What are your long term maintenance strategies for the rest of your life?

What have I been through. Thank you for asking. I've been through hail and back. There's a few veterans of dieting on here who understand what keto/IF/paleo/primal/food group elimination diets/food delivery/powders created in a lab and manufactured in plant - chemical sheetstorms can do to you. They can ruin your relationship with food and they can make you lose your hair. Oooo, there's all kinds of side effects from dieting. We haven't got the time. I could go on forever.

But in a nutshell and not the whole bushel, don't start dieting. Don't start none and there won't be none.
Side effects of dieting will get you nowhere good.

Here's the one positive. I see a real shift, not necessarily out there in cyberland but on here. I see folks returning and they are hail bent on not falling back into old habits that got them and me nowhere good. I like it because they're through with being duped. They want the truth.

http://"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWSx0bBiNIs[/url]

I can handle the truth.

Like many others on here, I have been taken advantage of by shysters. Programs and protocols that promised the moon but delivered nothing. If I had a dollar for every dollar I've thrown down the toilet, wasted on multi-cr@p and imaginary miracle weight loss cures, why I'd be dang rich.

Actually, @psychod787 - we are on the same page. The brain will quit fighting so hard against you to immediately eat it all back after 2-3 years. Many dieters think that once they reach their optimum setpoint that they're cured and fixed. Nuh huh.

Those hunger cues and that appetite control center located in the brain will still be on tilt after 3 years.

https://www.anareisdorf.com/single-post/2017/08/23/Why-Intuitive-Eating-is-a-Cop-Out-1


"Over time this has become a popular treatment for people with eating disorders, where I think its quite appropriate. People with anorexia or bulimia do need to learn to trust their hunger/fullness signals again and this can be a great approach for them that removes the obsession over calories and good/bad foods. Although eating disorder rates are increasing in the US, they are not nearly as big of a problem as obesity.

But, I am not talking about normal weight people or even people who are considered a little bit overweight. I am talking about the potential harm of using intuitive eating as a method to counseling people who are literally DYING because the are so overweight, this is where I think it is a complete cop-out.


I used to work with patients who were morbidly obese and preparing to have gastric bypass weight loss surgery. The program where I worked, required a 6 months preparation class before patients were allowed to have surgery. During this class, they worked with myself (a dietitian) and a therapist to help tackle food and psychological issues that might be impacting their weight. It was a great program, but was made "optional" eventually because patients saw it as a barrier to a life-saving surgery and filed lawsuits against it. I saw so much change in these patients in the 6 month class, many were able to lose weight the weight on their own. The fact the program pretty much went away is really sad.

But, I get it that most of these patients were at least 100 pounds overweight and struggling with MULTIPLE medical conditions. The surgery was their last hope. Sadly, during the 6 month waiting period, I had several patients die from obesity-related complications. Now, they may or may not have survived the surgery in the end, but the obesity KILLED them while they were waiting for it.

Even weight loss surgery, doesn't have good long-term success rates, with patients being able to only lose about 65% of the weight they need to lose. Many of them remain obese even after the surgery, and many gain the weight back, although the weight loss does help improve some medical conditions related to obesity.

When you are sitting in front of a person who can barely walk because they are so obese, who is actively dying from uncontrolled diabetes or high blood pressure, is it really reasonable to say to them "take 6 months to be mindful about your food and figure out what makes your body feel good, maybe in 6 months you will drop 10 pounds or none, either way love yourself and accept who you are"? I am sorry, but if I came to an RD DESPERATE for help and he or she said that to me, I would be furious, I might punch them. People who are obese are looking for a solution, hopefully one that can help them step off the edge, they don't need to hear "love yourself" or "listen to your hunger signals". That is just complete bullsheet.


"People who struggle with obesity simply do not have the same ability as normal weight people to "listen to their hunger cues". First, the obesity has screwed up their hormones. Many are resistant to insulin making them eat more AND leptin making them unable to stop eating when they are full. So, telling obese people to listen to their hunger signals is simply impossible."

"Who are you trying to convince, me or yourself? So much of what you say here is utterly irrelevant to my comment and most of the rest of it is a bunch of (incorrect) assumptions about me. Good luck to you. You are going to need it."

I sorry that gave you a pinch but I wasn't talking directly to you at all. I share what I've learned over the past 5 years. That's the amount of time that I've quit dieting. Everything I'm saying here is what I've done to myself and how I pulled myself out of deeper holes I've dug from way too much dieting.

My dieting career started at the age of 23 with flops and failures and restarts and reboots and resets and mostly just filled with disappointment from dieting malarkey. Dieting and eating it all back is a food prison.

Befores and Afters are a part of that misery. Why just today I've read where people couldn't stand seeing themselves in photos with only 15 lbs to lose. That's sad. Befores = Misery and sadness and trigger all kinds of things. But there's not one Before photo in my life that ever motivated me to make any permanent kind of changes. They were a way of saying, just look at what you've done to yourself.

I started thinking about the big landscape. Waaaay down the road and where I wanted to be for the rest of my life. I'm still standing.

When you take all of the misery out the equation and the self-induced body shaming, something happens. When you give yourself permission to eat everything you like in reasonable amounts, permission to do everything you want, something happens. You're no longer a dieter.