As a second issue: a lot of dieters seem to think that once they have lost the weight with one diet or another, they can revert to their old habits and keep the weight off. So they change their eating habits drastically, drop the weight and then go right back to the way of eating that made them fat. And, to their apparent surprise, they get fat again. “You can never go back again.” as the old saying goes. If you go back to the diet and exercise habits that made you fat in the first place, you’ll just get fat again.
This actually makes a profound argument for making small, livable changes to your eating and activity habits and avoiding the type of extreme approach that I described in my last booklet. The simple reason being that small changes seem to be easier to maintain in the long-term, even if they don’t generate results as rapidly. And that’s actually sort of the trade-off, the types of small changes that tends to be sustainable in the long-term tend to cause weight/fat loss that is so painfully slow (or minimal) as to be almost irrelevant; and the types of extreme approaches that generate rapid results tend to be nearly impossible to stick to in the long-term. In my last booklet, my compromise was to use the Rapid Weight Loss approach as a short-term approach and then use it to move into a maintenance approach. But I digress.
At the end of the day, here’s the painful reality that all dieters must come to terms with: the only way to both lose fat AND maintain that loss in the long-term is to maintain at least some of the diet and exercise habits you changed in the long-term. Forever, basically even though that’s a little too depressing to consider. Maybe we should just think long-term instead. Hopefully we’ll get genetic engineering soon enough to make it a not-forever kind of deal.
Dieters (or anyone seeking to change a long-standing behavior) must stop thinking of diets as a short-term behavior change, you’ll have to maintain at least some of those changes in the long-term. Now, I’ll point out here that the strategies used for weight/fat loss and maintenance aren’t necessarily going to be the same (nor should they be). As I talked about in the , there are situations where an extreme diet can be used initially and used to move into a proper maintenance phase. A lot of diet researchers and diet book authors miss this point, thinking that the diet that you followed to lose the weight/fat must or should be the same as the one you use to maintain that loss.
I do think it’s helpful is the diet that caused the fat loss can be used to move into a maintenance approach (again, something I discussed in some detail in the last booklet and will make mention of in this one) but they needn’t be the same. If eliminating all of the carbohdyrates from your diet makes it easier to lose fat in the long run, and you are able to move back to a maintenance diet that contains some carbohydrates, I don’t see what the problem is. Once again, the diet you use to lose the fat doesn’t necessarily have to be thes same diet as you use to maintain that fat loss. If nothing else, you get to eat more when you move back to maintenance, the types of foods you allow yourself may change as well.
Summing up this section, it’s not that diets per se fail, it’s that diets that are only followed short-term fail. The body is really good at storing incoming calories as fat after a diet and if you return to old eating habits, you can just watch the pounds come flying back on.
To hopefully cement this point in your mind, studies of successful dieters (those who have lost weight and kept it off for some period of time, usually 2-5 years) have shown several very consistent behaviour patterns of which this is one: they maintain the dietary and exercise changes they have made in the long-term. If you’re not going to maintain at least some of your changed dietary and exercise habits in the long-term, you might as well not bother (with one major exception discussed below).
One Exception to the Comments Above
There is, however, one major exception to the above that I should probably mention (and that I discuss in greater detail in my Rapid Fat Loss Handbook). There are individuals who, for whatever reason, only have to be in shape for a very short period of time, a day or three at the most, who don’t necessarily care if the results are maintained long-term or not.
Usually it’s a bodybuilder preparing for a contest, or even a model who has a particularly important photo shoot. Or a woman who needs to drop 20 lbs for her wedding or a male who needs to impress people at his high school reunion. Even athletes who have to make a weight class sometimes have to do scary stuff to get where they need to be, usally involving fluid restriction and frequently severe dehydration. But the consequences of not making weight (whatever they may be) are greater than the extreme approaches that tend to be used.
In situations like that, whether it’s healthy or not, extremely restrictive and/or even slightly dangerous approaches are frequently used. We may not like them, we may not condone them but sometimes the ends justifies the means because a few pounds may mean the difference in getting a big paycheck/winning the contest/looking good in your wedding gown or not.
In these situations, long-term maintenance isn’t necessarily the goal. No sane bodybuilder expects to maintain contest shape year-round, and no weight class athlete expects to maintain a severe state of dehydration year round. They get in shape for their event, and relax to some degree for the rest of the time. So the above sections really are aimed at the person looking to lose fat and keep it off long-term.
In that case, where maintenance is just as important as the loss itself, absolute attitudes and focusing only on the short-term hurt far more than they help, and should be avoided as much as possible. In addition to the strategies I’m going to discuss in this booklet, this means taking a very different attitude towards dieting. First you have to let go of your absolutist attitudes, which can be hard. Second, you need to start taking the long-view to both your weight loss and dietary and exercise habits. I’ll come back to this in later chapters.