Switching to Maintenance. My Struggles. Any advice?

IronAndrew

I have mandatory per diem so having more of a set schedule will do wonders towards creating less stress. Hard to make plans when I'm constantly adjusting them last moment.

IronAndrew

I just finished resetting my weight and resuming back to maintenance. I had a particularly bad few days at work earlier in June and discovered on June 22nd I was 203.4 pounds. Prior to that I had last weighed myself on June 13 and I was 189.6. A weight gain of 13.8 pounds in 9-10 days. Yikes!

As of this morning July 3rd I am down to 189 exactly after a strict 10-11 days of eating at my caloric burn levels and exercising 4-5 days out of the week intensely on top of my morning strength training. That's a loss of about 14.4 pounds in 10-11 days. As you can see I have no issues losing weight but when it piles on it piles on! Once I allow myself one "treat" it's not hard to rationalize another and another. This is why I gave up soda because I realized I couldn't trust myself to stick to 1 or a few a week and ended up at 6 cans everyday. I need better preventative measures.

Either that or I'm going to end up eating nothing but oatmeal, yogurt, apples, eggs, and salad for the rest of my life. Not the worst things to eat though.

I know part of why what happened beyond the stress eating is my activity levels plummeted due to aforementioned stress at work where I didn't have it in my to get active when I got out. Since exercise or food was how I dealt with stress and exercise wasn't on the table at the moment you can guess how it happened. Also exercise as an activity was a buffer against weight gain as well. Hiking groups didn't form the last few weeks and still aren't. Last hike I encountered my first copperhead snake and that shook me a bit. It wasn't trying to bite or anything I think it was dead from the smoke from the wildfires in Canada but it did make me think about how dangerous hiking can be if I'm not properly prepared.

Rather than my unsustainable 20-30k step days 2-4 times a week I'm going to do 3-4 aerobic sessions at 45 minutes going forward. Sprinkle in a few 45 minute sessions on the treadmill or outside if I'm up to that on top of the aerobic sessions if I've slipped and overindulged (I've pushed for sustained 3.5 mph on the treadmill at an hour during my burn and was pushing up to 4.0, tried 5.0 for a bit and realized I'm really not there yet!). That should address any instances of overindulgence. Of course not doing it in the first place is the best safeguard of all!

I had been monitoring my daily caloric intake all along but I neglected to weigh myself for 10 days. I'm going to go back to weighing every 3-4 days for awhile on top of logging. Constant vigilance especially during times of stress will have to be part of my plan going forward. I was afraid this would happen if I wasn't weighing regularly. It's a lot easier to deal with a 2-4 pound gain versus almost 14 pounds!

Thankfully I was able to address it. Good thing because things are about to get very rocky for me in regards to work soon.

I think this is a serviceable approach going forward. Any thoughts?

cmriverside

My personal take on your post(s) is that you seem to have quite a lot of anxiety and not many coping strategies?

That 14 pounds gain/loss in such a short amount of time is concerning. So is your belief that only strict food control and rigorous exercise will do.

Have you considered a bit of therapy to address your all-or-nothing, black-and-white mentality? Or even do a bit of reading on the interwebz about illogical thought patterns...those I mention are really common with various mental health disorders and can easily transfer to body dysmorphia or eating disorders.

Not bashing you at all, I can fall into dysfunctional eating at times, but 14 pounds up and down in a month is quite a jump. Part of that could just be regular fluctuations, too. The reaction and thought patterns around it are what is so extreme.

IronAndrew

You are not wrong. My anxiety and response to it plays a critical role to be sure.

In the event that my weight went up again, as it did I wanted to address it as soon as possible to correct it.

Prior to my weight going up it actually went down slowly towards 183 over time. That was without any periods of stress.

While anxiety and an inadequate coping strategy is a part of my issue I think that there’s also something else causing my weight fluctuations as well. I’m trying to figure out what that other factor is.

Rather than trying to find an exact amount of calories to eat per day, I’d rather go for an average per week, which I think is more sustainable long-term, as well as an average amount of time exercise, correct instead of per day, which again I think, is more sustainable prior to that I was focusing on the daily activity and caloric level which, of course is going to var from day to day.

An argument could be made it’s going to vary from week to week and maybe I should focus on a monthly caloric and a monthly activity level too. Another argument could be made that I’m obsessing over this too much. I like meeting targets it’s part of who I am walking towards that lessens, my anxiety amongst other things. I need targets to work towards.

Is it possible that the very things that worked for me to lose the weight are not going to work for me to stay at maintenance? Maintenance feels like a completely different game than weight loss was. Probably because it is.

