What Got You to Lose Weight Won’t be the Thing that Keeps it Off.
Every training plan works and every diet fails is a saying that has been paraphrased and reused many times within the fitness community. There is a lot of truth to it.
Consistency is the biggest driver of success when it comes to training. Most training plans revolve in some way around progressive overload and it very sustainable over a long period of time. Most diets revolve around a caloric deficit. This is inherently not sustainable. In training you can add weight, more volume, more intensity any number of variables, and still progress because your body eventually adapts. That’s the exact same with diets except it’s the problem. Our body adapts to the caloric deficit. Over time our bodies use the calories we ingest more efficiently and at the same time (hopefully) we are losing weight and thus need less calories in general. This is why the diet fails. It eventually needs to stop and people don’t know how to go back to a regular way of eating that keeps the weight off.
+50lbs & +5 years
It’s apparently very rare for people to lose a ton of weight and keep it off for the above listed reasons. I peaked in weight at 255 around December of 2014 (age 31). I have now hovered around 194–200 for the past 4 years. I lost the vast majority of the weight following the ketogenic diet.
How I lost it
I’m not necessarily endorsing that diet for you, but it’s what worked for me. Eliminating carbs reduced my desire to over eat or eat bad options and I was able to do it for months on end. I kept track using a diet app (Myfitnesspal) and worked out everyday at a commercial gym mostly following basic strength training. When I stopped following the ketogenic diet; that’s right, you guessed it, I gained back some of the weight. I went back on the ketogenic to lose the weight again and started the yo-yo cycle many of us are familiar with. This was even harder because the ketogenic diet had gotten more popular and companies started to create ketogenic products that did not actually get you ketogenic (look up dirty keto). I was less experienced and fell for these products as substitutes for what I had been eating.
How to keep it off
What stopped the yo-yo dieting? Community. Toward the end of 2016 I joined a Crossfit gym. From then on I stayed with a pretty small weight range. Why did this work? I surrounded myself with people that care about their fitness and health. This doesn’t work in a larger commercial gym because you don’t get to know the people around you as intimately as you do in a small class setting. In a fitness community you generally are spending more money than in a larger commercial gym. Crossfit typically is around $150/month so when you have options like PlanetFitness at $9.99/month, the people that choose to joining a Crossfit or similar gym are inherently going to be more invested. You care about this community and do not want to disappoint them, but you also want to compete against them. You learn their healthy habits and adopt them for yourself. Habits like meal-prepping become the norm. Not eating cake at the office for Nancy’s birthday doesn’t feel odd to your anymore.
This is the same mechanism that makes Weightwatchers works and why Peloton exploded onto the fitness scene. It why for many of us, the time we were in the best shape, was when we were on a sports team in high school. It’s not because our metabolisms were faster or some nonsense like that. It’s because we worked our asses off for near 3 hours each day because we cared about our team and our standing within it.
The structure of the diet takes it off. The structure of the community keeps it off. Find your community.
