Transition complete! From weight loss to weight weight maintenance Feb 2017 one month, steady state

Remember my post, the one about transitioning from weight loss to weight maintenance being short and well defined? Well, I've reached full time weight maintenance at a weight that is better for me.

The time period: It took about 1 month or so to really lock things down. Now 35 more years of weight maintenance. to go. LOL. Really, I just can concern myself with today and things will be okay.

In real life: Likely, I'll have to cycle between weight loss and weight maintenance many times, although, I'm aiming for a long time in between unintentional gain. Like a few years. or months. I'll take what I get and I won't throw a fit.

one month of weight loss, one month of weight maintenance Jan-Feb 2017

Now the real work begins!

Seriously, I see so much bad advice out there for weight maintainers. Advice that will absolutely result in weight regain. Intentional or unintentional, I'm on 100% constant vigilance during the next 6  months,  entire time of my remaining life span. 

Here's some fool proof advice: Choose your monitoring tools wisely. Monitor your weight, food intake, movement glucose, ketones if it helps, strength, blood pressure, inflammation markers, sleep, and stress relief. Choose  enough tools to identify and reverse a gain trend so that weight maintenance is simply weight maintenance.

Choose tools carefully. Choose weight maintainer seniors carefully, too. This is important if additional roots of obesity have not been addressed.

HINT: Develop habits around measurements and frequencies for long term weight maintenance. The focus will have to shift, so that new habits become sustainable habits. Then, when the next habit set (main habit with subsets) can be learned, practiced, sustained. 

That habit cycle will need to happen for each root cause of obesity. Toss some self growth in there. It's like fertilizer.

Unless you want to yo-yo!? After 40 years, I needed to stop yo-yo dieting. 

Good News: It seems for me to get easier (metabolically, emotionally) since I stopped cycling back into the food addiction or the bio-chemical mess or the stinking thinking that was killing me (or making life miserable) in the first place. 

Habit changes, one by one, only in the direction that will give me weight maintenance

Here's what is working now: 

• I keep my monitoring tools handy, 
• I check often (but not too much), and 
• I'm way, way, way honest with myself and what I tell myself
• I check in with other weight maintainers in real life.

What didn't work during other attempts:

• I did not monitor the correct metrics for my obesity root causes
• I did not monitor enough
• I was not honest with myself and my weight gain, getting food high was more fun!
• I didn't go out to find other abstainers like myself, stayed with moderators too long.

How long does it take you to transition between steady states? Have you ever strung together 2 months or two years of steady state weight maintenance? For me it's been 5 years +/- 10 pounds, and only 2 years +/- 3 pounds.

Very interesting....  I have to say I love steady state weight maintenance.