When I think about weight loss, I think about the grueling diet (CICO, Keto, Paleo, IF, ...) as the journey itself. But that's really only the first of three phases. It's not overly intuitive; you have 30lbs, 50lbs, 100lbs, 150lbs to lose, so you focus hard on that number to the exclusion of everything else. You drive to that number over weeks, months, even years. It borders on an obsession because there's nothing more personal, and it's your journey to own. We dream about what it will be like to end the journey and adjust our choices throughout the weeks and months; we change our IF hours, adjust our protein intake, reduce our calorie intake to match our changing BMR, incorporate exercise, etc.
But often, our failure in this weight loss journey isn't the weight loss phase. Once you get into a groove after the first one, two, three, N months, losing a pound or two a week becomes commonplace and feels almost boring. And we become complacent. Getting to that magical goal of a healthy weight sits at the back of our mind, and we forget the next two phases. Tapering off and maintaining.
Long before we reach a healthy weight, we should be planning how to taper back to a comfortable maintenance diet and how to maintain that CICO ratio. For a lot of us, this will be a lifelong commitment; a commitment to weighing ourselves, assessing our diets, recognizing when we begin to exercise less, when the scale changes, when stress from a job or a relationship affects us. And the best way to succeed when we face this adversity is to have a plan. As silly as it sounds, maintaining weight loss is as much an amazing achievement as it is a serious responsibility.
Tapering off from your weight loss program to a maintenance program is your training-wheels to this new lifestyle. Adding calories to your diet feels uncomfortable, strange, and almost wrong after you've been so strict for weeks, months, or years. But doing this healthfully, recognizing the psychological walls and discomfort, and talking to the right kind of people (i.e. therapist, weight loss group, chefs, etc) will help manage this transition. And I think this is the most important part of your journey, building the right foundation for your future, transitioning to a stable maintenance program.
I'm 50lbs down so far and in the "boring" part of the week-to-week. If anyone has any suggestions for ways to manage the boredom, I'm all ears; I'm currently trying to build a list of short-term goals to keep the rolling achievements coming. Recognize when I go down a belt loop, have a few pairs of jeans that are 1-5" waists smaller than I feel comfortable in, track my BMI, track my weight, build trend lines off my month-to-month weigh-ins, etc.
I think I wrote this out more for myself, to chew on my own thoughts. I needed to understand where I failed last time, where my next mistake will be in this journey, and what I need to do to ensure my success when I reach my goal. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to reflect and share.
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