3 Lessons I Learned on Maintaining My Weight After Losing 150 Pounds

Quick backstory. I lost 150 pounds over 17 months on the Take Shape for Life program and reached my ideal weight goal of 199 (I'm 6'3") on December 24th, 2014. (You can see that story on video here.)

First the good news. As of today (3 months after I hit my ideal weight goal), I am now 198. Yes, I've lost another pound. Congratulations to me. Before that sounds like bragging, I was struggling earlier this month, which I shared about in another post: Help! I just gained 3 pounds and I'm a health coach...

I have found that maintaining my weight is MORE CHALLENGING than losing it.

Yes, you read that correctly. Losing weight on the Take Shape for Life program followed a very straightforward system that provided me with predictable, steady results. And that was very important because it's easy to lose your motivation if you stop making progress. I felt great the whole time while in the weight loss phase because the quality of nutrition that I was consuming daily was the best I had ever had on a consistent basis. My inner fat kid was restrained! The fact that five out of the six meals I had every day were already prepared for me made it simple to follow the program given my busy lifestyle. And the one "lean and green" meal that I was responsible for each day was a real treat. This is where I learned to LOVE my veggies and learned how to eat healthy. I really had no clue before.

(This photo was provided to me by one of my clients who is now on the Take Shape for Life program. This is one of her daily "lean and green" meals that she has been blogging about. She shared with me that after she made this for her husband he asked her to marry him AGAIN...and he's not even on program.)

Now fast forward to maintenance. When you are in maintenance, your food selections can become more tricky as your choices increase. Yes, I know what I should be eating, but it's easier to give in to the momentary temptation and pleasure of the bad stuff. I'm allowed, right?

However, once you do that too often, your body starts to crave the bad stuff more and more. And if you're not careful this can spiral out of control as it did for me the first two weeks of this month.

So there are three big lessons I have learned in the past three months that have allowed me to maintain my weight successfully.

1) The importance of following a system. Take Shape for Life has a protocol for maintenance called B.E.S.L.I.M. (For an in-depth discussion about this see my previous blog post on Pulse: Never Yo-Yo Diet Again! The 6 Keys to Permanent Weight Loss.)

• Breakfast
• Exercise
• Support
• Low-fat meals 5-6 times a day
• Individual plan
• Monitoring

While each aspect is important, the one I have found to be the most important to me is to monitor my weight once a week. This allows me to stay in touch with reality and make a course correction as needed. This isn't always easy to do, especially when you know you made poor eating choices that week. The thought creeps into your head that you will be good next week and that you will weigh in next week. Resist this temptation at all costs! That's an incredibly slippery slope to be on. You'll wake up the following week, think the same thing, and before you know know it, you've gained back all of the weight you lost.

2) Think of food as fuel. I LOVE not just being at my healthy weight, but I LOVE feeling awesome in my body every day. This is a result of continuing to eat healthy (I could tell a big negative difference in my body and level of energy in early March because I gave into my inner fat kid. My weight hadn't changed much but the way I felt after eating too many and too much of the wrong kinds of food was very noticable.)

3) Exercise becomes important AFTER you reach your goal weight. Part of feeling awesome in my body each day is exercise. I now make it a priority to go to CrossFit each weekday morning, and do 10,000+ steps, seven days a week. These habits really set the tone for how I experience the day, along with the quality of food that I eat. So my purpose behind exercise now is not weight loss; instead it's to a) build lean muscle, b) maintain my weight, and c) to simply feel awesome each day.

Did you like this article? Please leave a comment below. Also, feel free to go over to my profile to connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm always looking for nice, genuine people to connect with. Being a dog lover is a huge plus.

Paul G. McManus is the Co-Founder of More Clients More Fun LLC., a digital marketing company focused on LinkedIn lead generation. He's also the proud owner of a Boston Terrier named Moo.

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