Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 28: Why you struggle to maintain your weight after weight loss?
Transcript
- Cameron Cummings: Welcome to Cameron's Conversation. So in today's episode, I want to talk all about why you struggle to, and have struggled to, maintain your weight after weight loss. Now this is a subject I am super, super, super passionate about, so I'll try and keep this a reasonable length, but it's so important we get this right. I know it's great that you lose weight. and you feel much better for it and have talked so much about all the impacts that had on me. Now all of that's bloody brilliant, but if you pile it on at an unbelievable pace, that is not a great position to be in for a couple reasons. One, you end up super bloody demotivated because you have dieted for all this time and then you're now beating yourself up about the fact that you're now back to or working your way towards, not intentionally perhaps, being back to where you were when you first started, which is not what we want. And two, if we repeated the yo-yo diet and lose huge sways of weight, I'm trying to say that right, if you lose huge sways of weight and then regain it, lose weight and regain it, the problem is you might also be losing some lean tissue and muscle mass over that time. And the issue with that is if you keep doing that and keep doing that and keep doing that, whilst we also are likely to lose muscle mass as we get older, particularly if you're someone who's maybe not the most active or not the most likely to train in the gym or not very consistent with it, that puts you at a little bit greater risk of kind of being in this odd position where you've dieted, regained, dieted, regained, dieted, regained, but instead of actually being in the same position, you're a little bit worse off because you have a little bit less muscle mass than you did there originally, and that means that actually there could be bit of a longer term impact or health because having more muscle mass is very, very important, right? That's a position we don't particularly want to end up in. Now the reason I think people struggle so much with maintenance, I suppose there's reasons, right? One of them is that no one ever talks about it, and I think a lot of coaches are guilty about this, is no one ever talks about what comes after weight loss, because it's much easier to talk about fat loss, and hey, hands up, right? That's gonna be me too to some extent. I absolutely do talk about maintenance, I'm talking about right now. I talk about it in emails, I talk about it elsewhere on social media, but the thing is, is that it all starts with weight loss, right? So that's where we're always going to want to start. That is where people are going to start their journeys and where it's most exciting. But we need to consider the next stage that follows afterwards, which is this, is the starting to figure out how do we maintain weight. But if no one's ever talked to you about it, a lot of the time people just assume it happens. I'm gonna lose three stone. Amazing, great, well done. You've lost three stone now. That's great. What's the plan for keeping it off? I'll just keep healthy habits. Okay, cool. Then three months later, they're piling weight back on because actually they're not kept those healthy habits because what they didn't do is they didn't transition from weight loss to maintenance. They had no strategy. They didn't know what should change and what shouldn't change because unsurprisingly, and this will be no shock to anyone listening, It's not the case that when you go to maintenance you can just be like, feet up on the desk, eat whatever I want, inhale a whole box of cereal every day for breakfast with a wee bit of toast and then have as many snacks as you like. All that does is lead you to pile weight back on. So that isn't gonna work, we can identify that. So it's like, okay, well, I need to keep some of my habits, but what habits do I keep? How flexible can I be? How flexible should I be with my food? How do I still keep some structure in but maybe allow myself to relax a little bit more than dieting? There's a lot more that goes into this. So the first bit of advice I would give is that to avoid that kind of collapse, if you like, at end of a weight loss phase is to treat maintenance with the same level of effort and energy that you put into your weight loss phase. Treat it as a skill to learn. So there's a few things I would start with, practically speaking. One, I'm a big fan of daily weigh-ins. I would continue to do those, right? I would continue to do daily weigh-ins. Two, I would keep tracking my calories. Now you might think, well, yeah, but I don't wanna track my calories forever. And that's absolutely right. You shouldn't need to track your calories. Like no one wants to be 93 years old still tracking calories, right? We don't need that. What we want to do instead is we want to be in a position where we weigh ourselves regularly so we can actually ascertain that we are indeed at maintenance. And also we want to track our calories so we can set a new target to stick to and get settled into the routine of that because I'm currently dieting on around about 2,000 calories. When I go back to maintenance, initially I'll go up to about 2,700 and eventually it will phase back to about 3,000 to 3,200 because my calories are quite high because I'm quite active. So I know some people will be listening to think, oh my God, I'd love to eat that many calories. I know, but it's all relative to high activity levels. training experience and so on and so forth. But the point is, is that if I'm on 2,000 calories, that feels really bloody different to 2,700. Even if you're a smaller female and you're going up by 300 calories, that still feels significantly different to where you are right now. And the reason that matters is the habits you have are all driven around the calories you have