One lesson I have learned the hard way in my fitness journey: Don't take on anything to lose weight that you aren't willing to do on a permanent basis.
If you do a bunch of nutty stuff to lose weight, you are very likely to gain the weight back once the nutty stuff is ceased. Why? You didn't learn a darned thing about how to exist in your real, day-to-day world.
I've been heavy and I've been very thin, and here is what I know: The stuff you did to lose weight is the stuff you will have to continue to do to maintain it.
The fact is that the difference between weight loss and weight maintenance for me is about 300 calories a day. Maybe. This is two cookies. So keeping up the weight loss methods, with a cookie or two (or whatever else equals 300 calories) added in, is what I must do to stay at my preferred weight.
Consequently, before I give up carbs after lunch, I ask myself: Can I live like this for the rest of my life?
Do I really want to live without ever eating sugar again?
And before I go to two workouts a day, I have to be honest about if that's something I can keep up after the weight is off.
If it's not, I don't do it. Maybe it means carrying around some excess weight a bit longer. That's Okay. I'd rather find and adapt to liveable solutions than go through the frustration of gaining back some or all of weight I'd sacrificed so much to lose.
It all goes back to that overused term "lifestyle". You will need to make changes, but find methods that fit into your lifestyle, or that you can build a new lifestyle around. Trust me, you will save yourself a lot of frustration this way.
And, honestly, I think taking on methods that can't be maintained is the main reason there is such a discouragingly high percentage of weight regain.
The difference between maintaining and gaining is separated by a VERY THIN line. Make sure you don't make it even thinner by setting yourself up for failure with changes you can't maintain.
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