losing weight Is easy, maintenance is hard!!

How old are you? For me, I'm 35 years old, which means I have around 40+ years of maintenance ahead of me. Weight loss is great because it's for a relatively small amount of time and you're motivated by a moving scale, smaller clothes, compliments etc etc. Now in maintenance that all stops and what I have to look forward to is over 40 years of a lot of mundane, day in, day out, same old, same old.

In a nutshell maintenance is boring and it's very easy to slip back into old habits, lose focus and get 'lazy'. Can you really wrap your mind around keeping a daily food diary for 40 more years? (I sure can't lol). Counting calories every day, for the rest of our hopefully long lives? See how easy it is to lose the motivation to keep at it? I've only been maintaining for about a year and I already see how easy it would be to slide back into old habits. And that's not factoring in other things like people who struggle with emotional eating, binge eating issues etc etc.

There's a 95% failure rate with long time weight loss success. Only 5% of us here will actually succeed at this whole thing. Pretty depressing to think about when you look at how much the odds are stacked against us

bump....(Just want to be able to find this thread later when I have time to read and respond.)

I think it all begins with how you approach weight loss. If you approach it as a means to an end, you are probably going to put the weight back on. You have to recognize that you will need to keep doing what you have been doing, making adjustments along the way to fit your new goals. That is why people with only a little weight to lose are often encouraged to lower their expectations on weight loss. Ideally, I think people need to re-evaluate their goals often and make incremental adjustments along the way. I also think it is helpful to establish a mind set that exercise is about health and not weight loss. you should not use exercise as a reason to eat more food. Gaining a true understanding of all of these little relationships between your mind and body are very key.

The vast majority of people stop logging when they go into maintenance. It can really get you in trouble. Some people can maintain that way, but many can't. I believe I'm in the "can't" group. I'll likely need to log for the rest of my life. Luckily, I've totally gotten used to it after almost 3 years here.

Maintaining is easy...not that losing was particularly hard, but it was tedious and annoying...but maintaining has been easy for me, I've been doing it for 8 months without logging with no problem. Here are some of the issues that I've seen from people I know personally and people I know on my FL and MFP in general....

- Failure to understand that there is no finish line...they aren't "done" just because they've reached some arbitrary weight on the scale...but that's how they see it. They're "done" with all of this nutrition and fitness stuff...time to get back to "normal". Long term success is predicated on understanding that health, nutrition, and fitness are lifetime endeavors...you are never "done"

- Unsustainable dieting practices...I call it deprivation dieting. People think that to lose weight they have to stay away from this or that or cut out this or that and in some cases, backing away from certain "triggers" is necessary...but by and large, cutting everything "good" out of ones diet is a recipe for disaster down the line because you never learn moderation and portion control. You never learn how to incorporate those not so nutritious goodies into an otherwise overwhelmingly nutritious diet. The result is that when people cross that finish line and pronounce themselves "done" they go back to eating the same old **** they used to eat. The only difference between losing weight and maintaining weight from a dietary standpoint should be a few hundred calories, what you're eating most of the time really shouldn't change at all.

- Failure to understand that the benefits of exercise reach well beyond calorie burn and losing weight. Weight control is a wonderful bi-product of exercise, but there are so many other benefits...but people tend to look at exercise as a chore that needs to be performed to lose weight...they never address any actual and independent fitness goals. They cross that finish line and pronounce themselves "done" and stop getting their fitness on. They've failed to understand that you use your diet for weight control; exercise for fitness. I exercise the exact same way now as I did when I was losing...sure, I mix up the routines and what not, but it's still 3x weekly in the weight room and 3-4x weekly of moderate cardiovascular activity for 45-60 minutes...right now it happens to be mostly on my bicycle.

TL/DR...basically people fail to realize that there is no finish line...reaching "goal" weight is only the first step of many in a lifetime of health, nutrition, and fitness.

How old are you? For me, I'm 35 years old, which means I have around 40+ years of maintenance ahead of me. Weight loss is great because it's for a relatively small amount of time and you're motivated by a moving scale, smaller clothes, compliments etc etc. Now in maintenance that all stops and what I have to look forward to is over 40 years of a lot of mundane, day in, day out, same old, same old.

