I started writing this post when I finally hit a groove with weight loss last year. I planned to share it once I hit my goal weight, but I fell off the wagon for a while. Thankfully, I'm now back where I was before I fell off, but I'm still not at my goal. But I started thinking to myself, why should I wait to share what I've learned? People often say, "It's not a sprint, it's a marathon" as a way to emphasize weight loss as a long-term process, but as I started planning for maintenance I realized that the work still won't be over once I hit my goal weight. I'll need to adapt and use the same strategies I've been employing throughout the loss if I want to keep the weight off forever (sure, some people fall into maintenance intuitively--I'm not one of those people). We love these analogies because they're easy sound bites to illustrate a more nuanced reality. But that's just it--it's not easy. You can easily imagine running a marathon and then just going back to sitting on the couch every night eating bags of crisps. It's not just about running a marathon; it's running that marathon and staying in marathon shape for the rest of your life.
So here are a few lessons that I'm learning and relearning all over again:
- Let go of the need to tell a story. When I started writing this, I thought I needed to start with an abridged autobiography detailing my issues with childhood obesity and poor nutrition, emotional eating, sedentary habits, etc. I don’t need to narrate how I wound up overweight. You already know the answer: I consumed more than I was burning. The specific reasons for why I did so have not mattered at all to my weight loss. Of course, it's important to think about why you're making decision that aren't giving you the results you want, or what your "triggers" are, but think of them as helpful lessons and not things that make up who you are. There is no yesterday. What matters are the decisions that I make in the present. Once I was able to divest from the emotions that come along with my fat narrative— disappointment, guilt, shame, and regret—I was able to develop concrete strategies to maintain a calorie deficit. I practice mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to manage the emotions that inevitably do come up. Those feelings don’t go away, so there’s no need to get too wrapped up in them. Learn to live with them like a roommate who just makes you feel indifferent.
- Leave the motivation to people who charge hundreds of dollars for people to pack into a convention center to be yelled at by folks with dubious job titles. It doesn’t matter how motivated or encouraged I feel about sticking to my weight loss plan. I made a goal and I know that steps I need to take to achieve it. I can either do it or not. I do lots of things I don’t particularly enjoy doing—washing dishes, doing laundry, paying bills—but I know that I need to do them. My enjoyment is completely irrelevant. What’s important is building strategies, habits, and processes to help me meet my goals. Instead of motivation, I've learned to tap into my sense of curiosity. What would it be like if I were to hit my goal weight? How would it feel to log all of my food for 60 consecutive days? Would anything be different if I work up to running 50 miles a week? I can't know if I don't give it a try!
- Unplug from the matrix. For those of us in the United States, at least, we live in a consumption-driven society. Weight loss has become about marketing. Buy this book, subscribe to this meal service, order this supplement! Also, don’t forget to listen to my podcast and click on my blog! This mentality is reflected in a question that gets asked around here a lot: “What should I eat to lose weight?” Is it clear what’s wrong with that question? It implies that there’s something you should be consuming more of to lose weight, rather than consuming less of everything. It suggests that the answer to weight loss is one of addition rather than subtraction. Everyone wants the quick fix solution, the pill or tea or meal replacement shake or tailored meal plan that’s going to give them fast results. No one wants to hear that it’s really about what you should STOP doing. In reality, this process is about hard work, persistence, trial and error, and educating yourself about what does and doesn’t work FOR YOU. And, yes, it’s about denying yourself for delayed gratification.
- Leave the dogma at church. I spent a long time trying out different ways of eating: “clean” eating, paleo, primal, slow carb, keto, etc. It was useful in the sense that I learned a lot about nutrition and how food affects our bodies. It was less useful in the sense that I’m going to continue to eat cupcakes (the kind with regular all-purpose flour and butter and eggs and sugar!) from time to time for the rest of my life because they’re fucking delicious. Yes, my diet primarily consists of whole, unprocessed foods and meals I cook myself, but I also prioritize the things that I enjoy. I don’t assign any moral value to food or my individual eating choices. Donuts aren’t bad; they’re actually pretty fantastic. Deciding to eat one doesn’t mean I’m being bad; I’m enjoying myself in a moment of glazed ecstasy. I just have to make sure that indulgence is moderate enough that it doesn’t get in the way of my overall goals. Even if moderation of "trigger foods" won't work for you, try to find things that you can really enjoy eating without falling into overconsumption. I had to get rid of my baking habit because it's easy for me to mindlessly whip up a batch of chocolate chip cookies. That doesn't mean that I can't keep a bar of 80% chocolate around to nibble on, or schedule a visit to a high quality local bakery into my eating plan.
