With the caveat that I only lost 50+ lbs and I’ve currently maintained for only a bit over 7 months - I trace my lack of an “off” switch to being a latch key child as a kid. Around age 11, my mom went back to work. My brother and I had to come home after school and we were not allowed to leave the house (in the summer with no school, we were not allowed to leave the house all day). I ate because I was bored - I would eat all afternoon and watch TV - stuff like sprinkling sugar on bread and eating it. As an adult, I would eat all afternoon at work - M&Ms or chips out of the snack machine.
I still have the hardest time in the afternoons (a lot of people I talk to are “night time bingers” but I very rarely eat after dinner), I defuse it with lots and lots and lots of tea. I have a cup of tea in my hand from 2-5 every day.
Maintenance is such an important topic to me because I’m constantly terrified I’m going to gain weight back. As a former 2 time loser (losing weight and then gaining all the weight back and more), I have lived the heartbreaking feeling of losing control.
After a lot of thinking and research, it is my opinion that my previous weight loss attempts were too restrictive - my goal was only to “lose weight” with no plan for what I would do after I lost the weight. Since in the past I starved my body with a very low calorie diet, my body reacted by binging as soon as I returned to “normal” eating. After generations of poor harvests and famines, I really can’t blame my body for reacting like that to a perceived famine.
This time - my plan from day 1 was not to hit a goal weight, but to change forever. I never saw what I’m doing as having an “end date.” I was very careful when I started to try to choose a diet that I could stick with forever (for example, any type of “low carb” was out of the question since I can’t live without a lot of brown rice and whole wheat pasta/tortillas/bread).
I’ve really been concentrating on the health benefits of food - tomatoes to fight cancer, blueberries to prevent age related brain issues, spinach for eyes, nuts for the heart. It’s more about what I do eat rather than what I do not eat.
I’ve also made a lot of goals that have nothing to do with my weight - goals for working out, goals for cholesterol levels, etc.
Okay - talked too long, but this is something I think about every day.