Staying on track!

jkkk4

About 9 months ago I lost almost 50 pounds! Was hitting the gym regularly and eating decent. Felt much stronger and looked much better! But lately life has been busy and I’ve gained around 12 of it back. I’m trying to stay on track and get that 12 back off with an additional 10. My habits are much better then before. I’m 26 and turning my life back around to fitness and healthy lifestyle. Jus need motivation to stay away from fast food and late snacks with milk!! Anything advice or words of encouragement are welcome!

AnnPT77

Maybe this doesn't fit, but I'll say it anyway, just in case:

It's pretty common to take special steps to lose weight, i.e., "go on a diet".

IMO, it's more helpful to think of weight loss as an experimental process, in which we figure out new habits that will help us stay at a healthy weight long term, but we keep a little bit of a calorie deficit while losing, to allow for weight loss, or in cases of experimental "oops", allow a little room for error.

Then, on reaching goal weight, we (hopefully) just need to tweak the calories up a small bit, and maintain pretty seamlessly.

Staying at a healthy weight is usually something we'll want to do for many, many years, far longer than it would take most of us to lose the weight. To me, that makes thinking of the loss phase as "maintenance practice" a potentially good strategy.

Different approaches to maintaining weight will work for different people. Some people keep counting calories. Some adopt a habitual rotation of meals and exercise that they know will keep them there. Some find they can develop more mindful attention to how full they feel, and succeed that way. Most seem to watch the scale (or waistband fit) and adjust eating if that goes in an undesired direction. And so forth. So, the experimental question is: What's your style?

That said, I'm not in a hugely different position from you (just maybe on a slower track? ). I lost around 60 pounds in 2015, and held steady on for most of 2016. Then I started drifting upward, while still mostly calorie counting. I'm quite clear what the cause was: I calorie bank (eat under maintenance) most days in order to have the occasional more indulgent meal or day. That strategy, overall, is fine, and I'm sticking with it. But I let things like weekend trips cumulatively make more withdrawals from the calorie bank (i.e., ate more) than I was putting in (on the the slight under-goal days).

So, I drifted up a quarter of a pound here, and a tenth there, over several years. Never got out of the healthy weight range (topped out around BMI 23), but it was a little heavier than I personally consider ideal. Finally, around October 2019, I decided I needed to turn things around. I didn't have the enthusiasm level for a substantial deficit, so I started just trying to manage my calorie bank a little more actively, still having under-maintenance days and over-maintenance days, but trying to maintain a deficit that would give me a small loss, half a pound a week or less. The reduced restaurant temptation since March (due to "shelter at home"/takeout-only in my area) has made that easier, but I was drifting downward even before that (including over the year-end holidays and my birthday). I'm down around half the 2015 to 2019 up-drift pounds, perhaps a bit more, at this point, at BMI 21.4 this morning - a low weight that I hadn't seen since November 2017.

I don't know whether any of that helps, or not.

Best wishes!

geltner1

Your conclusion that maintainence is very similar to the slow weight loss period that considering the weight loss as "maintenance practice" made wonderful sense to me. I'm going to start thinking that way.