Maintaining or Refusing to Regain

Updated 3.18.2015
I have talked before about weight maintenance, about how I haven't found it to be too difficult. Since the post linked there, the "10 pounds more than I thought possible" have returned, but I continue to maintain a roughly 30 lb weight loss. I've also written about my decision to try to lose a bit more weight and try to establish a new set point. That effort continues, though as expected progress is slow. My purpose here though is to discuss this blog post.

The author is a diet author who lost her own weight using a low carb (LC) eating regimen. Lower carb eating is what she promotes for maintenance, mostly because eating bread, cookies and other refined carbs is an easy way to blow a calorie budget. I was not, I am not a low carber, so to me her insistence that LC is the answer is simply easier calorie control. If you skip the breads and cookies you save a lot of calories. You can save as many (more!) if you skip the fat… but that’s for a different post.

I don’t agree with much this woman writes. But here she makes a point that I have made but in a different manner. That is that the body compensates until it cannot. It may be that the reason that I am able to maintain my weight loss with ease has to do with the fact that I was barely obese when I started seriously trying to lose. Once the body’s compensation mechanisms are overcome though, it would seem that significant changes occur and make maintaining more difficult.

That being said, I do read in the fatosphere, and if you do that carefully and over a long period you will see the writers admit the truth. They eat more than they admit, or they admit to binge eating. Binge eating seems to be a common factor frankly, and the thing about truly bingeing is that immense amounts of calories (multiple days worth) can be consumed. Eating that many calories can easily offset the benefit of any calorie deficit created in previous days.

Vegan Uproar

Updated 3.18.2015
There is a controversy brewing in the Youtube world of diet bloggers. Freelee the Banana Girl and her boyfriend are being sued for defaming another Australian Youtuber/diet guru. This is not the first time people have complained about the two, though it seems to be the first time anyone's taken them to court.

Unrelated to the court case but more to the point for my message, here's what happens when you ignore the energy balance. The video at the link is actual part two of her rant. The site is a repository of videos from people who are unhappy with (mostly because they gained weight) while following the "30 Bananas a Day" or "Raw til 4" diets. Both diets make the claim that calorie restriction is unnecessary (that the energy balance doesn't hold) I don't agree with all she says, but I do agree that stuffing yourself with more calories (of raw fruit or any other kind of food) than you burn leads to weight gain. Her biggest point is that the Youtubers behind the two diets change their stories periodically. I've written about Freelee the Banana girl before and why I watch her videos. Even in the small time that I've been watching her videos, I have seen how she's shifted her backstory on her weight gain and her maintenance of her very trim body. All of which makes me very happy to report that my daughter hasn't watched her in months. I admit that at this point, I am watching to see the end of the drama, and then I will likely put those minutes of my time on this planet to better use.

Brief formatting note

Updated 3.18.2015
I am still struggling with the change in organization for this site, mostly relating to how to archive older posts so that they can be easily found. Because of the haphazard way this site has developed over the 10+ years I've had (yes, 10+ year, believe it or not) the archiving has to be done manually. I don't even know it it's really necessary to do, because I presume that whatever small amount of traffic that come to this site arrives via Google search. The archive pages had been the front page to the sites, but teh new software package makes maintaining that unappealing. I know some "gurus" are big fans of infinite scrolling (and I have no plans to break posts into multiple pages to generate more "clicks"), but I'm not convinced that most web users scroll much at all.

All of which is to say that I will continue to provide permalinks to articles posted to the front page, but I'm not sure I will continue the archive page.

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