In a nutshell maintenance is boring and it's very easy to slip back into old habits, lose focus and get 'lazy'. Can you really wrap your mind around keeping a daily food diary for 40 more years? (I sure can't lol). Counting calories every day, for the rest of our hopefully long lives? See how easy it is to lose the motivation to keep at it? I've only been maintaining for about a year and I already see how easy it would be to slide back into old habits. And that's not factoring in other things like people who struggle with emotional eating, binge eating issues etc etc.

There's a 95% failure rate with long time weight loss success. Only 5% of us here will actually succeed at this whole thing. Pretty depressing to think about when you look at how much the odds are stacked against us

I've never looked at it that way before. you are right, it would get boring b/c there would be nothing to look forward to. I guess I could maybe make different goals of maybe exercising longer or harder or lifting or doing other things to keep from getting bored and tired of the same old ways. I'm only 29 so theres a lot of years left of me logging also

Setting different goals is basically mandatory. Most of my goals these days revolve around my fitness. And I basically have seasons...right now I'm just starting to train for the Santa Fe Century in May...it is a 100 mile bike ride through the mountains and mesas around Santa Fe...it is grueling...to train for this, I have to do certain things from a fitness standpoint. I have to push myself to go a little further and a little faster each week on my bike...I have to ride hills, etc. It's not good enough right now to just go out for a joy ride. Instead of looking at a scale, I'm looking at my stop watch and trying to set PRs for distance and time.

I will do that in mid May and then start training for my sprint triathlon in August...I will already have a ton of miles under my belt on my bike so my focus will have to switch from long miles on the bike to 5Ks and swimming and getting out and doing more sprint cycling for 12-15 miles rather than slow paced endurance cycling. Again, my goals are going to be revolving around improving my times for all of these things as I train...not some arbitrary number on the scale.

The fall brings about cyclocross season so I'll be back on my bike almost exclusively doing trail sprints and various cyclocross courses. I missed this past season with an injury so I'm looking forward to getting out there this coming fall. Cyclocross is a very intense and competitive cycling sport so again...goals are about improving here, not some number on the scale.

I weight train all year long to improve my strength and the various seasons above dictate how I lift...right now I'm following a variation of Wendler's 5/3/1 program called 8/6/3...I've found that it works better for all around athletic performance and fitness vs the 5/3/1 format which is basically training like a power lifter. With the 8/6/3 format I also throw in some Oly lifts for improved explosiveness.

In the summer when I'm doing my triathlon stuff, I will only lift 2 days per week due to the volume of other activity I have to do training wise. I also work in the 12 rep range with much lower weight and keep it pretty basic with compound lifts and some body weight work.

In the fall when I start cyclocross I will revert back to that 8/6/3 format above and pretty much follow that all the way through the fall and winter. I kind of take a step back on volume from mid November through mid January...I primarily lift and do some moderate cycling, walking, whatever but I'm not really training for anything...just reflect on the year that has passed and look to new goals for the coming year and how to go about accomplishing those goals.

I'm one for whom maintenance has been quite difficult, and definitely more difficult than the losing phase, so I;ll share some of my thoughts on it.

-when you're trying to lose weight, you have that constant momentum of losing pounds. Seeing changes on the scale weekly, sometimes even day by day, seeing numbers you maybe haven't seen before as an adult (in my case) fitting into smaller clothes than you ever have as an adult, seeing your body change, having people comment on the change and compliment you. You're always striving for the next little goal of x lbs lost, or a certain dress size. If you've always been overweight, you might find that you can do things you've never been able to do before. It's exciting and motivating. Ok, it's boring a lot of the time, but periodically you get that visual feedback of tangible progress made, and that makes it so much easier to keep going.

Once you're maintaining, you're staying the same. Your goal is to stay the same, and that's really hard. It's the same in any sphere of life, it's natural to want to get better and see progress/improvement. If you're not seeing progress, but striving to stay the same, it's easy to get complacent and let things slip. Which is why I agree that setting new goals is essential. You have to get into fitness for reasons other than burning calories or losing weight. You have to want it for itself, and setting goals like running in a race, or getting faster, lifting heavier, learning a new dance step or yoga position, or getting the next karate belt or whatever... all that stuff helps keep you going. Realising the importance of diet and fitness for overall health, and caring about it - that helps a lot too. That's the kind of motivation that sticks around a bit longer.



