Hello all! This may end up being a bit of a longer post, but I hope it provides some insight into what I believe is the most important part of health as it relates to weight management.
Part 1: the hidden problem
There are various statistics quoted all over the place as to the exact values for weight relapse, but the fact remains: even though weight loss feels hard, learning how to maintain weight after significant weight loss is objectively harder. The majority of people (some figures quote as high as 90%) who successfully lose 10% of their bodyweight or more will put back all of the weight (or more) within 3 years. So what exactly is going on, and what are the ramifications of this?
The cause is that people are not adapting a new lifestyle that is capable of maintaining their new weight after their weight loss phase is over. There are a huge variety of reasons that this happens, and there are some great videos covering the topic. One that I particularly enjoy is a study review (it's just him reading over a study) by physiologist PhD Dr Layne Norton New study on "How to Lose Weight & Keep It Off".
The goal of this post is not to do a deep dive into what it takes to maintain weight loss. This video gives a good overview, but the broad theme remains: going back to old habits that led them to their overweight status in the first place.
Part 2: the ramifications
Recognizing that keeping weight off in the long term is the actual enemy leads to several pieces of information that are necessarily true:
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Because weight loss communities are filled with mostly people that have not yet maintained a healthy weight in the long term, it is necessarily true that most of them will fail at this goal
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Advice given in a weight loss community by someone that has not yet kept weight off long term is likely to be advice given by someone that will fail at keeping weight off long term.
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The advice given in weight loss communities is advice given by a community that contains, by definition, a population that is terrible at maintaining a healthy weight long term relative to the general population. This is because they aren't currently a healthy weight often (not always!!!!), and haven't yet proven that their mindset is capable of sustaining long term weight loss
So am I writing this just to say "haha fatties none of you know what you're talking about lol!!!!"? No, of course not. What I am suggesting is that you have to be really, really careful about what you believe and what you listen to.
Part 3: self confidence
It is generally good to be confident about what you are doing, so long as what you are doing aligns with the truth. What is tough is that, although someone losing weight may believe that what they are doing will lead to long term weight loss and maintenance, that is necessarily not true by the numbers as most people that lose it are putting it back on.
So what is one to do? Just be a sulking pile of no confidence? I think the most important mindset to adopt is one of learning, and one of truth-seeking, where you are constantly doubting the things that you believe both presently, and the things that you have learned in the past. There is a lot about yourself that you will have to unlearn in order to successfully maintain weight loss. When people talk about "the need to reinvent yourself," I believe this is what they're referencing. You need to forget the things that you think you know, because those things have, by definition, not yet led you and most likely will not lead you to long term weight loss and maintenance.
When you find yourself putting labels on yourself like:
- "I just can't do running"
- "I just can't have sweets in the house"
- "My maintenance calories is X"
- "Every day, I do Y"
- "When I do Z, it really throws me off track"
Ask yourself: the odds are stacked against you, so how do I know that these things are helping? These thoughts are MOST LIKELY TO BE WRONG, they are coming from the mind of someone that has never maintained weight loss, and the numbers are stacked against you. None of this is "your fault", and I would posit that it's largely why obesity runs in families and seems to be a heritable characteristic. You get ideas planted in your head that you start to believe, or you're missing key ideas required for long term healthy weight maintenance. You need a sort of "ego death" to unlearn the things that you think you know.
Part 4: so what now?
I think that weight loss communities have this bizarre visceral reaction to people that have "always been skinny." But what is valuable about someone that has always been skinny? We can learn the correct wiring, the correct ideas, and the correct mindset and habit collection that lead to a lower set point. You need to develop a healthy lifestyle, and who better to learn from on what that looks like than... people with healthy lifestyles? Even people who are "unhealthy" but are a regular BMI (eat like shit and such), they're still maintaining a healthy weight somehow, so they're believing something in their mind, have developed habits, and are wired in such a way (from their environment) that they are staying a healthy weight.
If you go back and watch the Layne video above, that's exactly the type of wiring that people are citing helps them keep off weight: they are LEARNING the wiring of what it takes to keep a lower weight. They are following habits that eventually lead to understanding that keeping a low weight can be a happy experience that people look forward to every day. They want to exercise. They get excited about food as fuel. They are happy that their diet is flexible enough for treats. These are the types of things that you have to learn, and the people to look to are not yourself, and they're often not other overweight/obese people. This is not to say that other overweight/obese people do not have insight, but they are in the group that have the odds stacked against them.
Conclusion
I think the faster that you can accept you will need to unlearn a lot of what you think you know, the faster you can start building a new identity from the ground up. An identity that fosters self love, sustainability, lifestyle flexibility, grit, and positive communities. You can do this, but be careful about the things you think you know. God knows how many things I have had to unlearn. The future is bright, and keep learning more every day.
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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/1fe3k17/on_the_topic_of_maintenance_and_self_confidence/
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