Your question makes total sense. I have lost weight and gained it back - sometimes more, usually I can catch it. I was at the top 245 - have gotten down to 182, but am back up to 197 (was 204, but started WLM again). I weight myself every day - even when not dieting. My scale has a memory and does body fat. I have data for four plus years - and can see it happening. I actually bought myself relatively expensive custom shirts (at around 190) to try and stay motivated.
What happened this time is after I have made some good habit changes I stopped keeping track of calories. I had slightly injured myself and stopped doing weight training. This didn’t matter - I kept losing weight for around four months. Then it started to slowly creep up. I noticed it, but it happens slowly. I think I was in denial somewhat - my weight varies by over a pound fairly often day to day. Hard to tell when it is real - when it is noise.
Once I put myself into “weight loss mode” I do ok. It just is hard to turn that switch.
Depression - also - not trying to make excuses - but you can count me as another data point there.
I feel like my brain tries to “trick me” into not dieting. I’ve actually thought to myself - “I don’t need to diet anymore - I’m different now”. I KNOW that isn’t true, but the thought still run through my brain. It is helpful for me to ask - if I was a friend - would would a recommend to that friend.
I find walking and counting calories to be helpful. So is weight training, but I have injured myself several times and then get thrown off track.
I wish I knew how my brain works with regard to this. I have lost significant amounts of weight and gain them all back and more. It’s something like: something switches in my brain and I am able to restrict my eating, even if I feel hungry, light-headed and irritable. I shop for more healthful options and do cooking and planning ahead so I don’t get too hungry. I even order salads or grilled meat. It seems perfectly natural to follow a food plan.
Till one day it doesn’t and it’s perfectly natural to eat whatever I feel like, and I can’t imagine following a food plan. It seems inevitable that I will return to former habits, even though during the healthier phase I can imagine not backsliding. As far as being aware you’re backsliding, yeah, I can see my weight moving back up but everything is so incremental. It’s one decision at a time and each one is not huge. I just promise tomorrow will be different, if I can just have this one binge today.
Remarkably, I have only gained about 25 pounds over the last few years. Unfortunately I started at a high weight so I am still morbidly obese (~320ish) but to only have gained net 25 pounds is good for me. I think it’s because I live with my father now and am not so isolated. With no one to watch me, I can truly binge.
Lots of reasons. Unless you weigh yourself daily, keep honest track of your intake, or your new skinny clothes were well-fitting and grew snug, you may not notice a 10-pound gain. You might notice a streak of a change in habits, like exercising less or eating more, but that too isn’t always obvious. You regain weight gradually, and slow, long-term changes can be harder to spot. You may still be high on the 50-pound loss and minimize the significance of a 10-pound gain. You might also be in denial.
To halt regaining weight, you need reliable feedback, a clear head, the ability to reflect and honestly self-assess, and the follow-through to turn things around, all of which people have in notoriously short supply sometimes.
I lost 30 pounds two years ago by reducing my portion sizes, eliminating junk food, and adding a little more exercise (I have 40mins of walking built into my daily routine). Then, with 10-15 pounds to go until my goal weight, I hit the plateau from hell, and my weight loss completely stalled.
After a full year of tweaking my diet and physical activity with no success, I stopped being so vigilant about my diet and exercise. Mind you, I didn’t give up and let myself go – losing weight just fell from priority number one to two or three. But that’s all it took. Losing weight the right way takes daily work – planning meals, carving out exercise time, resisting temptations. Success in alll of those things builds momentum and can carry you to a certain extent, but for me, the momentum was deflated by the long, frustrating plateau, and it grew difficult to sustain the day-to-day effort that is needed to lose weight and keep it off. Since then, I’ve been half-assing it, and unfortunately, it shows.
