Why Is This Happening? - October 2017 - POSTED ON: Oct 06, 2017
During the this past 12 years of my weight-loss maintenance, I’ve been collecting data about my food and weight. This provides me with a great deal of personal information, and that data tells me that … over the years … my weight is continuing to creep upward, even though I keep reducing my calorie intake. I find this fact very annoying, as well as perplexing. Until I was faced with this personal information, I believed what our Culture teaches: “If Fat people cut back on their food intake enough to reach a “normal” weight, their bodies will become like the bodies of “normal” people. To maintain that weight loss, they need to eat more than they did to lose the weight, but not go back to eating as they did previously: in a gluttonous manner.” Essentially, I thought that you diet down to your goal weight number; cross the finish line; and from that time on you will maintain your weight-loss by eating like normally thin people do. This is NOT what has been happening for ME. So, I began wondering why? What’s going on? I spent a lot of time studying books, and articles, and research about this issue, and learned that as a “reduced obese” person, what has been happening to ME, personally, seems to fall within the theories of Set Point, and Biological Adaptation. My History I’ve spent my lifetime dieting, from my youth into my old age. I’ve lost, and regained, hundreds of pounds of fat. About 25 years ago, at age 48, I had an open RNY gastric bypass surgery, which - at the time - was still considered experimental. This forced me to eat in a way that dropped my BMI from a 52.9 BMI = Stage 4 - Super-obese, down to a 31.4 BMI = Stage 1 - just over the border of obese. After a few years I began actively dieting again in order to avoid a rapid regain. About 13 years ago, around age 60, I was back up to a 38 BMI = Stage 2 -Severe obesity. I began logging my food and daily weight into a computer software diet program. I begun losing weight, and about 16 months later, in January 2006, I reached my goal of a 22.5 BMI = in the middle of the "Normal" weight range. During the 12 years since that time, now almost age 73, I’ve continued using a computer program to log my food and daily weight. As a result of that effort, I’ve maintained my weight at-or-near a BMI range of “normal”. I now also have 13 years of records showing my personal daily food and weight data.
Weight Range Mantenance Plan - POSTED ON: Oct 02, 2017
I created a Weight Range Maintenance Chart in order to make my maintenance weight goals clearly visible. This is my Current Chart.
Here is a scale photo of my current weight. I have been successfully maintaining a very large weight-loss for many years. You can find my history in the ABOUT ME section which contains a great many links to detailed weight and calorie charts. I reached my goal weight of 115 pounds in January 2006, and since that time I’ve been making ongoing, consistent, diligent efforts to maintain my weight near that number.
I work to keep my weight within a certain number range, rather than at an individual “goal weight” number. I find this necessary because my body has frequent large weight bounces due to salt/water/waste issues. Despite my best efforts, during any one-month period, my daily weight tends to bounce back and forth inside a 5 to 8 pound range.
For the past 12 years, I’ve been able to keep these bounces between 115 and 135 pounds.
On occasion however, my weight has BRIEFLY been as much as 10 pounds below and 5 pounds above that basic bounce range. The yearly weight chart posted here shows my very lowest yearly weight during each of the past 12 years.
Running DOWN the UP Escalator - Weight Loss & Maintenance - POSTED ON: Sep 30, 2017
This article "hits the nail on the head" in the way it accurately describes my own personal experience, as well as what I’ve witnessed for years while watching the experiences of others. It contains one of most accurate analogies for Weight-loss and Maintenance that I’ve ever heard.
Some might find it depressing, but here in my 8th year (now starting my 12th year) of maintaining a very large weight-loss, I find it encouraging and positive to hear a medical professional, who is an expert in obesity, speak the unvarnished Truth.
Despite the fact that this Truth is rather unpleasant, and isn’t something we’re ever going to hear from Marketing Interests… (which includes most doctors and nutritionists) …. Facing it, Understanding it, and Accepting it, can be very helpful.