that are available right now to you. That's where we're at. So if you're in a weight loss phase right now, you know what you're doing for that. If I said to you, right, do you know what, you can't have your tracking app for a day, but I want you to stick to the calories, and if you manage it, I'll pay you 100 pounds, but you need to stick pretty close to them. You can't be too far under, too far over. You'd probably do a pretty sensible job of that, because you would have an idea of roughly where it should sit, right? The problem is, is that when you go up to maintenance, you have no idea what it feels like to be at maintenance. You don't even really, truly know where your maintenance calories are. Now, you absolutely can use a calculator to calculate your maintenance calories. That's fine. And that might be, especially if you're not being coached, quite a sensible thing to do. But please remember that it's an estimate. So let's say I use a calorie calculator and I am on 2,000 calories and it says Cameron you need to be on 2,600 to maintain weight. Cool. If I weigh myself every day and I track my calories every day, I know over two to three weeks I see actually, my weight's still dropping, it ain't dropping as fast, but it's still slowly trickling down. What does that tell me? Well, it tells me I'm probably not eating enough calories to be at maintenance, I need to up them again. So I do that and I repeat that process maybe by 100 calories this time, and then maybe 100 more two or three weeks later. And I do that iteratively, so it means that I'm progressing up and then eventually I'm like, actually, my weight hasn't dropped at all in the last two weeks, it's been really steady, let's hang about here, let's stop there. And that's fine. I know where I'm at. And then what I can progressively do is start to phase tracking out some of the time. I might phase it out on a Monday, for example, but then still track the other six days a week, then a Wednesday, then I might do three weekdays. Notice what I'm doing here is not stopping tracking the weekends, which is not a clever idea, by the way. The first day you will want to not track is the highest calorie day. So if you know your Saturdays have a tendency to be a bit rogue, then you'll know. I quite like to not track a Saturday, that would be great. That's exactly the day to track. Track your weekends. If there's last three days that you stop tracking, should probably be Friday, Saturday, Sunday, right? Those are the days for most people. Obviously everyone's different. I appreciate that might not be applicable. If you're someone who has a social event on a Thursday night, like every week, then that might be different. The point is this, is that I would continue to track the weekends or the social days first and foremost, and then progressively, but at the very end, I would start to reduce that one weekend day, then another. And if at any point your weight starts to climb back up, you maybe need to add another tracking day in and check in with yourself about some of your habits. Are you still being deliberate with your breakfast? Are you being organized with your lunches? Are you making sure that you have a kind of bit of a rough plan for your sort of meals in the evening, your dinners, et cetera, across the week? Okay, I'm going out on Saturday, but I know what I'm having for dinner. at least most of the nights that I'm kind of at home, you still need to have some underlying structure. So you can absolutely phase out of that in time, but again, if you don't weigh yourself, you don't know what's going on, or if you weigh yourself erratically, it kind of lets you bury your head in the sand. Because if you're doing daily weigh-ins and you see, okay, my weight has gone up every single day by a little bit for 11 days straight, I'm not in maintenance, I need to accept that, I need to pull my calories down. Right, it allows you to identify that. So it can be really, really useful. But as I say, it also allows you to push them up because sometimes where people fail, and this is a slightly, not controversial, but a slightly different take on it, is people make the mistake of thinking they need to stay on the same calories that they diet on, forgetting that you are deliberately under-fuelling yourself. So, I diet for 12 weeks and I drop eight to 10 kilos. I'm feeling bloody good about myself, so I'm quite pleased. feel... like I'm in really, really good shape, quite happy, and I think to myself, do you know what? 2000 calories, that's been great, I got into really good shape, I'll just stay there, no problem. And then I try and do that for a couple weeks, and I manage when I'm getting leaner still, but then I stop getting a bit leaner because actually what started to happen is my trackings got a bit wobbly, and I've had a few days where I've spilled over because I've been tracking for a long time, I've been dieting for a long time, but I'm a bit fed up of it all. not, know, my calories haven't gone up, so I've still got all the diet fatigue accumulating, I'm still basically dieting, but I'm also a little bit more fed up because that wasn't really the goal anymore and actually, like, I've started to become a little bit inconsistent and I've had a few days off, if I'm honest, and, ⁓ yeah, actually, my tracking's only been three or four days a week, not seven days a week, and all of a sudden what happens is, rather than you push up to your maintenance calories, you end up... just basically becoming less consistent with your tracking. Because if you were to continue on the calories you were on, you would keep losing, losing, losing, losing until it became unhealthy, right? We wouldn't want that. We don't want to be in a deficit forever. You don't want to under-fuel yourself. So all that would happen is you would start to get leaner and leaner and leaner and start to feel run down and tired and all the rest of it, right? So there'll be a