Due to my 11+ years of maintaining a large weight-loss, I consider myself to currently be a “dieting success”. 

For the past 63 years, I’ve spent lots of time thinking about, reading about, and actually participating in a great many Diets that were designed to produce weight-loss.

Every Diet that I’ve ever been on involved my ability to withstand the physical, mental, and/or emotional hardship of living with various eating restrictions.

Although we can successfully put our primary focus on the positive aspects of a particular diet, or dieting in general,  negatives still exist; and, on occasion, these thoughts will fill our minds.  

What does “suffering” mean?  Suffering is bearing, or enduring, pain or distress, which can be either physical, mental or emotional.  Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts.

What is “dieting”?  Dieting is when a person gives their body less food than it needs to survive in the hope that it will eat itself, and thereby become smaller.  Call it a diet, call it a lifestyle change, when a person starves their body hoping that it will eat itself to achieve the result of intentional weight loss,  they are on a diet.

Most people perceive Dieting  …a restriction of one’s food intake…  to be a form of suffering, and weight-loss is considered the reward for enduring that suffering.

Successful dieting depends on the ability to make sacrifices. A sacrifice is something you give up for the sake of a better cause. 

When dieting, a person continually sacrifices by eating less-food-than-their-body-wants-and-needs-to-maintain-its-status-quo, in order to make that body’s physical size smaller, i.e. to lose weight.

When the weight-loss payoff for that sacrifice, which involves suffering, is reduced or disappears, …. people tend to fail in their efforts to restrict their food intake.

Great loves affairs have a honeymoon period and dieting is no exception.  A great many people do very well during the first two or three weeks of a diet.

It doesn’t matter how extreme the effort might be, how much restriction is involved, or how much hunger we might be facing; if the scale is moving, especially if it’s moving quickly, it’s easy to deny that we are suffering.

People who have come off the most extreme diets will often ...

I am now in my 11th year of working to maintain my body inside my normal BMI range, after successfully losing more than 57% of my total body weight.  At my highest weight I had a 52.9 BMI, and at my lowest weight in Maintenance I had a 20.3 BMI.

Here in Maintenance I do lots of personal experimenting with different types of diets and ways-of-eating.  I recently began a new diet experiment which I call “Freedom in Maintenance”.  

This current Plan Directly Restricts the total daily AMOUNT of food that I eat, (has a maximum daily calorie number), but does not restrict the KINDS of food eaten, nor restrict the FREQUENCY of eating.

The consistent repetition of actions is what establishes a habit, and most diet plans are designed to help create specific eating habits.  These diets set forth specific eating behaviors, and the dieter’s goal is to regularly follow those specific eating behavior patterns until doing so becomes almost involuntary.

This current plan is very different than almost all other diet plans in that it does not rely primarily on the “Habit” concept.  Its successful implementation  requires very little repetitious conduct, promotes ongoing individual variability and allows spontaneous eating decisions. This, however, is a calorie restricted diet, not an “intuitive eating” plan.

Here is a graphic
of my
Maintenance Plan

At this time, I’m choosing not to discuss the specifics of HOW I came up with this particular diet plan, nor WHY I am currently choosing to do this particular diet experiment, but I probably will do so at some future point. 

The daily maximum 900 calorie number was established because that is very close to the amount of calories that my body uses to maintain my body at my current weight. ... which is currently near the top of my Weight Range Maintenance Plan.  DietHobby has many articles discussing that issue, for one of these SEE: Projections About the Rate of Weight-Loss.

The graphic at the bottom of this page shows the basics of the Freedom in Maintenance diet plan. 

• The total amount of one day’s food is to consist of between Zero and 900 calories. 
• <...

During my lifetime of weight-loss and maintenance efforts, I’ve experimented with almost every diet.

All weight-loss diets necessarily involve some type of food restriction.  This is because every weight-loss “Diet”, “way-of-eating” or “lifestyle” requires eating less food than one’s individual body uses so that the body will make up the difference by eating itself for nourishment, i.e. consume its own stored fat for energy. 

(See The Essence of Diets - Part One  and  The Essence of Diets - Part Two).

While many Diets limit the Amount of food eaten by focusing on Indirect Restrictions such as limiting the Kinds of foods eaten and/or limiting the Frequency of eating, my own Diet preference is to Directly Restrict the Amount of food that I eat. 

I do this by working to figure out how many calories are in every bit of food that I eat, all the time, every day, AND immediately recording that information in an ongoing computer food journal.  I’ve now been doing this successfully every day for more than 12 consecutive years.   See ABOUT ME for my weight-loss and maintenance information.

When working to count calories, the task of weighing and measuring food accurately is very important. While the calorie numbers obtained will never be perfectly exact,  consistently paying close attention to careful measurements will provide calorie numbers accurate enough to bring weight-loss and maintenance success. 

There are many computer programs available that will help with calorie counting. 
For example: My Fitness Pal offers a basic free online program with a food diary and an excellent food database.


Successful calorie counting involves the issue of Portion Control.  Most of the time the best way to determine the amount of food in One Serving is to look at the Nutrition Facts label and measure it.  

A rough way to figure out how much food is in one serving is to fill a measuring cup with the suggested size portion of food and then empty it onto a plate.  That will help you learn what these serving sizes look like.

I also find it helpful to frequently use very small plates and very small bowls.

Measurement essentials are: 
measuring spoons, measuring cups, and a small kitchen counter food scale. 

When following measurement directions, remember that 1 teaspoon or 1 tablespoon means LEVEL, not mounded or heaping.