Starting Over...Again

No you are not alone but i dunno know if knowing that is going to help you that much. It might make you feel a bit better though.

So yes i've had my years of losing and regaining but now i'm off that cycle and am staying in maintenance forever.

I've learnt a lot from the past few experiences and unlike you and probably most others, i started doing things significanlty differently and that's how come i am now in maintenance two years down the track and finding it all getting easier as i go along and i'm more secure in what i'm doing.

Like you i have certainly failed for the first lot of reasons you gave. I don't have medication issues. Stress is a real issue. You must always deal with stress asap effectively. And in the meantime, i think its my diet rules that allowed me go through some period of stress and not fall so far off the wagon that i was back at the beginning again. I only regain a modest amount over a modest period of time. I go to counselling if i'm in strife. It helps me find solutions to the problem at hand. If i don't, i end up depressed and that's a bad place for me to go from every angle.

What i think you need to do is make changes to the way you go about things that will see you through just about anything that comes up. If you have good diet and lifestyle things on the go, you can go slack for a while but bounce back to them quite easily. You see even when i'm binging on peanuts, or peanut butter sandiwches or whatever, i am not going back to what's really bad news for me which is icecream and sweets. Then i regain really fast and fall into a hole, i can't get out of.

first thing you can stop doing is bothering about exercise. Leave it till you are slim and are able. If you do that, then you know you will be able to lose weight and or maintain with or without exercise and it won't throw you when/if you stop for any reason. Sometimes i exericse sometimes i don't. I have completely given up the idea of "having to exercise a lot to lose weight" or even "having to exercise". It's simply not true. Exercise is good for you but interestingly, you don't need to do that much to get the most significant benefit from it. So just let it go and focus on your diet.

You can easily get well inside your healthy weight range without any special exercise beyond your daily life. Of course what you have to do is eat a bit less. I find the easiest way to monitor this is to keep a food diary but counting calories is fine if you like doing that.

So that's the second thing. You need to make your diet varied so that you don't get bored, tasty so that you don't get bored but in my view, you really should limit significantly fast foods and processed foods of any kind and prepare most of your food yoruself. The reason being is that home cooked food is more nutritious and more satisfying per calorie so you will not experience hunger so often. Establish regular meals times and spread your calories fairly even over your day. That's what i do. I like it.

Third thing is don't cut your calories severely. Go for long term steady weightloss. And don't panic about every little fluctuation on the scale. Its going to happen! can't be helped.

Get organised. There's quite a lot to how you manage things in the kitchen, especially if you are working or have a busy life. So you need to work out ways to eat satisfying meals that are quick and easy to prepare or make more involved meals that you can cook up in bulk and store in the freezer so that all you have to do is defrost. For most of my dieting period, i was big into my cooking and shopping. But since then often i am not particularly motivated to cook intersting stuff but by now, i can make healthy satisfying food easily with minimal effort - so long as there's food in the fridge.

The biggest risk to my weight management is maintaining a balanced mind. Stress makes me eat more. So that's when my strict rules about not eating sweets keep me from losing the plot completley. Yes i do eat more and i may regain a little but i also go and try and sort out the problme causing me stress asap so that i can resolve that get back to good eating. I find i don't have to work too hard then to lose what i just gained. Honestly when you are in a good mood its not that hard to eat less. If you keep yourself starved though on 1200 calories when you are very heavy, you are setting yourself up for failure.

Finally, it goes without saying, if you want to lose weight and keep it off forever, you have to change the way you eat, the types of food you eat most of the time. These days i have three types of food i try to keep focussed on. Vegetables are #1. I don't feel good if idon't eat enough vegies and i don't eat enough vegies when i don't feel good. So i try to keep a good stock in my fridge all the time. Tonight i started off with one potato and it became a great japanese style potato salad with other vegies egg and mayonnaise. #2. Protein. I've gone vegan a few months ago from previously being pescatarian. Eating protein at each meal if possible means i will likely eat less carbs which are not as satisfying without protein. #3. Fresh fruit. These are my sweets. I love fruit and i can eat as much as i want though when i was losing, of course i still had to stay in my calories. But fruit means i can live easily without sweets. I do eat sweets but only in low risk situations. I don't buy them for myself. I don't bake them. I try to eat them not so often. The other day though, i had pavlova for morning tea and several biscotti becuase i was a at a friends place and she offered them to me. For most of the two years i've been on this course, i only ate one serving of sweets but now my habits have really settled in and i know i'm safe if sometimes like the other day i have more. But it would be all over again if i went out and bought sweets for myself etc. This christmas we are going to a restaurant. I will have dessert.

So you probably weren't expecting this long spiel. but if you really want to lose this weight and make it long lasting you will try to consider what i've written above. Especially about having a plan to manage those periods life that cause your best laid plans to go awry. Don't give in to stress and let it rule you. Do less. Let stuff go. Seek support.

Losing weight can be fun, enjoyable and quite easy even if long. But this should be a strategy for life you are embarking on, not a trip with a beginning and an end. We all have to retrain ourselves to eat better all the time, then the odd foray into junk or indulgence will have no negative impact.