During my lifetime, I’ve lost and regained a great deal of weight.  For the past 11+ years, I've maintained my body at or near my “normal” BMI range.

I’ve experimented with many different diets, lifestyles, ways-of-eating, and non-diets.  See ABOUT ME. 

After all these years, here’s the most important basic fact that I’ve learned about losing weight and keeping it off.

How to Lose weight:
Sustain a caloric DEFICIT.

How to Keep it off:
Sustain a caloric BALANCE.

Various diet “experts” exist who dispute this law of calorie balance.  I’ve spent a lot of time studying and experimenting with that issue, and it has become clear to me that manipulating micronutrients does NOT “open a rift in the space-time-insulin continuum to transport body fat into the fifth dimension”.

I find it helpful to deal with Reality.

There are lots of methods of dieting including low-calorie, low-fat, low-carb, high-fat,  ketogenic, intermittent fasting, whole foods, unprocessed foods, food exchanges, etc. etc. etc.

However, cutting calories is the basis for every effective weight-loss diet because the only way to lose actual fat is to consistently get one’s calorie intake lower than one’s calorie expenditure. So in actuality, the bottom line for weight-loss is the average daily calorie number.

There are essentially 3 issues involved in all Diets,

The main food issue is: AMOUNT; and two sub-issues are: KIND and FREQUENCY.

•  AMOUNT -- of food eaten
  
•  KIND – fundamental nature (micronutrients) of food eaten
  
•  FREQUENCY of eating food

All Diets involving weight-loss or maintenance of weight-loss place restrictions on one or more of those three food issues.  The fundamental purpose of each of these restrictions is to reduce a dieter’s calorie intake. 

Some diets Directly restrict the food AMOUNT; while other diets Indirectly restrict the food Amount by restricting the KIND of food eaten, and/or the FREQUENCY of eating.  For additional information on this issue, see: The Essence of Diets. 

Every weight-loss diet requires that, … through some method, … attention be paid to how many calories one consumes, and how many one is burning.

ANY diet will lead to weight loss if one is in a caloric deficit, even one that is based on Twinkies, Doritos and Oreos, like Professor Mark Haub’s junk-food weight-loss experiment diet.

Some Diet Experts discount the importance of calorie restriction in order to get dieters to focus on their recommended way-of-eating. 

For example, Dr. Jason Fung, a proponent of Intermittent Fasting, refers to it as CRaP (Calorie Restriction as Primary).  While he doesn’t deny that a calorie deficit must exist for weight loss to occur, his claim is that calories aren’t the First and Most Important consideration. 

Calories are what matters for weight loss, but that doesn’t mean that all foods are equal, or that one shouldn’t pay attention to the specific foods eaten, because quality affects quantity. Low quality foods tend to be higher in calories and lower in nutrition.

There are “experts” everywhere who will tell you exactly What, and When, and How to eat. 

But food issues are very personal, and many of these involve a need for self-experimentation to find out which food restrictions will cause weight-loss without making one feel suicidal.

My personal choice is to track and record all my food intake in a computer journal which provides me with a calorie count. 

I have consistently done that every day for the past 12+ years, and I plan to continue with that practice. 

Calorie Counting gives me the Freedom to make my own individual food choices.

But with Freedom comes Responsibility, meaning that for ME, it requires consistent Food Tracking.  See: Freedom and Calorie Counting.   At the beginning, doing this can seem time-consuming and tedious, but for ME, it has now become a rather enjoyable habit. 

Accuracy or lack of accuracy is always an issue when counting calories, but I do my ultimate best to weigh, measure, and record consistently and accurately, and I am willing to trust that my personal best efforts are good enough.

While it is impossible for any calorie count to be totally accurate, it is possible ….

with
Consistent Effort,
Attention,
and Honesty

…. to get calorie numbers that will provide successful weight-loss and maintenance. 

Research studies have shown, again and again, that the more regularly a dieter keeps a food log, the more weight the dieter loses.

               

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 say that their restrictive diet was “great”, and that they just failed to stick with it.

But if their diet really was so great, why couldn’t they stick with it?  Why wasn’t the promise of “thin” (aka: “healthy”) enough to keep them restricting their food intake? 

In almost every case, people who are on an intense diet give it up once the scales slows down.  While the scale is regularly whispering sweet nothings in their ears, it is easy to live in denial of their actual suffering that is involved with that eating behavior.  After all, the numbers on that scale are flying down.  But eventually and inevitably, their weight loss slows down. 

This is the problem with weight loss; it simply doesn’t last forever.  It slows down because the body loses weight, physiologic changes called “metabolic adaptations” occur that are designed to protect us against what the body perceives as some sort of famine. It slows down because, as we lose weight, there’s literally less of us to burn calories. 

