Research indicates that 95% of all dieters regain their lost weight within 5 years. 

I am  a “reduced obese” person who has been maintaining my body at or near a “normal” BMI for the past 13+ consecutive years, so I am one of the 5% who has maintained their weight loss for more than 5 years.

Long-term Maintenance of my very large Weight-Loss requires me to Diet continually. By this I do NOT mean that I “Yo-Yo Diet”. I mean that I must CONSISTENTLY Diet.  Minute-after-minute, hour-after-hour, day-after-day, week-after-week, month-after-month, year-after year.

I am not, … nor will I ever become, … a “normal” eater who can effortlessly maintain a “normal” weight.  Even after all these years of consistent weight-loss maintenance, I've found that as a "reduced obese" person, I must fight my body continually in order to keep it from taking me up back into morbid obesity.

Basically, I engage in ongoing calorie restriction.  Over the years I’ve chosen to experiment with a variety of diets, ways-of-eating, lifestyles, and diets-that-claim-not-to-be-diets.  However, every one of these eating variations involves restricting calories in one way or another.

I log all of my daily food in a computer journal, and keep an eye on my calorie intake. 

Generally, I follow some basic eating guidelines which tend to give me freedom from specific diet rules, in the following ways.

My preferences matter.  I get to say what I like and what I don’t, and I can’t be wrong.


I manage my eating in a flexible way, similar to the way I budget my money, — not spending an absolute set amount every day, but keeping an eye on the bottom line.

Financially, I live within my means.  Although I don’t track every single purchase, I do look at price tags, comparison shop, and have a general idea of whether I can afford something.


I do the same with eating,
… paying attention to:

    ▪    The energy value (i.e. calories) in the foods I eat, or think about eating;...

It is difficult to communicate the Realities of Long-Term-Weight-Loss-Maintenance.  I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.

I am a Reduced-Obese person who has been successfully maintaining a large weight-loss for more than 13 years, which is a very long time.  For the past 7 years here at DietHobby I’ve been demonstrating my involvement with that maintenance process.

One idea that seems to be uniquely my own was the choice to consider Dieting as an ongoing Hobby, and I’ve written a lot about that already. In fact, I’ve written a great deal about most of the Dieting issues that interest me.  I’ve posted hundreds of articles, pictures, videos which are all still here, indexed and available for review Individually, in the Blog Archives, in the Blog Categories, and also under specific Section Headers.  See the Contents Directory for more details.

Just like there are different stages of Dieting, there are different stages of Maintenance.

Unless you’ve actually spent a lengthy amount of time on one or more Diets, you cannot truly UNDERSTAND the experience of Dieting. 

Understanding Maintenance also requires ACTUAL LONG-TERM EXPERIENCE of being personally involved with the Maintenance process.

In all this time, I have not personally run across any other “reduced-obese” person who has lost from a “super-obese” BMI, down to a “normal” BMI and has been successfully maintaining that weight loss for 10 or more years. Not in person, not diet-book authors, and not online.  And yet I’ve been diligently searching for quite a long time.

People who are NOT involved with dieting … either on a diet or planning to be on one… are seldom interested in receiving extensive information about the benefits or pitfalls of dieting, let alone the maintenance issues that occur after successfully dieting.  

Most of the people who ARE involved in the process of dieting, focus on their weight-loss goals; hope for an easy “maintenance”; and don’t want to face potential maintenance issues until after they cross their goal “Finish Line”. 

The task of Maintenance during the first few years immediately after a large weight-loss is usually more difficult than most dieters expected, and the last thing new MAINTAINERS want to hear is that the process is not going to get any easier … and that, in fact, it will probably become MORE difficult as time goes on.

So… I’ve learned that most people NOT dieting don’t want to hear about the realties of long-term Maintenance.

Most People ON diet...