The stress didn’t stop at work during my calorie burn phase to lose those 14 pounds the past 11 days I just turned towards exercise and other things to cope with my stress, such as use of aromatherapy, hot showers, meditation which I have done before which includes deep breathing, as well as mindfulness techniques. I put my hobbies on the back burner for a while, though, which are more on the creative side, which I’ll be using again, hopefully as a way to cope with stress which up to this point has mostly served as a creative outlet for me.

Prior to losing the weight and during losing the weight, I’ve realized that work, going back to school and my certification journey which I finished back in February and working towards other things in my career has been my life since late 2017. I’ve pretty much suspended the majority of my hobbies for a very long time doing that until school ended getting to do the hiking, taught me other parts of myself that I think are good not just for losing weight for maintaining a healthy lifestyle but for coping with stress. The challenge has been in able to keep things in balance when things get tough although when I was studying for my certification and getting the extra hours in over half a year at work before I could take the exam and I was able to keep my weight loss on a downward trend thankfully so I’ve proven I can do it. I just need to be more consistent. I did another couple of certifications that I finished up in early June and my weight did go slightly up like 2 to 3 pounds versus the almost 14, but I corrected it after the fact. If I was able to prevent it from going up in the first place like I did the first time around, I would consider that a win. I feel like I’m always reacting. I’m not able to prevent anything. To me that’s not sustainable long-term. I want to set it and forget it within a 3 to 7 pound range before I have to correct.

But is that even the best approach to take?

I started joining meetup groups that were about hiking or just being more physically active, to guard against that as well. Most of my friends are not physically active and prefer to spend the day and night inside which there’s nothing wrong with that but when I do a lot of that my weight goes up so if I want to prevent that I either have to be physically active on my own or find groups that engage in that. For the most part the second time around since last May, I’ve had to do all of this on my own. I had no one with me on my journey. I suspect many other people that I’ve gone through this have had the same experience. By contrast the first time around in 2017 I had a friend with me in my weight loss efforts and it was a lot easier. Achieving my target weight inspired that same friend to begin their weight loss journey again. Or they told me so anyway who knows if that was what really inspired them. It felt gratifying as they were my original source of inspiration the first time around and they got further than me until a couple of months ago before I achieved my goal.

I also have to be mindful of my caloric intake versus my activity level and make the necessary adjustments as well which I failed to do last time. At the end of the day it’s not on anyone else but me. It’s just a lot easier when I’m around people that have the same goals and targets as me.

Also until I lost the weight for a long time. I just sort accepted that’s part of who I was. A large person. I had been overweight and obese since the age of 11 sometime around 1997 or 1998 so being the fat person was almost a part of my identity. Until 2017, and until last year I tried and failed so many times to lose the weight as it would always come back are usually around 250. I still feel kind of weird losing the weight and looking this way. Many of my friends are not used to it. Same with my co workers and family. It’s like a different identity. Not sure if anyone else has gone through this I imagine a few people did maybe. When I look in the mirror, I don’t see myself I see someone else, a stranger. But I shrug my shoulders and move on with my day.

As mentioned before I tried and failed over the years to lose weight and then I found something that worked. I got halfway there back in 2019 until going back to school, which is part of that insufficient coping strategy, caused me to back off as I did not have a adequate response to it at the time. While attending school after my weight started to go up, I was able to get it down by 30 pounds during some particularly stressful periods. I wasn’t able to fully restart the journey in it’s entirety until the day after my midterm exam last year. I went from 331 to 183 from May 17 to sometime in March or April but I was in my 360’s sometime during school in November of 2021. Same range as I started in 2017. I effectively started over alone.

Then I went full throttle, and instead of stopping at 220 or even 210. I went to 190 and got below that. No one thought that I would even make it to 225 and told me to be realistic about getting to maybe 230 or 235.

I didn’t think I could do it at times, and other people in my life didn’t think I could go the distance, but I proved myself and them all wrong. I feel neither good nor bad about that. Just reflecting on it, it brings me no real joy.

Sad thing is, I have almost no happiness about achieving this, other than the fact that I achieved the task, which is a source of happiness, but there’s no satisfaction beyond that. Like I said before I like my targets.

Maintenance. There’s no target nothing to work towards other than not going up or down for me, which is in itself another source of anxiety. with weight loss I could work towards losing weight, which is something that I get.

The overall goal of maintenance as it seems to me, is to be one of consistency, which is something I struggle with intensely. I am good at extreme short and long-term bursts at something. I was obviously able to be consistent on my weight loss journey once I got below a certain amount of pounds or I wouldn’t get to where I was now, but that was because I had something in front of me to work towards. Right now I feel like I have something to work against and I think that is the critical difference.