- Begin with your "post-marathon" life in mind. Do you know why people so often regain the weight they lose? Because suddenly “dieting” is over and it’s back to business as usual. I’ve made this mistake before: lost some weight, felt happy with how I looked, and then went back to eating like I had before. Eventually, I decided that I wasn’t going to do anything to lose weight (besides eating at a deficit, of course) that I wasn’t willing to continue doing during maintenance. Everything doesn't have to be a struggle. I learned to embrace effortlessness as a practice. This is what it means to create a “lifestyle” change--not the polished, marketable type of "lifestyle" you see on Instagram and Youtube, but the gritty, challenging kind of lifestyle we all have that's full of ups and downs but ultimately sustained by our priorities, practices, and persistence. There's nothing remarkable about failing. It's commonplace, mundane, boring. The exciting part is having the resolve to recommit yourself to your goals, figure out what didn't work, and make the necessary changes.
Concrete strategies:
- Align your plan with your goals. A lot of people seem to have very precise goals (30 lbs by a wedding in 3 months), yet they’re unwilling to adopt fine-tuned strategies to reach those goals (i.e., a carefully monitored caloric deficit that will get them an average of 2.5 lbs a week lost). Sure, feel free to just “watch what you eat” if you just want to “slim down a bit,” but especially as you approach/enter a healthy weight range/BMI and start to envision more specific body composition goals, you need to be much more precise with your plan.
- Start simply and progress from there. Gradual changes. Try just tracking what you eat for a week without making any changes. Don't even count the calories--just keep a list. Or just try cutting out soft drinks first. Then decide you're going to have dinner at home twice a week and make enough for leftovers that you can have for lunch. Making abrupt, big changes often leads to fatigue because each change requires more effort.
- Have your toolkit ready. MFP app, food scale, body scale, groceries, food prep containers, whatever.
- Track your progress. You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Also, have multiple measures of progress so you don't get preoccupied with the scale. Observe how you’re feeling in addition to how you're looking.
- Plan for every scenario. Throw some protein bars in your desk for when everyone is still munching on stale Halloween candy. Keep a bag of nuts in the car for emergencies. Prep your freaking meals, people. This doesn't have to be the standard "meal prep Sunday/whatever day" where you cook everything at the same time. It might just mean making a calendar of what you'll have for a week without actually cooking it all at the same time, or keeping a list of rotating meals that you have the staples for on hand at all times. The point is to make it as easy as possible for you to make choices that are in line with your goals.
- Eat good food. Don't be intimidated by cooking (there are plenty of youtube channels like Brothers Green Eats, The Domestic Geek, and Mind Over Munch that have approachable videos about everyday cooking). Eat simply and repetitively most of the time, but shake things up every so often. [Note: I really want to expand on this more in another post where I tackle the trope of "boredom" when it comes to eating, so stay tuned for more on that]
- Don't forget the "small" stuff that's not so small: water, electrolytes (esp if you're keto or fasting for long periods), sleep, stress management.
- Get active, but don't think you need to become an athlete. You don’t have to sign up for a gym or adhere to a workout plan. I think that just walking or other sustained low-intensity exercise goes a long way towards making you feel better mentally and physically.
Methodology:
- 11,200 calories per week (1600 calories per day). I found it useful to adhere to a weekly deficit because I noticed early on that my calorie intake would naturally fluctuate anyway. I would eat over my daily goal and then balance out the average over the next few days with no issue. There was no need for me to feel like I wasn’t meeting my goals because I didn’t eat under 1600 calories every single day. I just focused on the 7-day average. This rendered worrying about things like maintenance and cheat days irrelevant for the most part.
- Pre-logging. Besides mindfulness, this has been the most effective step in curbing my binge eating. If I feel like I want something, I don't automatically say I can't have it. I just ask myself, can we fit this in today?
- Intermittent fasting. It's not necessary it's suited to some of my natural routines. Once I realized that calorie cycling was more intuitive for me, I decided to just make it more regimented through modified alternate day fasting (ADF), which is a type of intermittent fasting. I'd basically alternate lower and higher calorie days. Now I've switched to OMAD (one meal a day) because I found prepping all of my meals at the beginning of the week
- Some rough guidelines for what I eat. While I railed against diets that eliminate entire food groups above, I have found it important to have some guidelines for how I eat. I use a combination of macronutrient goals, an appreciation of Michael Pollan’s “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” (ie, minimizing convenience foods), and a modified version of Alton Brown’s food lists (foods to eat daily, foods to eat three times a week, foods to eat no more than once a week, foods to eat only occasionally). These are more aspirational than compulsory. I have also revised these guidelines constantly throughout the process because what works best for me has changed over time based on what's going on in my life. I've learned that I find more enjoyment in eating whole foods rather than playing macro tetris with packaged foods, so I have some rough templates for meals that I can always modify for variety by switching up various aspects.
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