On Maintenance and Being a Newbie Again

I started Weight Watchers the first time in February of 1998, using the 1-2-3 Success plan. I'm pretty sure that was the first plan they had with counting points. I lost 80 pounds over 22 months and I learned a ton in the process. After being overweight or obese almost my whole life, that was the first time I had ever lost a significant amount of weight. I stopped going to WW meetings before I got to my official goal, so I never learned to do maintenance or became a Lifetime member. I did continue to lose weight and I managed to stay at a healthy weight on my own for several years before I started gaining it back, very slowly but surely.

I know that one of the things that made it so easy to let myself gain the weight back was that I felt secure that I had the knowledge and ability to lose it again any time I wanted. Ten years later, I proved that was true. For the last fifteen months, I did what I knew I needed to do and now I'm fit and healthy again. During that time I listened to and read plenty of ideas about fitness and a healthy diet, and I cherry-picked the things that I was interested in incorporating into my own lifestyle. But all along I already knew what worked best for me and what I needed to do to be successful, so I didn't need to rely on input and advice from other people. In the meetings and the bulletin boards, I was answering a lot more questions than I was asking.

Not anymore! I am four weeks into maintenance and two weeks from Lifetime and this is all totally new territory for me. I'm excited and scared and all those emotions that come from being a newbie at anything. I have joined the Maintenance bulletin board at weightwatchers.com and nearly every day I read something about somebody's struggles with maintenance. I'm excited about maintaining for four weeks and I read posts from people who have been maintaining for one, three, even ten years. It's like the difference between that first quarter-mile run and a marathon. I'm not done, I am barely just getting started.

All that said, my offering today is a a couple of comments from the Maintenance board that have given me a lot to think about. A member who has been maintaining a 160-pound loss for the past three months says, "I'm viewing the weight loss process as a marathon: the race is the weight loss phase, reaching goal weight is crossing the finish line, and then what?...I'm viewing maintenance as running around in circles for the rest of my life." Another member replied with, "Losing weight is boot camp; maintenance is the war."

I'm ready for the war.