We have a friend who has been losing weight for the past year-and-a-half. He planned a diet and exercise program that would be compatible with the frequent trips and eating out with clients required by his work. Six months ago, he was no longer fat; now he is beginning to look thin. But he is still losing weight because, as he told us, he was once thin and sees no reason why he can’t be again. “I don’t care how long it takes,” he said. “Eating healthy and exercising every day is such a part of my life that I cannot imagine not doing it.”
His attitude is so sensible it is surprising more people do not share it. However, it isn’t. Years ago, when I was developing a weight-loss program for a hospital-based weight-loss clinic, our staff discussed the length of the program. We agreed, based in part by published reports, that weight-loss clients would not stay on a program for longer than twelve weeks and that estimate was optimistic. Ten weeks was probably more realistic. We discovered during the years of the clinic’s operation that we were right. Around the tenth week, clients would stop showing up for appointments, and even though they were given the opportunity to continue beyond twelve weeks with no extra charge, only a few did. Many said that they could diet on their own and this was indeed the case. But others, we knew, just didn’t want to be bothered dieting even though they had not reached their goal. They felt they had lost enough weight to improve their blood pressure or cholesterol or dress size and that was enough for them, even though they were not anywhere near their goal weight.
Dieting for more than several weeks can be extremely hard. In our book, The Serotonin Power Diet, we use the analogy of a long road trip to describe what it is like to have one’s eating limited by a food plan and leisure time used up with exercise.
Often a car trip is marked by long periods of boredom as the scenery of one interstate merges into another and even the rest stops become predictable and unexciting. Sometime it feels as if the destination will never be reached and due to speed limits, there is no way to race ahead and get there sooner. So too with a diet. The novelty of the first few weeks vanishes and the dieter settles into a routine of eating and (one hopes) exercise that is like driving with cruise control. The pounds drop off (like the miles going by) but the weight-goal destination still seems quite far away.
Few people would give up a car trip before reaching their destination because of boredom and driving fatigue. But often their arrival is delayed by events over which they have no control such as accidents, detours, car trouble or bad weather. Occasionally a trip is lengthened because of a planned stop along the way for a few days of sightseeing. Eventually the destination is reached.
People who must be on a diet for a very long period of time would do well to regard it as a long trip with built-in and/or unexpected delays along the way. Sometimes a diet gets sidetracked because of work, social or family obligations. Stress, holidays, mood changes or sickness can make the diet take a detour so that it takes much longer than anticipated to lose the weight. But a delay is not justification for a permanent stop to weight loss. It is like being stuck in traffic; you never think you will move again because eventually the car moves again. The same thing will happen with your weight loss. You may even find yourself gaining a couple of pounds but go back to the diet plan and the pounds will start to come off again.
