Burn It Off And Keep It Off: The 7 Biggest Weight Relapse Mi

Just thought of sharing here some important points from the article that I have read. I find it very relevant especially for us who had successfully made it so that we won't be experiencing anymore weight yo-yo's.

After you succeed at burning off the fat, what then? How are you going to maintain your new body? What does your next set of 12 week, 6 month and 12 month goals look like? What’s your next fitness challenge? What’s going to keep you interested in training? How do you plan to stay motivated? What will prevent you from slipping back into old patterns?

Avoid these weight relapse mistakes:

Relapse mistake #1: Choosing the wrong diet to lose the weight.

Maintenance begins with choosing the right nutrition program during the fat loss phase. The first mistake that leads to relapse is following a fad diet or any diet so extreme or restrictive that it triggers binging or is simply too difficult to stay on for long. This includes not only the eating plan itself, but also any other weight loss methods, such as supplements or drugs. One study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that far more relapsers had lost weight by fasting or taking appetite suppressant pills than maintainers. Apparently the fasting helped take some weight off and the pills helped curb hunger, but neither helped keep the weight off.

Relapse mistake #2: Unrealistic deadlines.

Many authorities say that unrealistic weight goals are one of the biggest causes of failure and relapse. There’s truth in that, but provided that body composition is kept in mind, I think the real problem is unrealistic deadlines, more so than unrealistic goals.
Most people sell themselves short and don’t set their fitness standards high enough. Puny goals and low standards are set for one main reason: fear. By setting low standards, you don’t risk disappointment. You can play it safe if you choose, but if you do, that’s the same as accepting mediocrity. We all have genetic constraints and we can’t change our inherent body structures, but as long your goals aren’t so outlandish that they’re merely wishful thinking, I believe you should set big, ambitious goals. You simply have to be smart about choosing deadlines. To calculate the time frame, divide your amount of weight loss desired by the ideal weekly weight loss target of two pounds per week. If you want to drop 30 pounds, at two pounds per week, that’s 15 weeks. If you factor in some water weight loss or above average fat loss, you might get there in 12 weeks. But if your goal is 30 pounds in 30 days, you’d better think twice about that deadline. Even if you met that deadline by dropping large amounts of water and lean tissue, it would have been counterproductive because there’s a direct correlation between speed of weight loss and relapse.

Relapse mistake #3: Abruptly stopping a nutrition or exercise program.

The physique that we developed during the weight loss phase could not be maintained without continued effort. You’d think this would be common sense, but research says otherwise. One study on long term maintenance sponsored by the Kaiser Permanente HMO organization said that the relapsers seemed to assume that their lost weight was “permanently gone” and they were surprised when they found themselves heavy again.

Relapse mistake #4: Returning to your previous caloric maintenance level without increasing activity.

After a large weight loss, your calorie maintenance level is lower than it was when you started. With a 50 pound weight loss for example, an average guy will have a maintenance level about 400 calories lower than when he started his fat loss phase. Do you see the conundrum? If he goes back to his old maintenance level, and all else remains equal, he is guaranteed to regain the weight. The math equation has changed! Even if you’re aware of this potential pitfall, permanently reducing your calories to accommodate your new energy requirements is one of those “easier said than done” propositions. If you’ve gotten accustomed to eating a certain volume of food for years or even for an entire lifetime, it’s not always an easy adjustment to make. You have two choices. One, you can get used to eating less than you did before your weight loss. Two, you can get used to exercising more. Ideally, you’ll do a little bit of both and that will make life easiest. This reduction in calorie needs after weight loss explains why increasing exercise has always been the single most cited success strategy for long term weight maintenance. The increased activity offsets the lower maintenance level and it’s easier for most people to stay active than it is for them to eat less than they were previously used to.

Relapse mistake #5: Dichotomous thinking.

Relapsers see situations in black or white terms without shades of grey. For example, they insist they have no time to train, rather than making efficient use of what little time they have. They’re either on the program completely or off completely. If they have one bad meal, they feel as if their entire week has been completely ruined. If they miss a deadline, instead of just pushing back the date, they think they blew an entire 12 weeks. Relapsers also have very rigid ideas of what success means. For example, they might define success as weighing 125 pounds and anything other than 125 pounds is seen as a failure. Fitness is not a win or lose, pass or fail situation. Fitness is a journey of learning and self improvement. All or none thinking creates unnecessary stress and doesn’t allow you to give yourself credit for what you did right or to learn from your experiences. Cut yourself some slack and avoid this mistake in thinking at all costs.

Relapse mistake #6: Perpetual dissatisfaction with body weight and shape.

Relapsers express great dissatisfaction with their new body weight and body shape, even when they’ve made huge strides in progress. They tend to make comparisons of themselves to others and when taken to an extreme, this turns into perfectionism where no achievement ever seems good enough. Relapsers also tend to make judgments about themselves as a person based on strictly on their physical attributes. The pursuit of constant improvement is clearly a virtue. Some of the healthiest and fittest people in the world credit their success to never becoming complacent and always striving for better results. This seems to be in conflict with body dissatisfaction as a cause of relapse. We can reconcile this paradox by understanding that you can strive for continuous improvement while also liking yourself at every step along the way — it’s not one or the other.
It’s also important to get very clear about how far you want to take your physical development and how much time and effort you’re willing to invest. Not everyone wants or needs the washboard abs of a Men’s Health cover model or the body shape of a figure model. Use 80-20 thinking here. Suppose you can get 80% of the way to what you consider your physical ideal with a fairly modest investment of time and effort. To capture the next 15% takes more time and serious hard work, and the final 5% takes a monumental full time effort. How far to you want to go and how much are you willing to pay?

Relapse Mistake #7: Poor coping and stress management skills.

High levels of stress, unexpected life events and negative emotions can all lead to weight regain if you don’t have strong coping mechanisms to deal with them. Maintainers experience the same non-health stresses that relapsers do: financial difficulties, family issues and work stress. The difference is, relapsers use food to distract themselves or escape from bad feelings rather than confront their problems head on and develop alternate coping mechanisms. Women need to be more on guard then men. According to the Styles survey, which was conducted to identify characteristics of weight maintainers, more men (35.5%) were successful at maintenance than women (27.7%). The most likely reason for this difference is women are usually more emotional than men and are more susceptible to emotional eating. Regardless of your gender, to maintain your weight, you have to continue reminding yourself that food is for fuel, for nourishment and body-building material, not for coping with stress. If you haven’t mastered stress management and developed good coping skills during the fat loss phase, then even if you manage to reach your weight goal, it will be a struggle to maintain it.

One piece of good news is that the reasons for relapse are not a mystery. We know why weight regain happens and it’s not difficult to predict. Weight relapsers have been studied in great depth and their behaviors are quite distinct from maintainers. If you take an inventory of which regainer behaviors you’re engaging in and then avoid these mistakes in the future, you can avoid relapse right from the source of the problem.

If you want to see the article completely, this is the link:
http://www.burnthefatblog.com/archives/2011/04/7-biggest-weight-relapse-mistakes.php