How to accept that this will be a life-long effort?

I'm 20lbs short of maintenance, but our youngest son was visiting yesterday, so I asked him how he kept his weight off. He was about 350 in his senior high school year, I didn't ask how much he weighs now but he wears size medium clothes & he's fit. He works out. He said after he lost weight, he became more active because it felt good & he was able to do it. He played racquetball quite a bit, enjoys bike riding & generally likes being active. He even has an outdoor job. He is now 33. & hasn't gained any back. He likes to eat too but doesn't eat "junk" or oily food, he does most of the cooking for himself, wife & little girl. When we go there to eat, he usually grills some kind of meat & grills veggies with it. thought I'd share. He never counted calories, just started eating different & exercising when he started.

I'm not someone who had a long weight loss journey and has "loosely maintained" for years--the biggest my range has ever been has been 15 lbs, but normally I have a range of half that (low 140s to mid 130s is typical for me.) Which is to say, sometimes my clothes are tight, sometimes they are loose, usually they fit right, but they are the same size and I only get rid of them when they are out of style, not because I've outgrown them.

These little dips and leaps are really what "maintenance" is over a lifetime. Because vacations happen and you get stressed about work and stop tracking for a few days or you underestimate how many calories are in that salad that you have been ordering every day since it's just SO good...and then what happens is you have a few too many high weigh ins in a row, and then you're back on. You draw a line in the sand (141 is my line) and if you see a certain number, that's IT. There will be no more of that goofing around, the gloves are on, the food scale is out, let's DO THIS.

Notice that I am a member here, have several food/diet apps on my phone, belong to one gym and three fitness studios, subscribe to Runner's World and have a separate dresser in my room that's just for workout clothes. Loss/gain/tracking is part of my life. And while it's never really over, I think feeling good in my own skin makes the effort worth it.

Evamutt wrote: »

I'm 20lbs short of maintenance, but our youngest son was visiting yesterday, so I asked him how he kept his weight off. He was about 350 in his senior high school year, I didn't ask how much he weighs now but he wears size medium clothes & he's fit. He works out. He said after he lost weight, he became more active because it felt good & he was able to do it. He played racquetball quite a bit, enjoys bike riding & generally likes being active. He even has an outdoor job. He is now 33. & hasn't gained any back. He likes to eat too but doesn't eat "junk" or oily food, he does most of the cooking for himself, wife & little girl. When we go there to eat, he usually grills some kind of meat & grills veggies with it. thought I'd share. He never counted calories, just started eating different & exercising when he started.

Yeah that works for some people. For others like me who would have no problem skipping the entree to go straight to dessert, it's much harder, honestly.

I figure its like brushing my teeth. if I want to have teeth in a few years, I need to do it, even though it's really tedious and time-consuming. Same thing with watching my food and activity levels.

I lost 65 lbs when I was 19, but I did it in a very unhealthy manner. I regained healthy habits with a good deal of effort, but I also regained weight, particularly when health problems led to a significant reduction in activity. This was a profound mistake, but understandable because of fear of re-visiting the bad experiences I had surrounding my earlier weight loss including disordered eating.

Shockingly, I let things get very out of control over the next several years, but have since lost all the regained weight (and am almost 10 lbs lighter than I was at my lightest before to my utter amazement) without any disordered eating or obsessive exercise.

I intend on maintaining this weight, no matter what, because now my future well-being depends critically on it (due to the aforementioned health problems). I can live with the annoyance of watching my net calories because its FAR less annoying than the consequences of being overweight for me. Like brushing my teeth; which is far less annoying than being toothless.

Addendum: You have given no insight into what your height and weight are, or body fat percentage you are trying to maintain. Whether these are reasonable given the effort you need to put in may be an issue.

You don't have to be perfect to maintain, just pretty darn good. The longer I'm at it (about 9 months) the easier it gets. But when I hit the top end of my range, I buckle down FAST!