I need a target I need an objective those are things I understand.

So the best I can think is monthly or weekly caloric objectives as well as monthly and weekly activity level physical activities such as time
walking, doing aerobics, etc. and varied intensity.

I acknowledge that my approach is not the best one, or even a good one which is why I seek input from other sources.

It got me here but the approach that helped me to lose the weight is not going to keep me from getting it back. Especially if that’s when all my free time is going towards prevention or correction. Eventually I’m going to get tired and something is going to slip. It already has a few times. I have everything corrected again for the moment but for how long?

Once I have more of a set schedule, I think much of my anxiety will dissipate until then I’m going to use the techniques I mentioned earlier to increase aerobic activity to 3 to 4 times a day, and just be mindful but not obsessive about intake.

I tend to seesaw between two extremes, and I really think the crux of maintenance for me is finding balance and not obsessing over a number on the scale. Setting targets and meeting them are part of who I am. I am a task oriented person and that’s never going to change so me getting rid of that is not an option.

Using my fondness for meeting targets and objectives in the maintenance journey seems to me the only way forward, but maybe there’s something else I haven’t seen?

I really hope there is something else. Another way.

cmriverside

What you said is sensibly articulated.

I'm going to reiterate what I mentioned on page one.

Hormones are all out of whack in that first year post-weight-loss. It's just a fact.

Keep working at it, and I think Time will be the best solution. You know how much to eat and how to log food, and if you don't panic and stop doing the basics like stepping on the body weight scale and getting a little exercise (it doesn't have to be a huge Social Event that takes three hours, just start walking as much as you can in short time chunks every day) - it will all be okay.

Step on the scale, log food. Adjust at five pound changes, don't let it become 14.

AnnPT77

IronAndrew wrote: »

You are not wrong. My anxiety and response to it plays a critical role to be sure.

In the event that my weight went up again, as it did I wanted to address it as soon as possible to correct it.

Prior to my weight going up it actually went down slowly towards 183 over time. That was without any periods of stress.

While anxiety and an inadequate coping strategy is a part of my issue I think that there’s also something else causing my weight fluctuations as well. I’m trying to figure out what that other factor is.

I think I may've said this upthread, and I know I'm speculating here (not knowing you well personally), but I still feel as if you're having the absolutely normal routine weight fluctuations we all experience (mostly water weight and digestive contents weirdness), but reacting to them as if they were entirely body fat changes requiring quick correction. I may be wrong.

Generally, a big change in weight over a day or few - without a commensurate big increase in eating or big reduction in activity over a similar time period - isn't fat. With even remotely consistent habits, fat changes tend to be a slow-creep kind of thing, that sneak in in the background behind the more dramatic swings that are water/waste.

Rather than trying to find an exact amount of calories to eat per day, I’d rather go for an average per week, which I think is more sustainable long-term, as well as an average amount of time exercise, correct instead of per day, which again I think, is more sustainable prior to that I was focusing on the daily activity and caloric level which, of course is going to var from day to day.

Averages can work. Even a week isn't a sacred limitation, though. (But I do understand that you seem to like things to be more structured and measurable.)

An argument could be made it’s going to vary from week to week and maybe I should focus on a monthly caloric and a monthly activity level too. Another argument could be made that I’m obsessing over this too much. I like meeting targets it’s part of who I am walking towards that lessens, my anxiety amongst other things. I need targets to work towards.

Is it possible that the very things that worked for me to lose the weight are not going to work for me to stay at maintenance? Maintenance feels like a completely different game than weight loss was. Probably because it is.

It's possible. For myself, I focused during loss on finding habits I thought I could keep nearly on autopilot long term to keep at a healthy weight. It's possible to do that later, but I found it a bit easier to do with the moderate calorie deficit to cushion the effect of any failed experiments with candidate habits.

The stress didn’t stop at work during my calorie burn phase to lose those 14 pounds the past 11 days I just turned towards exercise and other things to cope with my stress, such as use of aromatherapy, hot showers, meditation which I have done before which includes deep breathing, as well as mindfulness techniques. I put my hobbies on the back burner for a while, though, which are more on the creative side, which I’ll be using again, hopefully as a way to cope with stress which up to this point has mostly served as a creative outlet for me.

