Why do people give up?

Because changing habits and understanding the underlying motives for our eating behavior is neither simple nor easy. We become very attached to our patterns and thought and behavioral habits and are it takes self awareness and self discipline to change them.

What worked for me was coming to terms with exactly what I said above. Understanding my unhealthy patterns with food. Eating for comfort. Stress eating. Things like that. Understanding trigger foods for me. Experimenting with different foods and macro combinations to find what was most satisfying for me and helped control hunger. And most importantly, developing new habits.

All of this takes a huge dose of patience because, by its nature, it is not a fast process in any way and learning new habits takes trial and effort and time for them to become ingrained as the new normal.

Unreasonable expectations and lack of understanding of the process generally lead to frustration which leads to giving up.

People expect to lose a minimum of 2 pounds a week (usually more). That’s not realistic or even healthy in most cases. So people expecting to lose 10 pounds a month but “only” losing 2-4 are disappointed and frustrated that they are doing “all this work” for “nothing” so why bother?

People think paleo/keto/low carb/clean eating is a requirement And/or the “only thing that works for them” (usually because a previous 2-6 week stint on said diet produced massive water weight loss in a short time). Such restrictive diets are difficult to maintain for a long time-particularly if they aren’t already very close to what you would naturally choose to eat. If you have a sweet tooth, low carb/keto will be very difficult to maintain for a long time. So you will “fail” (eg massive carb-laden binge) at “the only thing that ever works for you” so why bother?

What works for me?

Knowing there isn’t an end date. I am never “done”. I will need to eat this way forever (to maintain my loss). So if I’m not willing to do it forever, I’m not doing it now.

I have reasonable expectations. I lose 3 pounds a month at best. Best. Since this is forever, if it’s less than that-ok.

There are no moral attachments to food. I am not good or bad based on what (or how much) I do or don’t eat. This goes along with people who “ were so good for 3 days” then “I was so bad today”. Meh. I don’t fall off the wagon. My wagon has 4 wheel drive and comes with me even on days where I eat far more than I need.

I do things I enjoy for activity. I incorporate foods I like - maybe not every day, not as much as I might like, but a life without ever having pizza and cookies isn’t realistic.

I log. Everything. Every day. Good. Bad. Ugly and everything in between. This keeps me engaged in the process even on days when I eat more than I need or am just not able to make good choices (like now-when I’m playing chopped in my kitchen and wondering what else I can make with canned pumpkin, beans, crab meat and half a bag of shredded cheese).

I have given up in the past because it is difficult to constantly be hungry. I maintain around 1500-1700 calories depending on my activity level and eating even maintenance is a struggle because I’m often hungry. It doesn’t matter what combination of foods I eat, the hunger is there and hard to manage. It is like my body senses when it is in a deficit when I try to eat less and increases my hunger. I have tried increasing protein, volume, etc but none of that helps.

I think "satisficing" is a big part of it, for people who've lost some weight and then struggled to maintain or gained it back. The "good enough" problem, which can be an issue in so many areas of life. I will use my own experience with weight loss as an example, but I don't mean this to necessarily be about me but about the satisficing challenge in general.

At my peak weight I was 330 lbs. I felt like crap. Not just aesthetically but health-wise. Huffing and puffing to go up a flight of stairs, squeezing into restaurant booths that were already fairly deep but somehow weren't deep enough for my girth - and hoping to God there'd be a stand-alone table so I didn't have to do so. Tugging on 3x shirts and feeling them pulling around my moobs, and seeing the stretch around my stomach and grabbing a different shirt and sullenly biting the bullet and buying some 4x's. All of that morbidly obese person stuff. Being morbidly obese sucks.

It was easy, really easy, for me to get started. I wanted to not be morbidly obese anymore. Wanted a normal life. Wanted to fit into restaurant booths and movie seats and airplane seats, and to wear clothes that fit well, and to feel healthy and not self conscious about my weight.

So then I lost 10 quick pounds, took a couple months off, and then got seriously on a diet and dropped 50, hitting my first milestone of 270 to get out of obesity class 3, and felt really good about that. But with that milestone, the dieting got a teensy bit harder, because the initial motivation - to not be so ridiculously huge - was partially satisfied. I was big, but not as big as I was; 270 lbs was a huge, noticeable improvement that got me a lot of compliments from friends & family. So it got a bit harder to pound that calorie number every day.

Then I lost another 20 and that's where I am now and it is HARDER. I'm still technically obese but actually I don't feel very obese anymore; maybe I should feel obese, but mainly I just feel good! Clothes fit. 2x clothes, not 3x or heading to 4x. I'm large but not "mommy-that-man-is-so-fat" humongous. I have another 50 or 60 lbs I want to lose but in the meantime I feel healthy and strong and feel like I look pretty good, relatively speaking. And so it has gotten harder to hit that calorie target every single day. I still do it most days, but I had to increase the caloric number a bit because my mind was totally rebelling at the super-super-hard core number I'd started with at 330 lbs. With feeling better and like I've accomplished a lot, my appetite has come back, which was virtually absent for the first 40-50 pounds, because I was soooo motivated at first not to be that 4x shirt wearing person anymore and I don't feel quite as burning a drive to get from 2x to XL.

