Why you know how to lose weight but not how to maintain it
Let me take you back to a conversation I had this week.
A lovely lady said something to me that I just have to talk to you about.
"I knew how to lose weight. I knew how to gain weight. I never knew how to maintain it."
That's it.
That's the whole thing.
Not "I lack willpower."
Not "I just can't stick to anything."
She'd never actually been taught the maintaining bit.
If you've been dieting for years, decades even, this might be landing pretty hard right now.
You know how to switch a diet on.
Cut this, track that, hit the number.
You've done it more than once.
You've probably done it more times than you can count.
And you also know how to put the weight back on.
In fact you're better at that bit.
You always have "just do another diet" sat in the back of your mind as the safety net.
What you've never done is live at the weight you got to.
Just... live there.
No plan.
No countdown.
No Monday reset.
Here's why.
Diets are a set of rules.
Someone else's rules.
Eat this, not that, weigh this, track that.
Follow them well enough and out you come the other side at goal weight.
Except if diets actually worked long term, they wouldn't be a multi-billion pound industry.
They need you to come back. So they teach you the losing, never the after.
That's where the all-or-nothing kicks in.
You go from tracking every mouthful to nothing.
From cheat days once a week to no structure at all.
And nothing feels more unsafe than that, especially if you lean towards perfectionism (yes, I'm including myself in that one).
So the floodgates open.
The weight creeps back on.
And some.
Then you beat yourself up for it.
Then you go looking for the next diet.
Rinse. Repeat.
For years.
The only way off that loop is building an actual relationship with food.
Learning your own hunger, your own fullness, what you actually need versus what a plan told you to need.
That's the whole difference between chronic dieting and food freedom.
One is rules you follow. The other is trust you build.
I go much deeper on this in this week's episode of Chatting with Cara, including exactly what building that relationship with food looks like in practice.
You can listen here.
Ready to stop rinsing and repeating? If you're tired of losing the same weight over and over, book a free no-obligation call and let's talk about what actually breaks the cycle.
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