Prior to losing the weight and during losing the weight, I’ve realized that work, going back to school and my certification journey which I finished back in February and working towards other things in my career has been my life since late 2017. I’ve pretty much suspended the majority of my hobbies for a very long time doing that until school ended getting to do the hiking, taught me other parts of myself that I think are good not just for losing weight for maintaining a healthy lifestyle but for coping with stress. The challenge has been in able to keep things in balance when things get tough although when I was studying for my certification and getting the extra hours in over half a year at work before I could take the exam and I was able to keep my weight loss on a downward trend thankfully so I’ve proven I can do it. I just need to be more consistent. I did another couple of certifications that I finished up in early June and my weight did go slightly up like 2 to 3 pounds versus the almost 14, but I corrected it after the fact. If I was able to prevent it from going up in the first place like I did the first time around, I would consider that a win. I feel like I’m always reacting. I’m not able to prevent anything. To me that’s not sustainable long-term. I want to set it and forget it within a 3 to 7 pound range before I have to correct.

But is that even the best approach to take?

I think a range is good, but - because it's normal for body weight to fluctuate randomly from one day to the next - I feel like it's more realistic to think of an action plan that is alert for a creep upward of scale weight, then a period of a couple/few days above the high end, before reacting. But maybe that's just me.

Higher vigilance = more stress, for me.

I started joining meetup groups that were about hiking or just being more physically active, to guard against that as well. Most of my friends are not physically active and prefer to spend the day and night inside which there’s nothing wrong with that but when I do a lot of that my weight goes up so if I want to prevent that I either have to be physically active on my own or find groups that engage in that. For the most part the second time around since last May, I’ve had to do all of this on my own. I had no one with me on my journey. I suspect many other people that I’ve gone through this have had the same experience. By contrast the first time around in 2017 I had a friend with me in my weight loss efforts and it was a lot easier. Achieving my target weight inspired that same friend to begin their weight loss journey again. Or they told me so anyway who knows if that was what really inspired them. It felt gratifying as they were my original source of inspiration the first time around and they got further than me until a couple of months ago before I achieved my goal.

I also have to be mindful of my caloric intake versus my activity level and make the necessary adjustments as well which I failed to do last time. At the end of the day it’s not on anyone else but me. It’s just a lot easier when I’m around people that have the same goals and targets as me.

Also until I lost the weight for a long time. I just sort accepted that’s part of who I was. A large person. I had been overweight and obese since the age of 11 sometime around 1997 or 1998 so being the fat person was almost a part of my identity. Until 2017, and until last year I tried and failed so many times to lose the weight as it would always come back are usually around 250. I still feel kind of weird losing the weight and looking this way. Many of my friends are not used to it. Same with my co workers and family. It’s like a different identity. Not sure if anyone else has gone through this I imagine a few people did maybe. When I look in the mirror, I don’t see myself I see someone else, a stranger. But I shrug my shoulders and move on with my day.

This is normal, too: I found that my friends/family were kind of weird about my weight loss at first. But after some months to a year or so, as I stayed around the same weight, they got used to the new me, and stopped reacting to it, started taking me-as-me for granted at the new weight.

Ditto for self image. It was quite frequent for me during the first months to a year or so to catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror, or something like that, and not realize it was me; or to turn sideways to fit through a small space as fatter me would've needed to do, even though it was no longer necessary. (Got some odd reactions to that from people around me, too. )

As mentioned before I tried and failed over the years to lose weight and then I found something that worked. I got halfway there back in 2019 until going back to school, which is part of that insufficient coping strategy, caused me to back off as I did not have a adequate response to it at the time. While attending school after my weight started to go up, I was able to get it down by 30 pounds during some particularly stressful periods. I wasn’t able to fully restart the journey in it’s entirety until the day after my midterm exam last year. I went from 331 to 183 from May 17 to sometime in March or April but I was in my 360’s sometime during school in November of 2021. Same range as I started in 2017. I effectively started over alone.

Then I went full throttle, and instead of stopping at 220 or even 210. I went to 190 and got below that. No one thought that I would even make it to 225 and told me to be realistic about getting to maybe 230 or 235.

I didn’t think I could do it at times, and other people in my life didn’t think I could go the distance, but I proved myself and them all wrong. I feel neither good nor bad about that. Just reflecting on it, it brings me no real joy.

Sad thing is, I have almost no happiness about achieving this, other than the fact that I achieved the task, which is a source of happiness, but there’s no satisfaction beyond that. Like I said before I like my targets.

Maintenance. There’s no target nothing to work towards other than not going up or down for me, which is in itself another source of anxiety. with weight loss I could work towards losing weight, which is something that I get.

The overall goal of maintenance as it seems to me, is to be one of consistency, which is something I struggle with intensely. I am good at extreme short and long-term bursts at something. I was obviously able to be consistent on my weight loss journey once I got below a certain amount of pounds or I wouldn’t get to where I was now, but that was because I had something in front of me to work towards. Right now I feel like I have something to work against and I think that is the critical difference.