natural point where your body and your psychology becomes more resistant, like you don't want to. The drive to eat food becomes higher. and actually you start to struggle to stick to those calories. So what happens is instead of you actually moving to maintenance, you're clinging onto a diet because it feels familiar, but that familiarity, that comfort that you know where you're at with it is also holding you back. And I've seen this before and I've absolutely had coached one-to-one clients who've said to me, ⁓ I'll just stick at these calories. And I'm like, no, no, no, that's not how this works. We need to go up in calories. We need you to learn how to have the flexibility and structure that allows you to maintain weight. and have a good quality of life and have a little bit more flexibility. Because hey, when you're dieting you do have less flexibility. You have some, but it's reduced. We need a little bit more for this to be a lifestyle thing. So that's really, really important too, is clinging onto your diet calories for too long is a recipe for disaster. It is not a good strategy. It is going to hold you back in the longer term. So it's something well worth considering. So. That's another little aspect that I think goes a bit wrong. The other one, and this comes kind of back to mindset to a point, is that people do not plan out their maintenance phase. They don't have any strategy, so they stop the diet on a Sunday because they reach their goal weight, and the next day they make the decision, the questionable decision, if they're gonna celebrate, they're gonna have a bit of a treat day, and from there it's just carnage because they have that treat day. They maybe go quite a bit overboard because they are susceptible to overeating because they've been dieting for a long time. What does that mean? Well, if you've been dieting for a long time, is it reasonable to think after 16 weeks of dieting, you might have a bit more hunger? Yeah, probably. Is it also reasonable to think that even if your calories go up, that on day one, all of that hunger isn't gonna go, right? That's not how it works. And this is another thing that really catches people out. is that actually often is not when you reverse diet, when you progress up to maintenance in the first instance, sometimes, oddly enough, your hunger can go up. People think, what? But I'm eating more food. But the reality is is that unless you are incredibly diligent with making sure all of those calories go into foods that fill you up, which I'll come to in a bit later, you are likely to experience a bit more hunger. And even if you do focus on foods that fill you up, Often when people increase their calories, they do actually experience a little bit of a spike in hunger, oddly enough. It's just one of these quirks that happens, and it's very, very common. And actually what happens is if I went up to my maintenance and I sat there for three, four, five, six weeks, what I probably find is week by week, progressively my hunger diminishes, right? It starts to drop back. So let's say it jumps up an extra 20, 30 % more than it was sort of pre, when I was dieting, sorry, when I'm dieting, not pre-dieting, but when I was dieting. It jumps up 20 % from there, which is a bit annoying because you're like, ⁓ I'm hungry than normal, but you got a bit more food to play with so you can manage it. Then after a week, it's 15%, then after another week, it's 10%. And then before you know it, it's back to the level it was dieting and then below. And then two months on, it's actually really, manageable because it's just kind of normalized. It's just at a normal level. And I've done a good job of eating lots of extra filling foods and used a lot of my calories for that. Great. But what most people do is they're like, ⁓ thank God the diet's over. I know what I'll do, I'll have three custard creams more a day. That gives me a little treat on top of what I normally have. And this is not the right move, because the problem is, is you're now introducing a bunch of food that's really, really tasty, and your hunger's still really, really high, and you're not managing that hunger, because those three custard creams ain't filling you up. So we've got a problem. And that problem is that you're just even hungrier, and you're snacking more. So you then want to snack more, and it becomes a bit of a cycle. So. What I always recommend, and what I do with my clients, with my one-to-one clients, is I always preface with the fact that the first few weeks and months of that maintenance phase are critical. If we can navigate out the first six to eight weeks, it's very likely they're gonna have a lot of success with long-term maintenance simply because we can start to build some habits, and we've probably navigated this trickier kind of point, that cliff edge of hunger where... you're done dieting and suddenly you've got loads more food available to you and it's really, really easy to kind of over-consume. And the problem is, is sometimes what happens is when you do bring things in like your custard creams as an example, don't know why I picked that, it like a childhood favourite biscuit, there we go, but you bring back in those custard creams, the problem is you find it really hard to manage the amount you're having, right? So you end up saying, I'll have three a day and then you end up having more than that, so you're already over your calories and it just becomes really, really tricky. because in the next day you're trying to, ⁓ well I went over, I need to watch that, I don't wanna gain weight, I'll drop my calories tomorrow, so you make yourself hungrier. So what starts to happen sometimes when people move to maintenance is they don't do a good job of fullness and looking after the appetite piece of it and they don't give it enough time to start to diminish back to normal levels. Because do know what, six, eight weeks on, that's maybe when they can say, I can