mark. Incidentally moving past the 2 year mark improves your odds of not regaining more than 5lbs to 58%.

Ideally, of course, we all want to get to the 5 year or more mark where our odds of not regaining 5lbs improve to 71%.

I'm still a year or two short of that mark myself depending on how I define the end of my weight loss; but I am hopeful since enough time has passed that most of the usual side effects of a substantial weight loss have subsided.

While I don't think the national weight control registry study is "excellent"; I freely admit that I *considered* the strategies employed by its members and adopted the subset of them that I deemed appropriate for myself and my circumstances.

[all facts and figures quoted above are from: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/82/1/222S/4863393, a national weight control registry study, hence my mention of the registry by name above]

I also considered, just as @NovusDies did, all my previous weight control failures.- Doing so, in fact, while ready to give up on losing weight because the methods I was employing were unsustainable for me at the time was what led me to seek alternatives, and to find MFP, in November 2014!

P.S. the figures above are for the GENERAL weight loss seeking population. I suspect the MFP forum reader and participant population is much more likely to experience success. But I, unfortunately, don't have a study for that!

SummerSkier

The OP post does address a common theme especially with yo yo dieters. We come up with some new approach every time and we are gung ho and do great for the first bit, but where we fail is that we don't have an exit strategy. I am going on 2 plus years of maintenance now and one of the biggest differences this time is that I set my goal at a very reasonable place which was not a dangling 'treat' just outside reach. I also decided that another of my goals was to maintain for at least a year to see if my skin would firm up some. It seems many of us are really really good at losing weight but not so good at maintaining. I spent a lot of time reading and lurking in the maintenance forums here (esp the stickies) to see what was working and what wasn't for people. I still do. So perhaps however a person chooses to loose their weight is NOT the most critical for long term success. For the first 30 or so years I had no idea that after I lost weight I could not just act "normal" and go back to where I was before. That was a sort of light bulb moment. Yes I agree that the long term plan needs to be sustainable and one which each individual reaches on their own but in most cases it is very likely that long term plan is not going to be the "before" woe.

Katmary71

@SummerSkier I totally agree with you, maintenance is a whole different beast! I went pretty hardcore with calories and exercise while losing weight. I also haunt the maintenance forum. Taking it slower would have taught me a more sustainable way of living. I'm working on finding that balance now. Losing you have feedback from the scale and healthy gains from losing the extra weight. Now it's a matter of setting goals like fitness ones and keeping those healthy changes.

NovusDies

SummerSkier wrote: »

The OP post does address a common theme especially with yo yo dieters. We come up with some new approach every time and we are gung ho and do great for the first bit, but where we fail is that we don't have an exit strategy. I am going on 2 plus years of maintenance now and one of the biggest differences this time is that I set my goal at a very reasonable place which was not a dangling 'treat' just outside reach. I also decided that another of my goals was to maintain for at least a year to see if my skin would firm up some. It seems many of us are really really good at losing weight but not so good at maintaining. I spent a lot of time reading and lurking in the maintenance forums here (esp the stickies) to see what was working and what wasn't for people. I still do. So perhaps however a person chooses to loose their weight is NOT the most critical for long term success. For the first 30 or so years I had no idea that after I lost weight I could not just act "normal" and go back to where I was before. That was a sort of light bulb moment. Yes I agree that the long term plan needs to be sustainable and one which each individual reaches on their own but in most cases it is very likely that long term plan is not going to be the "before" woe.

My goal is to act normal when my weight loss is done. I am adjusting what my normal is as I go.

Whether or not a person can lose weight with a method that is completely different from how they maintain it will depend on the person. I have been losing for close to 2 years so the idea that I could have been on a cabbage soup diet all this time and the time I need to finish is far-fetched to me. I think because I had much more to lose and would spend much more time losing it I have to employ a plan that is closer to what I think maintenance will eventually look like for me. I have to keep slowly adjusting my habits which will consistently improve my normal.