-This doesn't apply to everyone, but for those of us who have always been overweight and got their because of a messed up relationship with food, that stuff is really hard to change and doesn't go away just because you've lost the weight. I've been maintaining for over a year and I still want to eat more than I should, and I still have a reflex to turn to food when I'm upset or depressed. I've got a lot, lot better at dealing with that, but I still fight it all the time. If you have issues with food, you really have to work on that stuff from the beginning, and accept that you may still need to work on it once the weight is gone. If you've never been a healthy weight, you don't have years of healthy eating habits to fall back on, and it can take a long time to get comfortable with eating what your body needs.


-Body image can be an issue too. It can be really weird losing a significant amount of weight and a lot of people struggle with accepting what their body is like. As you're losing weight, you still have the promise of what's to come. I used to think things like "well, I look a lot better than I did, but imagine how much better still I'll look in another 10 lbs". Once you're at your goal weight, you kind of have to accept that that's how you're going to look. Of course, you can still change if you decide to lose a bit more, and you can change a bit through body recomposition, but in general it's a lot slower and less noticeable. At some point you have to get used to the way you look, and accept that. For some people that can be hard, and I've heard of people even intentionally gaining some of the weight back because they're so uncomfortable. Then some also have issues with being noticed more, or people finding them attractive which can open a whole other can of worms. So yeah - body image can throw another spanner in the works.



I think the biggest issue for most is that people think you go on a diet and exercise your socks off to lose a bit of weight, and then you're done and can go back to normal. Obviously, it doesn't work like that. You have to create a lifestyle that supports your body being at a healthy weight, and stick with that lifestyle. I think people on MFP generally "get it" more than elsewhere, but everyone I know in real life who is trying to lose weight is well and truly "on a diet", following a plan, cutting out "bad" foods and killing themselves doing hours of exercise that they will probably only sustain for a few weeks. And to be honest, even though I feel I did everything "right" in that regard (imo anyway - modest calorie deficit, still ate all the foods I like, do exercise I enjoy, took diet breaks etc,) I still get times when I get tired of counting calories, tired of having to watch what I eat and eat moderately, so I can understand why people get bored of it all and end up going back to their old ways.



tl;dr: the people who can't maintain are either the ones with start with a messed up relationship with food and don't manage to address that, or they're the ones that temporarily go "on a diet" and make restrictive changes that they can't sustain long-term.

I haven't found it hard, but I didn't find losing weight hard either. It's the same thing - like brushing your teeth. Boring, but necessary.

I'm of the opposite view - losing weight is hard and maintaining is easy!

For me both phases were/are very similar and the only real difference is that at maintenance I can eat more, be more relaxed with my logging, fit in social events easier, get better results from my training and don't have to go shopping for new clothes.

Think the difference in outlook frequently goes back to how people lost their weight. I didn't exclude anything and didn't use the number on the scale as the only indicator of progress.

This

For me, just a guess... If I'm losing weight, it's not a big deal if I have a day off and I'm over my goal... I'll still be at a deficit overall, or maintain. If I do that when maintaining... I'll gain weight.

im finding it to be opposite. i think losing was a *****, and maintaining isnt too bad, as long as when you were losing, you taught yourself how to eat like a normal person instead of like cattle grazing all day.

I like that you allow yourself a day per week to splurge, do you still track on those days? I don't want to deprive myself, and I do see that my calories to maintain would be more than I get now to lose weight so I'm looking forward to that. I can see how the not losing weekly would be hard to adjust to. thanks for your feedback!

I will try. Or sometimes I'll log what I do know (if I make a 500 calorie breakfast) and then estimate something later (like if I go out to eat and I have a burger and fries I'll just throw a number on there and call it a day. Like 1500 calories.) And because I don't track stuff like sugar, salt, etc. it doesn't matter to me I only track calories. When I went to an Oktoberfest thing I ended up just putting 4,500 calories or whatever based on the day. Ha!