All of this is to say, I think as some people (including me) proceed down a path of accomplishing something, the initial high motivation tied to the huge gap between "what is" and "what should be" adapts to the now smaller gap between the current state and the end goal. The initial horror of realizing how out of control my weight had gotten provided a hard-coreness that was hard to maintain as horror gradually gave way to more of just a rational sense that "there's still plenty of work to be done". It's more analytical than emotional for me, now, and emotions were programmed into animals in the first place to provide direction to behavior, and determination to persevere against the odds.

I love that word satisficing from economics - it's very human to fall into "good enough" mode. We set big goals that'll take us all the way to a perfect outcome, but as we get closer to the outcome, "good enough" starts to slow things down.

Now I think many people get into satisficing mode before they're done with weight loss and at some point it's "good enough" and then they just want normalcy back - being able to eat what they want, without counting and logging and being hungry. And just get fatigued with pretending a brussel sprout tastes as good as a peanut M&M. So one day, "I'll take a break" just happens, not a planned, intentional refeed but a spontaneous "I need a f'ing break". And it feels good, those M&Ms and whatever else was denied or in such short supply for so long, so the break gets extended to 2 days, then a week, and month, year, decade, whatever. And of course, without the counting and logging, or whatever the methodology was to drive the weight loss, in most cases the weight will come back - 85 % of dieters regain, supposedly.

I have had plenty of unintentional, spontaneous time-outs over the last 10 months . "Binges", I guess. The only difference for me this time is that I've successfully climbed back on the horse the next morning instead of letting it grind on until the poundage is back. For me, that is absolutely, 100 % the critical success factor - getting back on plan the next day. So I'm still dieting, still pushing forward, but with each additional pound lost, it gets harder because of the ever smaller gap between what is and what should be. I could live with my current weight if I had to, and that wasn't the case at 330 pounds. And when I'm 20 lbs less than today, that feeling that "I don't really need to do this every day, and I really want a pizza" will be even stronger.

This satisficing problem inconveniently dovetails with the fact that with every pound lost, you get 5-6 calories less to eat. Lose 50 pounds, and you either have to eat 250 cals/day less food or slow down your weight loss goal (the latter making much more sense, obviously). So, when you think about it, the more success you have with weight loss, the more your progress slows down and/or the less food you can eat. This alone is probably responsible for many failed efforts.

Just my 2 cents.

This year? I'm a stress eater. I did well until beginning of March when my daughters respiratory consultant rang to really ram home that if my girl catches corona she won't make it so get in the house, don't see another living soul and keep steroids to hand to whack in to her at first sign of a cough and do not set foot in the hospital

So as my mother taught me eat all the crap while plastering on a smile

Took a month to get a grip of myself mainly by telling all professionals that called to repeat what respiratory said, that if I need them I'll call but until then assume where fine and stop phoning

It's a learned behaviour that I think I'll be working on the rest of my life
My mother never stopped that behaviour until she took vascular alzhimers and could no longer get up and grab what she wanted

I remember summers as a child being shut in the garden to "play" and seeing her eat a whole cheesecake alone slumped in front of the TV
And I spent many years doing the exact same thing, rapidly gaining weight through a horrendous marriage and the early years of my daughters life while we lived in hospital

I'm trying not to pass my behaviours on to my kids because I want better in life for them

So I ordered a stack of colouring books, adult ones included and I get those out when I'm struggling instead

I logged here for over 3 years. During that time I lost around 50 pounds. Wasn’t exactly sure of start weight, within a couple pounds.

I have an office job and commute that required me to be away from home for 11 hours a day. It was hard to find time to get much exercise on weekdays. I also spent several evenings after work helping my elderly dad avoid a nursing home, and then several evenings a week clearing out his home after he passed, This was for almost 2 years.

As I lost weight, my calorie needs dropped to fewer than I found satisfying, around 1350. Due to the things mentioned above, it wasn’t easy to find time to exercise enough to earn extra calories.

Clearing out my dads house was stressful, eating brings comfort. I was sick of having to be so careful about every bite that went into my mouth. Once you quit tracking and caring, it’s hard to get back into it.

My reasons:

People pleasing. I followed plans I hated because my friends did them or they were popular and I wanted camaraderie and their approval. When I didn't get any results or their results I quit.

Getting religious with plans. Each diet or exercise plan was The Solution, The Way. And I'd burn out and quit when I couldn't or didn't want to follow anymore.

Impatience. I'd run numbers with the Fitbit, Tdee calculators, and Libra. And if I didn't lose at the expected rate, knowing full well that I lose slowly no matter what I do, I'd quit.

Why I'm not quitting now? I'm uncomfortable. I literally looked in the mirror at the start of the quarantine and asked myself how I want to walk out of this. I was already unhappy. Most of my summer dresses (I live for my dresses) are on the edge of snug. I refuse to go into a size 10. I know that's someone's goal, but I was once a comfortable 4 and totally happy. I want that feeling back. I just turned 44 and entered perimenopause. I want to age gracefully and be healthy and active.

My short answer: Because it's EASIER to be able to eat what you want in any amount and be fat than it is to be disciplined and eat what you NEED, to be healthy.

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition