The Laid Back Guide to Weight Loss Maintenance: The Laid Back Guide Back Guide to Weight Loss, #3

By Kayla Cox

The day you hit your goal weight is also the first day of your weight loss maintenance journey. If you have ever struggled with your weight, you may fear the road ahead, where the possibility of weight regain lurks. While there is more work yet to do, weight regain is not inevitable. The key is to approach maintenance in the right way.

 

The author, Kayla Cox, struggled with her weight from childhood until age 30 and knows from experience how frustrating it is to gain the weight back. In 2016, after losing 65 pounds, she was determined to keep the weight off, once and for all. She sat down, studied her past failures, and finally learned from them. By implementing what she has learned, she has maintained that weight loss for over 7 years. In this book, she shares her laid back, step-by-step approach to successful maintenance. She also gives you strategies for dealing with setbacks, and an unvarnished look inside her own journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kayla Cox
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223174141

Book preview

The Laid Back Guide to Weight Loss Maintenance

Kayla Cox

Copyright © 2023 Kayla Cox

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Cover by Kayla Cox and Photoshop Generative AI.

I dedicate this book to everyone who has ever hit their goal weight, and then promptly gained back the pounds.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Also by kayla cox

Introduction

Chapter 1: The General Maintenance Approach

Chapter 2: The Enemies of Maintenance

Chapter 3: Remember: You’re a Loser

Chapter 4: Grinding It Out, and Mucking About

Chapter 5: As Clear as Mud (Interpreting the Scale)

Chapter 6: Netflix Marathons Are Not a Sport

Chapter 7: Putting Yourself on Autopilot

Chapter 8: Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts

Chapter 9: When Life Gets in the Way

Chapter 10: Failure

Epilogue

Appendix 1: Writing Your Maintenance Plan

Appendix 2: Goals Unrelated to Weight Loss

Appendix 3: 10 FAQs About Maintenance

Acknowledgement

About The Author

Books By This Author

Also by kayla cox

Non-Fiction

The Laid Back Guide to Intermittent Fasting

Overcoming Weight Loss Obstacles

Intermittent Fasting Workbook

Fiction

Escape from Olshek's Castle

The Swamps of Dorscha

This book is not intended as a substitute for the medical advice of physicians. It is for informational purposes only. The reader should regularly consult a physician in matters relating to his/her health and particularly with respect to any symptoms that may require diagnosis or medical attention.

Introduction

Ut est rerum omnium magister usus. (Experience is the teacher of all things.) -Julius Caesar

Who Am I To Write a Book on Maintenance?

I am not a doctor. Or a nutritionist. And I’m certainly not a dietician. So what on earth makes me think I should write a book about weight loss maintenance? It’s not a proposition I took lightly, considering my failure rate in this area. I dieted throughout most of my childhood and teenage years. Sometimes I was thinner, sometimes I was chunkier, but I could never stick in a healthy weight range for very long.

My weight crept up throughout my twenties with each subsequent pregnancy. I tried to convince myself that nature had doomed me to be overweight and that I should accept that. Sure, I had hit my goal weight countless times, but I always packed the pounds back on. By the time I was pushing 30, weight loss felt like an exercise in futility.

In February 2015, I weighed in at 222 pounds. At 5’6", my Body Mass Index (BMI) was 35.8. That meant I was obese. Through the process of intermittent fasting, cutting out my emotional eating, and getting more active, I lost ‌80 pounds. I ate whatever I wanted, and I repaired my relationship with food. For once in my life, weight loss felt enjoyable, and keeping it off forever felt like a real possibility. In 2018, I wrote a book called The Laid Back Guide to Intermittent Fasting to explain exactly how I lost weight. Afterwards, I got a very nice email from a reader who told me I should write my next book about weight loss maintenance.

I wrote another book instead, called Overcoming Weight Loss Obstacles. It was about the harder parts of weight loss, and I included a section on the obstacles I had seen so far in maintenance. I published that book three years ago. The idea of a maintenance book kept pulling at me, but I kept procrastinating. I wanted to experience maintenance more before I wrote an entire book about it. As the years passed, I wondered why there weren’t more books on this subject. Maintenance is the most important part of weight loss. No one really wants to lose weight, only to gain it back. So what gives?

Why Aren’t There More Books About This?

Here’s a theory: few maintenance books get written because maintenance is squishier than weight loss. It’s easy to define successful weight loss. You set your goal weight, and if you hit the goal weight, you are successful. But how do we define successful maintenance? How much‌ weight regain is okay? If a person loses 20 pounds, and regains 20 pounds, we can all agree that’s a failure to maintain the weight loss.[1] But let’s say someone drops 100 pounds and regains 20, but keeps the rest off. Is that successful maintenance? In my opinion, yes. You may disagree, and that’s okay. Maintenance is squishy. You must define what success looks like to you based on your own philosophy.

I thought about waiting another five years to write this book. Ten years of maintenance experience sounds more authoritative, doesn’t it? But I knew that if I waited any longer, I'd forget the earlier, harder days of maintenance. Those days, dear reader, that you’re likely going through right now.

If I waited, I’d gloss over all those times when I felt a lot more worried that I’d regain the weight. I’d also conveniently forget all those embarrassing mistakes I made. In the pages that follow, I’ll tell you all about them, so that hopefully you can avoid making the same ones. Maybe you will still make them, but you will be comforted because you’ll know from my example that you can make a lot of mistakes in maintenance and still be successful. In other words, what this book lacks in experience, it makes up for in honesty.

My Journey Thus Far

Let’s talk turkey about what my maintenance has looked like up to this point. In November 2016, I got down to my first goal weight of 157. I maintained my 7-day average between a low of 157 and a high of 163. My highest single day weight during that bout of maintenance was 166. In September 2017, I went back to weight loss mode and lost down to 142 for a total loss of 80 pounds.

My next bout of maintenance started in October 2018. As of this writing (October 2023), I have maintained my 7 day average between a low of 142  and a high of 152. My highest single day weight during this time has been 154. I’ve had moments of self-doubt, despair, anger, flippancy and complacency. I’ve been guilty of overeating, emotionally eating, and laziness, even though I certainly know better.

As of this writing, I have kept the initial 65 pounds off for 7 years and have maintained my weight in the normal BMI range for over 5 years. Statistically speaking, if a person is going to gain the weight back, they usually gain it back within 5 years. I’m at least past that milestone.

You might wonder how I know I will keep it off forever. Lean in close, and I’ll let you in on a little secret: I don’t. But if I wait until I make it to the finish line to write this book, I’ll be dead, and then it will be too late. Alas, writing a book about weight loss maintenance is no guarantee of my permanently keeping it off. I am not, nor will I ever be, safe from weight regain. And neither will you.

It’s something that stares every single one of us who has had a weight problem right in the face, every single day. That’s really the thing that motivated me to write this book. Not many people delve into the long slog that is maintenance. But someone needs to give the scoop on what to expect after you hit your goal weight. Despite my inadequacies, I’m going to give it my best shot.

I’m writing this book now with all my missteps and near-catastrophes fresh in my mind. I hope that when you’re finished reading this book, you’ll think, gosh, if she can do it, I can do it.

If, God forbid, one day in the future you Google me and future-Kayla Cox has regained all the weight, do not panic!