It’s been almost a year since we started this site and one of the major topics we thought would be difficult to tackle was weight loss maintenance. Below is a graph of my weight since I started keeping track of it in about October 2010 up to recently.
I have been pretty happy with how things have been going, but how to maintain weight loss going forward remains an interesting challenge. On the one hand, I think that some habits are relatively easy to break (at least after you’ve been on track for a little while). For example, I haven’t had a soda, even a diet one, since around October. I can’t remember the last time we ordered a pizza, much less ate the whole thing together for dinner. I don’t think we miss it very much.
At the same time, you can see a slight drift up over the last year or so on the graph from a low of somewhere in the 216 neighborhood to a current weight around 225. It’s difficult to decide whether that’s a bad thing and I need to be careful or not. I’ve added more strength training, so I’d like to think it represents gain of muscle mass. But on the slow path from 220 to 280 to 320 lbs I never really thought I looked very different along the way.
We were discussing recently the issue of checking your weight. It is probably not good to do it too often, but never checking is also dangerous. (Maybe showing everyone a graph of your weight can help!) Probably the best idea is to slowly institute new habits – you often hear the term “lifestyle change,” which can sound like a cliche, but I think is the best way to describe it. At the same time, placing too much emphasis on weight as a number is perhaps not good either. Do you have tips for weight loss maintenance? Hope you are achieving all of your goals!
1st congrats on your transformation as a cpl. We as a couple lost over 200lbs combined & have maintained it for over 2 years now. If you have a moment, can you share your transformation story with our website? As far as maintenance tips, we have kept it simple.
1. 1 day a week, we have a “free day” which entails eating 1 or 2 meals of anything we want. Because we eat clean 6 days a week, that one day is actually beneficial to your body.
2. Whatever your goal weight was/is, shoot for 5-10lbs beneath that number. Why? Because it allows you a 5-10lb cushion to allow for “life” to happen. Once you get close to the top end of that range, tighten up and make changes.
3. Weigh yourself atleast once a week to two weeks. Why? The last thing you want to do is to get comfortable. Comfortable is what got you heavy(or stress). You might think your eating good, exercising etc, however your body might adapt to the activity & it will require different stimuli to burn more calories, thus your cruising along and when you do weigh, you might be surprised.
4. There might be times of less activity, make sure you are aware of that and make adjustments in your food intake. If your moving less for some reason, eat less.
Well, I hope the tips help.
I invite you & your wife to visit our site and hope that you would consider a submission. The followers of the site would find your story very inspiring.
I’m in the same boat. Lost a ton of weight and have hit a non-moving patch. I’ve added crosstraining to shock my body (it had gotten too used to what I was doing, even though I was doing it a lot more often). It’s just what my body needs.