I’m working to get the numbers on the scale falling again. I’m reverting to the good habits I had two years ago, and making minor adjustments to my approach. For instance, I already count calories (I’ve kept a food journal for three years now), but I am going to add weekly weigh-ins. I’ve heard it a dozen times, but now I realize the importance of having that kind of objective feedback to keep you on track. Fortunately, I don’t have any mental or emotional issues with food, and I have maintained some good habits from two years ago, like choosing whole-grain products and preferring fruit as snacks. I gave up caffeine completely this year and don’t eat much sugar or fried foods. The battle is in my head, and I just need to listen to that annoying skinny bitch inside my head who knows what I should and shouldn’t be doing.
At a rate of 2 pounds/month for 12 months, your weight peaked at 132 lbs. This is still within the healthy BMI range for a female who is 5’3". Even with another 10 lbs, you are just around/over (depending on your frame) the highest end of range. I would be lying if I said that some of your words weren’t concerning. I hope you are seeking some consultation around your health-related behaviors.
I’ve lost and regained a meaningful amount of weight on two occasions. The regain came down to motivation.
As I talked about in the other thread, I did lose about 30 pounds with low carb when I was a teenager (and regained about 80, never doing that again). I kept it off about 1.5 years, but at the end of that period I lost motivation. I lost weight because I liked a girl, but as I got over that the desire to be thin went away.
The second time I lost weight was in college when I lost about 40-50 pounds with a low fat diet. I kept it off for 2 years by taking diet drugs. Towards the end of almost 2 years I started reading books on the sociology of obesity which changed my opinions on the obesity wars, and made me rethink why I wanted to lose weight in the first place. About 6 months after that I stopped taking the medication and the weight came back within a year (my lifestyle did not change, if anything I started engaging in more physical activity because I moved to an apartment where I could walk everywhere instead of drive around the time I gained it back).
For me the weight came back both times because of motivation, it wasn’t worth the effort at keeping it off.
Being thin is what Louis CK calls a ‘white people problem’. It is something people obsess about when the rest of their life is going well. But with careers, family issues, health problems, etc. it isn’t always going to be on the radar.
And I know people will respond and say ‘losing weight is good for your health’ but honestly most people lose weight to avoid being the recipient of social stigma, not because they want to reduce their risk of heart disease in 40 years. Young people, esp young women, make up a huge bulk of people trying to lose weight and they don’t have any of the health problems associated with obesity in their teens and 20s, diseases of obesity generally strike when you are elderly (and considering how few people save enough money for retirement, the argument that people lose weight because they want to avoid health problems in retirement is just absurd). Even if a person can maintain lifestyle changes for life, and even if doing that does keep the weight off, doing it to avoid social stigma loses its punch after a while. If a major motivator of weight loss is to increase one’s perceived value on the dating market, that isn’t always going to be a high priority.
What I’d like to know is what are the long term weight loss stats for people who lose weight for social reasons vs those who lose it for legitimate health reasons (sleep apnea, osteoarthritis, type II diabetes, etc).
Losing weight is easy. Keeping it off is the truly difficult part. People who go on diets gain the weight back because they go off diets. There is a mentality that when you get to goal, you’re done. Nuh uh. You’ve just begun. Maintenance is forever if you want to keep the weight off. You still have to track your calories.
Every time you go on calorie restriction, you slow down your metabolism a little. So every time you gain weight back, it’s even harder to lose it the next time. We didn’t evolve to be able to lose weight easily. Only recently has food become relatively abundant for a vast amount of the population. Evolution made our bodies want to hang on to every calorie available for the hungry season.
ETA: and when I say losing weight is easy, I mean in relation to keeping it off long term. I know from first hand experience that it isn’t easy.
Yet, ironically, it can be exactly what helps pull people back out of their depression. And when used preventatively, can reduce the duration, frequency, and severity of depressive episodes.
I wonder if part of the problem is that the idea of LIFESTYLE CHANGE FOREVER AND EVER sounds so overwhelming and miserable that people either get discouraged up front or let a slip result in a case of throwing in the towel. In any recovery program, the idea of “never again” is strongly discouraged for just that reason.
