Temporary Maintenance

I wanted to thank you all for your nice words and encouraging comments from my Dr. Oz show appearance. It was an amazing experience, and I just so appreciate all of your support and good wishes!

I’ve had a hard time concentrating on writing (I wonder why) but one topic that keeps popping into my mind today is maintenance. Dr. Oz said on the show that losing weight was great, but it was maintaining the weight that made him happy. And that’s exactly how I feel. I lost a lot of weight over the 10 years that I was obese, but I never was able to maintain or sustain the weight loss. So here are some thoughts on temporary maintenance – because getting to goal and staying there is most of our goals. At least it was for me!

You know, I’ve read a lot of blogs over the past 10 months and one really great thing I see happening sometimes is that people have lost weight and then hit a plateau of sorts. It can be a plateau very close to their goal weight, or a plateau which is still quite far from their goal. But what I love to see is that in spite of the plateau they aren’t quitting. Rather they are content to work hard at exercise and eating right while at the same time holding steady at their weight. I know that Vickie has talked about this on her blog before.

I call this temporary maintenance. Temporary maintenance is a good thing. It’s a more positive phrase than “stuck on a plateau.” Sometimes this temporary maintenance is deliberate and other times it just happens. But either way, it can be a really important part of your journey. Why?

Because when you are in temporary maintenance you are maintaining. And maintaining is your long term goal. Sure you have a long term goal of losing “x” number of pounds, but more importantly, a longer term goal should be the maintenance of the loss of those “x” pounds! Right? Right. So temporarily maintaining a weight loss, be it for two weeks or two years, isn’t always a bad place to be. It can be frustrating, but if you try and look at that time as a learning experience then perhaps the frustration and inevitable temptation to fall back into old habits can be squashed.

Here are some positive things about temporary maintenance:

♥ You aren’t gaining

♥ You can focus on eating healthy

♥ You can exercise consistently

♥ You can “play” around with food intake, determining where the balance point is

♥ You can try new things

When I was losing weight that final times, I didn’t have any really long periods of temporary maintenance – but there were the occasional weeks or two where my weight seemed to stabilize. And it stabilized at about every 50 pounds. At 250 it stopped for a bit, at about 199 it stopped again. Both times, instead of getting frustrated I remembered how far I had come and how happy I was to be where I was right then. Focusing on the positive aspects of all I had accomplished really helped me too.

How do you react when you hit a temporary maintenance point? Diane