Those now with at maintenance, have you beaten your set point.

I guess I don't meet the criteria... I had lap band and lost 100 lbs about ten years ago. I kept it off - and have lost another 57 lbs in the last year. Now, please keep in mind - even with the most drastic surgery - you still have to eat right and exercise... you still have to follow the laws of physics - which means CI cannot exceed CO if you are going to lose weight. Surgery is no more a "magic pill" than anything else - it's just a tool to make it easier to do the whole CICO thing.

How I did it? I lost the first 100 doing Low Carb... I lost another few pounds pushing my husband in a wheelchair - and I lost the last 50 on MFP by logging and weighing, and doing daily exercise. No specialty eating plan, this time - just eating like a "normal" weight person would - 2 tacos instead of four... 2 slices of pizza instead of half the pie. I added some weight training in the last few months and that has had some great results, also.

So, anything that is a "diet" implies you will some day "go off" of the diet - and that's when the yo yo thing happens... what you need to do is just change the way that you eat - permanently.

Do what works for you - for the long haul. IF you think you can eat fat free mayonnaise for the rest of your life - then go for it. Otherwise, learn to eat less real mayo, now... If you can live the rest of your life without a dinner roll, then do the low carb thing... just figure out what you can live with, and do it. It will take some time and some experimentation to figure out what really works for you.

Will you focus on less calorie intake? Or will you focus on burning more calories with exercise? Are you going to use the traditional food pyramid? Or go with Low Carb, or High Protein, or whatever? Are you going to eat three meals a day with snacks? Or do some form of Intermittent fasting? There are a hundred different ways - and none of them is any less valid than the next IF it works for you. The only hard rule is, you have to have less calories in than you use every day. After a while, you will find out what you consider to be worth a big calorie hit - and what you don't. That discovery might surprise you.

One thing that helps with the "changing the way that you eat forever" plan is to not try to go too fast. Eating 1200 calories a day requires some serious sacrifice... and even with exercise calories, it just doesn't get you a lot of good stuff... but, if you are only going for 1 lb. a week - it's a little easier. Once you find that formula that works for you, it becomes nearly effortless...

Lastly - just be aware that, even if you are going slow and even if you have found the formula that works for you - there will be those days when you just have to eat that Hershey bar. Don't beat yourself up too much - just get back on plan as soon as you can and keep on trucking.

Good Luck.

I suspect you'll find that most here regard the body set point as a myth.

It exists to this extent: If we eat all the foods that give us pleasure, and eat them until sated, we will almost always eat more calories than we expend in our daily activities unless we are very very active. This will cause us to put on weight. At some point, we will weigh enough that our daily calorie expenditure, which increases with body weight, reaches equilibrium with our food intake. That's just biochemistry and thermodynamics. But to regard this as some kind of preferred state which our body is striving to achieve is, I think, a mistake. It's a problem we have in a prosperous society because the amount of food we have available is, for all intents and purposes, unlimited, and we can always eat to satiety. This is highly anomalous in human history and among human societies. There is no "set point" in evidence in more typical societies, where food scarcity is the norm.

I know this: If I take care for the amount of food I eat and stay active, I lose weight if I'm too heavy and maintain a healthy weight if I am not. If I take no care for the amount of food I eat and become sedentary, I gain weight up to a certain maximum. That I do not go over, or very much over, a certain maximum is due to the facts that I have amusements other than eating, that my tastes in food are simple, that I do not eat for emotional reasons, and that I engage in a certain minimum of physical activity even when generally sedentary. So I have natural limits on the number of excess calories I'll habitually consume even when many more than that are available.

But that's all. My body doesn't have a "set point" at 210 lbs that it's somehow striving to spring back to now that I'm at 175. That's simply where I end up if I pay no attention to how much I eat, and if I get no more regular exercise than walking from my car to my desk and back again every workday.

We succeed by taking responsibility for our consumption and activity, without looking to cruel fate dooming us to being forever overweight by having imposed an undesirable body set point upon us, as if we have no control over how much we eat and how much we move.

You have one very useful and important insight: This is about a lifestyle change, not a short-term sprint to being skinny. My approach is this: I eat all the foods I love so that I don't feel deprived. I just eat less of them. I eat them mindfully, so I enjoy them to the fullest in the amounts of them which I allow to myself. There's no reason for weight loss to be unpleasant or painful. That is, I think, why so many successful dieters yo-yo. They diet in such a way that they feel deprived. When they reach their goal, all restraint is released and they dive back into their own habits, having been unsuccessful in developing new ones because those they were trying to develop were so unpleasant. Make your new eating habits pleasant. We are naturally built to enjoy eating. Why fight it? Just don't enjoy it to excess.

surreychic wrote: »

... stopping food giving them that intense reward feeling, especially following weight loss is tough. I wonder if it's possible to break trough..

You don't "break through" that and there's no way to stop it. You use it.

The increased reward from food can affect you one of two ways. Either it makes you eat more (which is what the body wants) - OR it can make you happier with less of something. When I'm in a deficit, I can get as much joy from a single chocolate as I previously could from a whole tray. You just have to learn to live with the tension of wanting more, and not allow yourself to use it as an excuse to give up.

Edit: I know this is paradoxical, but that is the nature of pleasure. The pursuit of it, the longing, is often better than the thing itself.

As stated above, I don't believe in a set point. In my personal opinion, it's just another excuse as to why someone isn't losing weight. I started losing weight at the end of June 2015. I'm 5'3". I went from 139 pounds to 107 pounds. I am now between 111 and 112 pounds; not because my body made me gain, but because I chose to put on a few pounds.

For me, this wasn't just about making a scale shift; it was a lifestyle change. I went from a person who loafed around depressed and was often to lazy to walk up the block to someone that's happy about life, exercises daily, is fit and happily maintains her weight on ~2200 to 2500 calories daily. I'll take the person I am now any day, even if one day my body decides to have me gain a few pounds. However, I'm fairly certain that will not happen.

The set point issue is due to habits. Yeah, I'm naturally going to keep gaining weight if I don't keep myself on track all the time - that's just how it works.

There are no set points. I think most people are just looking for an excuse to fail / or justify why they failed. I maintain my weight because I chose to do this as a lifestyle change, not a quick-fix diet solution.

My view of "set point" is that it is what you will weigh if you just follow your normal habits and eat whatever you want. At some point, the availability of food combined with our activity level will reach a state of equilibrium. If a person changes their habits so that they are more active and they reduce the availability of food calories, that state of equilibrium will be a lower weight. If they are inactive and choose foods that are easy to prepare and high in calories, the state of equilibrium will be a higher weight.

SezxyStef wrote: »

TimothyFish wrote: »

My view of "set point" is that it is what you will weigh if you just follow your normal habits and eat whatever you want. At some point, the availability of food combined with our activity level will reach a state of equilibrium. If a person changes their habits so that they are more active and they reduce the availability of food calories, that state of equilibrium will be a lower weight. If they are inactive and choose foods that are easy to prepare and high in calories, the state of equilibrium will be a higher weight.

if this is the case my set point is continually changing as I will if I am not careful eat and gain consistently and possibly not stop...

Exactly. It's not a set point that makes someone weigh a certain amount, it's their eating habits. One can't expect to maintain a lower weight unless they eat the calories to match their TDEE. The problem is that for people who treat weight loss as being all about a number on the scale, they go back to making unwise food choices the minute they hit their goal weight thinking that they won't gain but they do. Then they'll buy into excuse theories like set point and assume they just can't stay a certain weight. Then you'll have people who say "Well her set point must be lower than mine because we're the same height and eat the same but she's SO skinny!" These people fail to take TDEE into account.