Maintaining weight loss

I like to say that losing weight is easy but maintaining weight loss is really hard. It is easy to manage what you eat and to exercise when you see the instant gratification of losing weight. Maintaining that weight loss is really, really hard, which is why so many people that lose weight end up gaining a large portion of it back.

The first thing that helps with this problem is to not go on a "diet." When you start following a trendy diet, like Atkins or the South Beach diet, you are completely restricting yourself in a given area. This type of dieting is not realistic for the long term. Instead, you need to change your lifestyle in healthy ways similar to those I have discussed in previous posts. If you make small changes that are easy to continue for the rest of your life, you are more likely to maintain a healthy weight.

The second thing that I found to be really helpful was to lose a little bit of weight, then maintain for a few weeks or months, then start to lose weight again. There are so many emotional and physical changes occurring in your life when you are losing weight and it is important to stop and let your mind and body get used to the new you. If you have been big your whole adult life like I was, it can be very shocking to look in the mirror and see a skinny stranger. It was very good for me to take a couple of weeks to get used to the new Rachel and to learn who I was on the inside and the outside. Then, it was a bunch of small shocks instead of one huge, overwhelming shock.

It is also good to learn what it is like to maintain a smaller weight when you are still not at your goal weight. The change in portion size and number of calories you can have during a day can be overwhelming. When I was first losing weight, I was eating 1600 calories a day. To maintain my weight at 190 pounds, I had to eat 2100 calories. That is a lot more food than I was used to eating at that time. I needed the time to learn how to fill the calories with good, healthy foods, instead of going back to the old standbys that I used to eat. Since I knew that I was going to start losing weight again, it was less stressful to gain 5-10 pounds at that stage than when I was at my goal weight.

The third thing to do when losing weight is to throw your old clothes away. The worst thing you can do is hold onto clothes that you can no longer wear. It is much harder to justify gaining weight back if it means you have to go buy a new wardrobe.

The most important thing you can do is to not beat yourself up. This is a struggle that you will deal with for the rest of your life. That means, sometimes you will gain weight and that is ok. It does not mean you are a failure in any way. Beating yourself up when things go bad is what got a lot of us here in the first place. If you gain weight, its ok, just go back to the basics.