Weight loss also slows down because, in the diet’s early honeymoon-like days, dieters are usually more vigilant and strict.  Eventually, if the scale slows down too much, stops, or …worse…starts going back up, suddenly all of that suffering becomes too much for them to endure.  After all, why suffer if there’s no payoff?


I see a great deal of truth in what obesity specialist, Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, M.D. says in his book “The Diet Fix”.

Dr. Freedhoff says, "If you don't like the life you're living while you're losing, eventually you're going to find yourself going back to the life you were living before you lost."  Doing this will cause your body to re-gain the weight-loss.

 
About weighing and scale addiction, Dr. Freedhoff says that physiologically, plateaus do not exist.

He acknowledges that there are periods of time when the scale doesn’t immediately and accurately reflect a person’s fat loss; but then he says ….”Unless it’s a temporary trick of the scale, . . . if you're not losing, either you're burning fewer calories than you think; you're eating more than you think; or some combination thereof.“



He says although there's really no such thing as a “Plateau”, there IS such a thing as a "FLOOR". If you've truly stopped losing weight, there are really only two questions you need to ask yourself. 


1. Could I happily eat any less?


2. Could I happily exercise any more?


If the answer is "yes" then you can tighten things up, but If the answer to both is "no", there's nothing left for you to do.  The number of your BMI is not an issue. You’ve Arrived.  You’re There.

This is because IF you can't happily eat any less and you can't happily exercise any more -- then it's unlikely that doing this will ever become part of your permanent behavior.  If your new eating behavior is only temporary, eventually your former eating behavior will return…along with your lost weight.

Eating isn’t really only about health or weight management.  Food isn’t just fuel.  If it were, we would all swallow our calorie pills, followed by our vitamin pills, and be whatever weight we wanted, because we would easily take in more calories, or less calories, depending on what body size we wanted. 

Food really isn't ONLY about fuel or sustenance.  It also exists for pleasure; to comfort; to celebrate; to bolster; and to support. 

Some people are able to endure a great deal of suffering in order to reach a weight-goal that they greatly desire.

However, long term weight management has to somehow become more than just the entrenchment of suffering. 

Individuals who want to succeed at maintaining long-term weight loss must find some long-term method of eating that allows them to be be able to eat less food in a way, that for them, doesn’t qualify as suffering.

I’m  continually searching for that way.

NOTE:  Bumped up for new viewers. Originally posted on 2/1/2016

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. 
• The amount of allowable meals in one day is between Zero and 9. 
  
• The allowable meal size is anywhere between a tiny morsel and a large meal. 
  
• The timing of the zero to 9 meals is totally random. 
  
• Every kind of food is permitted, nothing is forbidden and nothing is required. 
  
• The ONLY limitation is the 900 calorie daily restriction.
  

I will be recording pictures of some of my various Freedom in Maintenance meals in the Photo Gallery section of DietHobby (look under the heading RESOURCES)   Most of these food photos will be specific to size and measurement and also show a calorie count for that portion size.

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. 


Also ¼ of a cup is a level measurement in some measuring cups, but a distance below the brim for other measuring cups, however it is also never mounded or heaping.

There can be a great deal of calorie difference between 1 level teaspoon and 1 level tablespoon.

For example: butter or peanut butter. 1 level teaspoon is about 33 calories; 1 level tablespoon is about 100 calories…

BUT 1 heaping teaspoon is actually about 1 tablespoon (100 calories), and 1 heaping tablespoon is about 2 tablespoons. (200 calories).

 

There can also be a great deal of calorie difference between ¼ of a cup; ½ of a cup; and 1 cup.
 
¼ of a level cup of mixed nuts is about 225 calories. ½ level cup is about 450 calories. 
1 level cup is about 900 calories.  One heaping cup is about 1125 calories.

This past year or so I started recording pictures of some of my various meals in the Photo Gallery section of DietHobby (look under the heading RESOURCES) to record various meals that I’ve actually eaten as part of various experiments-of-one.  Most of these foods are specific to size and measurement and also show a calorie count for that portion size. 

I've also made quite a few Recipe Videos that demonstrate measurements and portion sizes.  You can find these under the header RECIPES.  Below is one of my Recipe Videos which demonstrates the Measurements of Peanut Butter.
 

What did

one skeleton

say to

the other?

Congratulations!

You

reached

the

Finish

Line.

When it comes to the issue

of Weight Loss & Maintenance

of that Weight-Loss,

As Long as Llife Exists...

There

is

NO Finish Line.

Saying it Again....

There is NO

Finish Line.

Those who would like to understand more should read the article: Running DOWN the UP Escalator - Weight Loss & Maintenance. 
Also, review the articles contained here at DietHobby, under:  Blog Category:  Research - Science.