I need a target I need an objective those are things I understand.

I stink at conscious consistency, but can use bursts of motivation to find relatively-easy repeatable new habits, and practice them until they become pretty automatic most of the time . . . and most of the time is good enough, generally. I used to have routine habits when I was fat - habits I didn't think about much - and now I have different habits.

As far as targets or objectives, I feel like you're maybe looking for things that are quantifiable, numeric, measurable. I grant that averaging around X calories intake and Y exercise sessions of Z length can be that, and maybe even staying within a weight range can be. But some goals are possibly more process oriented (weigh daily or log every day or things like that), and maybe those loom larger in maintenance. Some people here say they set athletic performance goals in maintenance, too, like improving running pace or weight lifted or something like that.

So the best I can think is monthly or weekly caloric objectives as well as monthly and weekly activity level physical activities such as time
walking, doing aerobics, etc. and varied intensity.

I acknowledge that my approach is not the best one, or even a good one which is why I seek input from other sources.

It got me here but the approach that helped me to lose the weight is not going to keep me from getting it back. Especially if that’s when all my free time is going towards prevention or correction. Eventually I’m going to get tired and something is going to slip. It already has a few times. I have everything corrected again for the moment but for how long?

Once I have more of a set schedule, I think much of my anxiety will dissipate until then I’m going to use the techniques I mentioned earlier to increase aerobic activity to 3 to 4 times a day, and just be mindful but not obsessive about intake.

Short slips don't matter in the big picture. (I know "short" and "big" are squishily defined, in that sentence.) The longer you're in maintenance, I'd bet that your confidence in that idea can increase, especially if you can kind of foster an impulse in that direction (by working with averages, as one example, say).

I'd strongly encourage you not to let exercising to "make up for" eating be a big factor, because of the risk of starting to think of exercise as a punishment for over-eating. That's a slippery slope toward a bad relationship with both exercise and food. Food is not a sin. We don't expiate it via exercise. Over-exercising steals balance from overall life, too.

Slightly better might be a planning kind of approach, like if you can predict you have a bigger eating social event or something coming up, maybe eat a little less in the days leading up to it, or fit in a bit more movement, something like that . . . when possible, maybe psychologically position it as empowering yourself to enjoy some special indulgence at a certain point, rather than "making up for" something.

Your impulse to seek balance in your life is IMO an even better way to look at things: Balancing happy/practical exercise with reasonable average calorie intake, allowing enough time and energy for stress-management activities, creativity for its own sake, some social connections, and all the things that go into having a well-rounded life. I'm not saying that's easy . . . but that's a stretch objective or goal of a non-numeric sort, maybe?

I tend to seesaw between two extremes, and I really think the crux of maintenance for me is finding balance and not obsessing over a number on the scale. Setting targets and meeting them are part of who I am. I am a task oriented person and that’s never going to change so me getting rid of that is not an option.

Using my fondness for meeting targets and objectives in the maintenance journey seems to me the only way forward, but maybe there’s something else I haven’t seen?

I really hope there is something else. Another way.

I have confidence that you can work this out. It can be gradual. Don't be too hard on yourself, eh? This - loss and maintenance - is a big life change. You've done super well so far. You can continue to do well. It will take some experimenting, some learning, analysis, adjustment . . . and that's OK

Best wishes!

IronAndrew

Thought I'd check in. Weight is still fluctuating some but not with as many large swings up and down as in the past. I might finally have this maintenance thing figured out!

I've definitely built a bit more muscle too (especially in the legs) so I'm sure that may have played a part in past variances in weigh-ins.

For now I'm going by how my clothes feel and where my belt notches around my waist. If I start to have an issue with that I then step on the scale and re-evaluate. The constant weighing from before and the constant over correction was not sustainable long-term. I've also allowed myself a wider latitude of weight range. I find it evens out on its own now. And if it doesn't then I take action but I haven't had to do this in some time now.

This approach in contrast may not be perfect or what I originally had in mind but it's something I can do that works for my needs.

After a few more months once I get other non physical health things better balanced I'm going to look into other fitness goals of mine. This includes weight lifting, running, and maybe even mountain climbing. Fun times ahead.

AnnPT77

@IronAndrew, I'm so glad to here your weight is settling into an acceptable range, and that you're beginning to feel more calm and confident about maintenance. That's excellent. I know it's hard at first, but it's good that you're getting more relaxed about it (in a good way, i.e., not inattentive or uncaring). Good show!