I consider myself fit and healthy for the most part. I also appreciate indulgence. But I know my limits and how to live in a way that doesn’t make me feel guilty or defeated. I recognize that everyone needs to figure out their own way, but I question if some of the language just feels bigger than the original issue.
FWIW, that isn’t meant to denigrate people who lose weight, I myself would like to lose weight. I’m just saying that keeping it off long term (w/o medical advances to adjust the bodyweight set point) requires a ton of motivation and at the end of the day a lot of people can’t sustain it because life intervenes and depletes people’s cognitive resources, or because the motivations in the first place (avoiding ridicule, being considered more attractive, etc) lose their appeal.
**SenorBeef **has an interesting weight loss story. I don’t know if he still posts here, but he lost something like 200 pounds a few years ago.
This is what happened to me. I lost a good bit of weight with diet and exercise. Then I got busy with work and was just paying less attention to diet, skipping workouts because I had a deadline to meet, etc. I would notice a higher number on the scale but discount it as normal fluctuations. Then I realized I had permanently gained a bit of weight back, and told myself I really need to get back on the diet and exercise. Just as soon as I’m done with this project, of course. Then I stopped weighing myself because what was the point? I knew I’d gained weight, and I was going to get right back on the wagon as soon as I could. But ah fuck it, I’ll have pizza tonight, I don’t feel like cooking.
I had regained about 25 pounds before I caught myself.
This time last year I was about 20lb (10kg) lighter than now. I lost that weight in the first year after my son was born, when I was breastfeeding and made sure to incorporate extra activity in my day to day life to improve my fitness. It all came unstuck around April this year. First I quit breastfeeding and even though I was aware that meant I had to tighten down on my calorie intake a bit, I crept up ever so slightly. Not a big deal and I think I would have managed to counter it… Except we all came down with The Cold That Would Not Die and were sick for two solid months. Forget exercising and eating well. We were so sick, simply keeping the household ticking over was a battle. It was late June when we finally emerged from the grips of The Cold That Would Not Die - that’s winter here, not an especially motivating time of year. We started getting our eating habits back on track and slowly getting moving again… And at the very start of September, we all came down with the freaking Cold That Would Not Die AGAIN. Another two solid months of being ill with only the occasional day or two reprieve between relapses. It’s been miserable. I’ve now been cold-free for about two weeks, but my other half has a headache and sore throat again so it is still in the house. Ugh.
Fingers crossed that I’ve finished being ill for the year and can work on getting my lifestyle back on track to ditch that excess weight again.
Perhaps, in some cases. But I think the bigger problem is that maintaining significant weight loss does in fact require a huge lifestyle change forever and ever. And it doesn’t really get easier over time.
In my case, losing a lot of weight and keeping it off requires I develop what is effectively an eating disorder. (What else would you call obsessively writing down every morsel of food you put into your mouth?) And it takes a significant amount of effort to maintain an accurate food log. As soon as I began to let my food log slip (because I was getting busy, and just didn’t have the mental energy to maintain it), the weight began to come back on. Ditto with exercise; it consumes a sizable fraction of my limited free time. Once work began to become hectic, I pretty much couldn’t keep it up unless I wanted to give up every other interest I had, or damage my health by not getting enough sleep.
Obese people trying to keep large amounts of weight off long-term are like salmon swimming upstream in a waterfall: all they have to do is pause for a bit, and the current sweeps them back down to where they began. That doesn’t mean the effort’s futile, but the odds are stacked against them. Fortunately it doesn’t require a big weight loss or a ton of exercise to reap health benefits.
Yes, that is part of the problem. When people think diet, they think deprivation. Moderation is the key, but people seem to live in one extreme or the other. They feel like if they eat one cookie, that they’ve failed…so might as well eat the whole damn bag! Guilt has a lot to do with it, but biologically, we are programmed to eat. We have several different processes that trigger our response to eat, but virtually none for stopping. We don’t even stop when our brain gets the signal for full.