maybe be a little bit more relaxed and have a little bit more snacking in the mix. I'm still having good meals that fill me up, but I can give myself some more flex because actually my hunger isn't off the charts right now, it's manageable. So these things are really, really important. Navigating maintenance is not something that's guaranteed that's gonna happen by accident, right? I often stress this. And I think that, and this is probably a little bit... ⁓ I think this is a bit unsaid, right? But a lot of coaches, and this happens, right, will see clients that will come to them, will smash weight loss and be like, I'm done with weight loss, that's me done, and finish coaching. And I'm very honest with clients from the start that it's really worthwhile having a few months at minimum of maintenance. Now a lot of clients have performance goals and stay on for other reasons and they want to focus on the performance phase or gaining muscle or getting into even better shape because they've lost the weight. but they actually want to still get in better shape and that's different. But every so often you'll get someone who'll smash the weight loss and just be like, yep, that's me done. And you kind of say to them, you know what, it'd be good to navigate even a month of maintenance just so we know you're well set up. they're like, no, no, no, I'm fine. And they just head off and then they end up really, really struggling with it. And they regain weight relatively quickly, which is not what you want as a coach. Because as much as we build a lot of really good habits in the weight loss phase, there is a second part to this, like we've said. There is this learning to, what about starting to reduce your tracking days and making sure that you drop that weight and still being consistent with weigh-ins and getting to the point that you're a few months removed from that weight loss phase and you're like, ⁓ actually, I've kept my weight the same for three months now, I'm starting to feel really confident about that, I feel much more positive. These things are really important, but I cannot stress enough that when you shift to maintenance, if you just pile all of your calories into snacks and treats, all that will happen is you'll end up hungrier than you were before and you will struggle and you'll start to regain weight. Now, the big positive, because that all sounds a bit negative, the big positive is actually you can start to have more flexibility. It just might be that it's not week one of maintenance, that you have tons more. You want to of gradually phase it in. And something that's quite cool is what I tend to do with clients and what people often should do. It's kind of doing a reverse diet. So you maybe increase your calories by a nice big chunk. And then after that, what you then do is progress them up in smaller intervals. So you might add 50 or 100 calories every second week until we reach this point that our weight, as I said in this kind of start, stagnates, right? It's kind of like, ⁓ it's not going down anymore at all. We're leveling out. We're probably at maintenance now. Great. Often it's not. You kind of reach that maintenance and then after a few weeks, you're actually able to push it a little bit harder because some, sorry, higher because someone starts to train a little bit harder because they've now got more energy. They also walk a little bit more because they've got more energy because their calories are up. So often it's not. There's this kind of like initial bigger jump, then maybe an incremental increase. And then after a little bit, you can sometimes nudge up a little bit farther again, which is quite cool. It might not be huge amounts, but it all adds up. So often the way I frame it is that first chunk, let's say I add 400 calories initially, then I go up by 100, 100, and 100. I probably for those first 400, I'm just gonna use all of those for fullness. Then the following 100 calorie intervals, that's when I'd start to say, well actually, I can bank those 100 calories for the weekend. So I've got a chunk more food during the week, but then I'm also gonna have an extra four, five, 600 calories to spend on a Saturday. And then if I go up another little interval, actually I think I can push my calories up a bit more, my weight's in a good place. I can then maybe get away with a little bit more again, and that gives me more on a Sunday. And that's how I structure my week when I'm at maintenance, is I have. higher calories on the weekends and then I have slightly lower calories weekdays. So I have more flexibility. So absolutely you will be able to eat more food, enjoy yourself, meals out become less challenging to navigate. All of that becomes much easier, but it needs to be done properly. So if you are interested in one-to-one coaching or you're struggling with weight loss right now or struggling even with weight maintenance, given that was the topic of this podcast, then the link for one-to-one coaching is in the show notes. And if you want a little bit of a conversation, a bit of a chat, then you can click that link and I will reach out to you and we'll get something in the dow. So we can have a little bit of a chat around how coaching can help you. If, however, you have a suggestion for a future topic on the podcast, please pop me a wee message on Instagram and hopefully you find that helpful. I think it's really important that people are made aware of the challenges of maintenance. so that you can go in eyes wide open. I would want for everyone to have a better understanding, not just of weight loss, because more and more people have an okay understanding of that, but where they really, really struggle is this whole maintenance thing, and it really messes with their heads, and it stops them seeing the long-term success that they deserve to have. So, if you do have any questions, ping me a message or any podcast suggestions, but otherwise, speak to you soon.