Everyone messes up, everyone slips up from time to time. When you don’t meet a goal, or you meet a goal and revert back to old habits, you are not a failure. Your plan may have failed, but you are not your plan.
It can be pretty disheartening to lose weight only to gain it all back. Often times, we have the finish line mentality, and we don’t even realize how hard the maintenance will be. I am not going to debate which is harder, and fully admit in the throws of weight loss, you don’t want to hear it isn’t going to get easier.
I will say this, if you lost the weight before, you have the tools and should have the confidence that you can do it again. Wether you followed a specific paid program, ate off a smaller plate, or stopped eating fast food, you made changes that your body positively responded to before. If they felt comfortable, do them again. The mindset shift that needs to occur once the weight is gone, no point in re-inventing the weight loss wheel. As you progress,s make lifestyle changes. When I lost my initial weight, I gave up restaurant food. I went from eating out ten plus times a week, to zero, for twelve weeks. After those twelve weeks were done, I had to adopt a two times per month max for eating out. Why? Because otherwise bad habits would have crept back in again. Know yourself, and your limits, in this process.
Take a moment to evaluate what happened last time, you cannot change life happening, but you can react differently going forward. Maybe you slid backwards when something catastrophic happened. While we cannot prepare for that event again, per se, we can put better tolls in place for the next time. Sometimes, we need to go through the motions, and just survive for a time. Set up safeguards to pull you back on track. Remember this isn’t a weight loss journey, it is a lifestyle.
Going forward, build on your past success and tweak for long term success. Remember, there is no failure worth quitting. Take each set back as a lesson to learn from and grow.
If you’ve successfully lost weight and gained it back, what is one thing that worked and you will implement again?