We can have indulgences if we plan for them, but we also have to battle our instant gratification desires and unrealistic expectations. People want fast weight loss and get discouraged when they don’t lose 10 pounds a week. There’s just no instant way to do it barring liposuction. I’m studying Nutrition Science and just last week we discussed diet and weight control. It’s hugely complicated and there’s no magic way.
I have wondered that exact thing, regarding tracking teetering on disordered eating types of behaviors. It’s funny how the behaviors that they encourage people doing could ultimately lead to their demise.
I am not sure what I am hung up on with this notion. But it may be because I have never seen it as a burden to live this way. Again, it has taken me lots of experimenting to figure out what works and what does not. I guess that is the trick–like really being honest with yourself and modifying your “lifestyle change” to accommodate you, instead of the other way around? (Does that make sense?)
I wonder too if a lot of the problem is that people don’t think creatively in their diet and exercise changes. It’s so sad to me to see those miserable people on the cardio equipment who look like they’re being tortured and counting the seconds until they finish. It’s the same look on the people who painfully struggle through raw baby carrots hoping they “make weight.”
Why not try to find an exercise you enjoy? Why not find a way to eat carrots that tastes good to you–or maybe try another vegetable that you actually like? This is where I am guessing things go bad. It’s easy to crap out of a plan you dread. Why not enjoy it?
Yup. When I was exercising and getting in shape I was in a up mood, and I found it very easy to make myself go through the rigmarole of watching what I ate, and exercising properly. But when I’m in a down mood (as I am currently) I just can’t do anything.
I appreciate your concern. I will definitely admit that I struggle with my body image, but I also realize that my health struggles are not as severe as some of the people in the thread and I am not attempting to parallel my experience with theirs.
I just thought that as someone who lost about 35 lbs. and then gained it all back within a year, I was qualified to provide an answer in this thread, that’s all.
I struggle in threads like this not to get all snarly and hair-pully-out, because I want to scream “NO, IT’S NOT!” What I need to remember is that it’s “no, it’s not. At least, not for me.”
Maybe this is true for healthy, wealthy, relaxed 1%ers, but my struggles with my weight have always been part and parcel of my other life struggles. If I am healthy, I can take the time and make good choices about what I’m eating. If I’m healthy, I have enough energy to go to the gym. If my career is going well, it’s probably because I’m healthy. If my finances are stable, the stress relief from that alone is going to make it possible for me to handle other things in a constructive manner.
My weight is not the last thing I focus on when everything else is going well. It’s the first thing I focus on.
I think you’re vastly underestimating just how powerful that social stigma is. Overweight children are more likely to report loneliness and sadness than children with cancer. The national dialogue on obesity, at best, stresses just how miserable all the fat people must be, how we live without dignity, how much of a burden we are when it comes to health care costs, how we’re going to die early, and how fat people impose themselves on the rest of the world when they don’t fit into airline seats. Usually, it lapses into a diatribe on how lazy, slobbish, and disgusting we are. In the last five years, the tone of discussion has turned downright ugly. This message board - a place I consider to have pretty much the highest levels of education, insight, and compassion on the Internet - still has posters refer to overweight people as “fatties”, and no one calls them on it.
It’s a constant barrage, and it’s exhausting. So, yes, it’s a huge factor in motivation. Unfortunately, it’s a negative factor. It doesn’t provide the confidence and resolve to be more active and eat in a healthier manner. It’s an obstacle to getting outside and living like a real person when you know other people are turning away in disgust or calling you names behind your back. It’s a punishment when you slip up, because you’ve just fulfilled all those prophesies about lack of willpower, laziness, greed, and gluttony.