Running Down the Up Escalator By Dr. Ayra Sharma, M.D. (a Canadian Obesity Specialist) One of the games I used to play as a kid was to run Down the UP escalator. To get to the bottom, I had to run faster than the escalator was moving up. If I ran any slower, the escalator would gradually but steadily take me back to the top. In fact, even to just stay half-way down, I’d have to keep running at about the speed the escalator was moving up. If I stopped running even for a second, I’d be moving up again. As you may guess, I am using this analogy, to illustrate the challenge of losing weight and keeping it off. The escalator represents all the complex neuroendocrine responses to weight loss that will always want to take you back to the top – the only way to reach the bottom or to even maintain your place half-way down is to keep running. Alas, in real life, the weight-loss escalator is even trickier. For one, there is no real bottom – i.e. no matter how fast you run, you will never reach the bottom and be able to simply get off. No matter how far down the escalator you manage to get, you are still running on the escalator and it will keep moving you back up to the top the minute you stop running. But things get even more depressing, because, the further down the escalator you get, the faster it runs. This means that the further down the escalator you manage to get – the harder you have to keep running to just stay where you are. Or, in other words, when you start from the top, the escalator is running relatively slowly and you may easily manage to get down the first 5 steps. But as you go down, the escalator picks up speed and so, if you just keep up running with the speed you started at, you may not even manage to hold your place 5 steps down. And, to get to 10 steps down, you’ll definitely have to speed up – unfortunately, with every additional step you manage to make your way down, the escalator moves up even faster.
Status Update - September 2017 - POSTED ON: Sep 06, 2017
Treating Dieting as a Hobby (see: ABOUT ME) involves the ongoing task of finding or creating ways to keep myself interested in detailed issues involving Weight-Loss and Maintenance, as well as watching how MY own body responds to those various issues. Here at DietHobby I sometimes share my personal weight and calorie numbers, along with Tactics that I’ve used to help me in Maintenance. These past articles showing my weight and calorie history can be easily located under BLOG CATEGORIES, Status Updates. Yesterday I posted about my Summer Experiment 2017. Collecting, recording, and analyzing detailed personal data has helped me lose weight and maintain that weight-loss. For the past 13 years I’ve been logging all of my daily food intake into a computer food journal which provides me with a calorie count. I’ve also been using a scale to see my early morning weight, unclothed, immediately after urination, which I record immediately. As part of my long-term-weight-loss-Maintenance journey I use various charts to track my progress. Although each chart uses the exact same weight and calorie information, I’ve found that charting that information in different ways helps give me new viewpoints which sometimes results in additional insight. Bounce Chart My body’s daily weight tends to Bounce up and down quite a lot. In my weight-loss phase I created a table that I call a “Bounce Chart”, and during a specific time period, I make daily entries to a specific chart in order to track the range of my daily weight deviations. The 98 Days of Summer “Bounce” chart shown here covers the 98 day time period between Memorial Day and Labor Day 2017. It shows my starting weight was 133.2 and my ending weight was 132.0. So, this shows that I had a net weight loss of 1.2 pounds for the entire summer which involved a 9 pound “Bounce Range”. During that 98 day period, I ate an average of 662 calories per day.
Summer Experiment 2017 - POSTED ON: Sep 05, 2017
As part of my long-term Maintenance of a large weight-loss (currently 12+ years ), I do a lot of personal experimenting with various dieting issues. My experiment this summer from Memorial Day to Labor Day was to see how my own body’s weight results compared with the Body Weight Planner’s (BWP) projected calculations;
... while making a consistent and hard-core effort to drop my current weight lower in my Maintenance Weight Range (back below the 25 BMI border between “normal” and “overweight”).
The Overview pictured above shows my personal data input and the program’s projections for weight-loss. I’m age 72, going on 73, so I listed my age as 73. I used the lowest percentage that the program will allow for my Physical Activity Level. Based on my personal numbers, the program gave me an 1151 maintenance calorie burn. It projected that if I ate 900 calories per day for the 98 days between Memorial Day and Labor Day, I would lose from 133.2 pounds down to 126.0 pounds. This would be a loss of 7.2 pounds over a 14 week period, averaging about ½ pound loss per week. Note that the program projects that at the end of the 98 days, in order to maintain a 126.0 pound weight, my calorie burn would be 1121, which is an ongoing 30 calorie reduction. This Simulation Graph shows that Increasing my calories from 900 for weight-loss to 1121 for maintenance would cause a weight UpBounce of 1.5 pounds over a 6 day period (98 days of dieting, + 6 days of maintenance = 104 days).
Therefore my projected final ongoing weight result would be 127.5, which would bring me back just inside my “normal” BMI range. Many years of keeping ongoing records of my weights and calorie counts have taught me that my personal metabolism burn is Lower than the Average rate predicted by Metabolic Formulas, so my personal diet plan for this experiment was to work to keep my daily calorie intake below 700 calories.
Mar 01, 2021 DietHobby: A Digital Scrapbook. 2000+ Blogs and 500+ Videos in DietHobby reflect my personal experience in weight-loss and maintenance. One-size-doesn't-fit-all, and I address many ways-of-eating whenever they become interesting or applicable to me.
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