Looking for Progress,
because there's NO Perfection

There’s quite a lot of online information about weight-loss available. But almost nothing about long-term maintenance of that weight-loss. One could conclude that people who have successfully maintained a large weight-loss for 5 plus years simply lose interest in the process and move on to other interests.  However, this doesn’t appear to be the most likely conclusion.

 First, all available research indicates that less than 5% of all successful dieters actually maintain lost weight for two years after a large weight-loss.  If one chose to use the numbers of the National Weight Loss Registry (of which I am a member), this total number would be a fraction less than 1%.

Next, two years is not really an exceptionally long time.  When I see someone who reports success at weight-loss, I mentally say… “Yeah, come talk to me in 5 years … or 8 years.”

People losing weight tend to post frequently and make themselves highly visible.  People gaining weight tend not to report that fact.  Almost no one who has a very-large weight-loss, reports their maintenance numbers after the first few years of maintenance.  

The highly-visible, online personalities who blog about their large weight-losses, tend to disappear a year or two after their success.  I’ve followed a few of these bloggers with interest as they lost weight, thinking perhaps THIS person will be an exception… that perhaps THIS ...

If a Past Miracle were in the Present Time.. 

We’re at the beginning of another year, and … like most people… I’ve been spending time evaluating myself and my life, thinking about my past and future goals and behaviors.

I’ve been involved in this weight-loss/maintenance struggle for a very long time. Sometimes it is harder to do this than at other times. Maintaining positive eating behaviors is more difficult for me whenever my positive eating behaviors fail to bring me positive weight results in (what I consider to be) a timely manner. This describes my current situation, which … even though I am currently a “normal” size …. makes today one of the hard times.

My lifetime path has involved a continual struggle to get and to keep my body at or near a “normal” size. I was born in the 1940s; was a child in the 1950s; and a young adult in the 1960s and 1970s; middle-aged in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and am now old in the 2010s +. At the end of this year my age will reach the seventies.

At every weight, I’ve always been healthy. My motivation for this lifetime struggle has never been “health”, it has always been vanity. It comes from a strong inner drive, established in my childhood, to force my body to fit into the norms of the culture in which I live. Unfortunately, I also have very strong opposing desires/needs that drive me to eat a variety of foods that my body tells me are delicious, in amounts which my body turns into fat.

I find maintaining my body at a “normal” weight to be extremely difficult. Even after 9 years of maintenance, even at the very top edge of a “normal” BMI, or even within the “overweight” area, I remain in a biologically altered state, my still plump body acts as if it were starving and works overtime to regain the pounds I’ve lost. To lose and keep off weight, I, as a “reduced obese” person, must eat far fewer calories and exercise far more than a “normal” person who maintains the same weight naturally.

For many years, my Set Point has been inside morbid obesity. It might have been more normal in childhood, and even in adolescence, but over the years of yo-yo dieting it ratcheted up. All evidence indicates that an increased Set Point is a one-way-street. I am certain that becoming a “normal” weight, and maintaining that weight for the past 9 years has not caused any reduction in my personal highest Set Point. For more information on this issue, see my previous posts in the DietHobby ARCHIVES.   Non-Diet Guru's can advise Intuitive Eating all they wish, but all that does is settle a person's body into its highest Set Point.  I know from my own experience (plus watching others) that "listening to my body" and eating what I wish to eat when I feel hungry, and stopping when I feel full",...  would result in my 5'0" tall body weighing over 250 lbs again.

This past year I’ve read quite a lot of books and blogs by people discussing “Fat Acceptance”. This has made me more consciously aware that each of us can choose whether or not we buy into our culture’s standards of beauty, and each of us must decide individually whether working to become a &ldquo...