As for health, it does happen to be my primary motivation, because as painful as the social stigma is, if I wanted to retreat from the world and exist as an overweight person without bearing the sting of rebuke, I could find a way to do it. But the co-morbidities that accompany obesity can’t be avoided. I have a family history of diabetes, cancer, and high blood pressure. I’m pre-diabetic, and my blood pressure ranges from normal to prehypertensive even with the beta blocker I take to prevent instances of paroxysmal tachycardia (which is almost certainly weight related). I know what happens to fat people with diabetes. I’ve seen my mom go through a double mastectomy when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. I’ve seen the destruction of self my father suffers from because of his high blood pressure induced strokes.
More than that, at the age of 41, I am terrifyingly aware of just how much loss of mobility I’m facing if I don’t get this weight off. I know that my left knee has some sort of damage, and that my left ankle is now acting up. I can’t pick myself up and move like I could even five years ago, and while much of that has to do with my lack of activity, the hundred pounds of extra fat I’m carrying around makes it so very much worse.
So, believe me when I say that the main factor in deciding to have weight loss surgery are health-related. Social stigma, powerful and damaging as it is, is a sidebar. In fact, if it were just social stigma, I would continue to try to willpower my way through weightloss just to show myself that I have the willpower and strength the rest of the world says I lack. Attractiveness? I don’t even know what that is. I haven’t been an adult woman and been what is considered an attractive weight, ever. So, that’s pie-in-the-sky daydreaming for me.
I want to hit 50 without being a fullblown Type II diabetic. I want to die with all my limbs still attached and my eyes still working. If I have cancer, I want to know that my body’s resources are devoted towards fighting and recovering from it, not coping with the stresses obesity puts on my body. I want to go for a hike without hurting myself or being exhausted for the rest of the day. I want to take part in the world around me without being left behind or left out.
I added the bold.
I know you didn’t mean it that way, not like what’s-his-face’s comment about “legitimate” rape, but really . . . what would be an illegitimate health reason? How is social acceptance and support not a health reason? There is a huge field of study with supporting research that shows people with social acceptance and support live longer, healthier, happier lives than people without it.
It can. Unfortunately, for some of us, it does not. I generally feel really good after exercising, so if I’m depressed and manage to exercise, I’ll have a 30-60 minute window of time to get started on something else and create the productivity snowball effect. If I miss the window, my mood plummets, and I’m right back where I started before the exercise.
About 12 years ago, I lost roughly 60 lbs- I don’t know exactly what my starting and ending weights were, but I went from weighing about 275 to weighing about 215 at my lowest.
I did this the old-fashioned way- diet and exercise. I basically counted calories and exercised like a fiend. I averaged 1.5 lbs lost per week over roughly 10 months. I then stayed between 215 and 230 for the next 3 years.
What happened next was what always happens next- stress and intense emotional issues. I started graduate school, and then after I got out, worked in a relatively stressful job as a consultant for about 3 years. I went from about 230-235 to about 275 between 2003 and 2008.
Then, between switching jobs, my wife having a miscarriage, and the new job becoming MUCH more stressful and awful, I gained another 25 lbs between about 2009 and 2012.
Now that things have calmed down, I’m back at the eating right part, and am down 25 again. I have no doubts though, that if something horrible happens to me, or I end up under a lot of stress again, I’ll probably start overeating again.
The hard part for me is finding exercise that I don’t find horribly boring, and that I want to spend the time doing- it seems like now that I’m married and have a child, I have very little time to do what I want to do anymore, and I sure as hell don’t want to spend that time being bored, sweating and pained at the gym.
I was at 270 this Thanksgiving 2011 and went on a diet which managed to arrest my weight gain until Christmas. At New Years I still weighted 270 and started a ketogenic low carb diet with 65% of my calories from fat, 30% from protein, and the rest carbs from vegetables. I worked fantastically and in August I was down to 213. Around that time my marriage really went downhill and I got constant sniping about cooking meals for myself, since my wife wanted to eat fast food constantly instead of real food. Since then, I gained back to 230 by Thanksgiving, but I was dealing with too many other things to worry about eating right. Now I have moved out and am back on track. As of this morning I was at 222, and I hope to reach my goal of 200 by the end of February.