The Better Life Perspective
Losing weight may not actually be the part you struggle with. You have probably proved more than once that, given enough motivation and a clear set of rules, you can make the number on the scales move. The frustration comes six months later when normal life has returned and much of the weight has returned with it. Perhaps that does not mean you failed at weight loss at all, perhaps the method succeeded at helping you lose weight, but was never designed to help you live at the lower weight afterwards.
The Better Life Founders Journal
Why Your Belly Fat Keeps Coming Back After You Lose It
The most dangerous moment in a successful diet maybe the moment it works. You stand on the scales and finally see the number you have been chasing, the trousers fit again, somebody notices that you have lost weight and there is a satisfying sense that the job has been done. Perhaps you have spent twelve weeks avoiding bread, tracking every calorie, declining desserts, drinking little or no wine and exercising with a consistency that would have surprised anyone who knew you back in November.
Then comes the perfectly reasonable question nobody seems to discuss quite enough.
What happens now?
If you are anything like many men I know, losing weight itself may not be particularly mysterious. You know what to do and, when sufficiently motivated, you can do it. You tighten everything up, become more organised, remove the obvious excesses and watch the weight come down. The difficulty begins when the project ends and the life that existed before it moves back in.
Work gets busy again, Friday night becomes… well, Friday night, holidays happen, somebody suggests dinner, exercise misses a week and the habits you tolerated temporarily because you were on a diet become increasingly difficult to justify now that you are supposedly finished.
A few pounds return, then a few more, until eventually you find yourself back considering yet another diet.
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What Would Make This the Last Time You Had to Lose It?
Better Life starts with the life you will need to live after the belly fat has gone, then builds the route towards losing it around that.
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It is very easy at that point to decide that the missing ingredient must have been discipline, but I am increasingly unconvinced.
There is an issue here that I think we can do a lot about. Many generic weight-loss plans are built almost entirely around how you will lose the weight, with surprisingly little thought given to how you will live when you have lost it.
If the route to your target weight requires a version of your life that you have no intention of maintaining, the problem has been built in from the beginning.
This does not mean the easiest possible plan will produce the result you want. Losing body fat still requires an energy deficit and changing established behaviour still requires effort and action. The more useful question is whether that effort is being spent practising a way of living that has some chance of surviving once the urgency of the diet has disappeared.
Perhaps that means learning what an ordinary Tuesday dinner looks like rather than surviving for twelve weeks on bland meals you blatantly dislike. Perhaps it means deciding how alcohol fits into your week instead of banning it until the target date, or finding a form of exercise you could genuinely imagine doing next February when nobody is congratulating you any more for losing that weight.
Maintenance is not an afterthought to weight loss, I believe it is the test of whether the approach worked.
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Could Your Maintenance Plan Start Before You Reach Your Goal?
In-app Momentum Coach, Max, can help build your weight-loss approach around the meals, weekends, work responsibilities and social life you want to keep, so reaching your target does not require starting another completely different plan afterwards.
See How Better Life Personalises Your Weight Loss →
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Research involving thousands of people who had successfully maintained substantial weight loss also found considerable variation in the strategies they used, with the authors concluding that there was no single approach that worked for everybody. That seems obvious when written down, yet much of the diet industry still sells exactly the opposite idea: here is the programme, now fit yourself around it.
At Better Life, we would rather reverse that.
Your personal in-app Momentum Coach, Max begins with the weight you want to lose, but he also needs to understand the life waiting for you on the other side of it. Your working week, the food you enjoy, what normally happens at weekends, how well you sleep, when stress makes eating harder to manage and what caused the previous attempt to unravel all matter because those are not inconveniences surrounding your weight-loss plan.
They are the environment in which it has to survive.
That also changes what success looks like. Reaching the target is still worth celebrating, but the more interesting achievement may come several months later when nothing particularly dramatic is happening, you are eating normally, going out occasionally, taking holidays, dealing with a difficult week at work and your weight is still roughly where you wanted it.
No restart required.
Perhaps, then, the question before beginning another diet is not simply how quickly can I lose this belly? It is whether the way you intend to lose it resembles a life you would be happy to continue once it has gone.
If the answer is no, I would change the plan before trying harder at the person.
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Make This the Last Restart
Tell Coach Max what has worked before, what eventually brought the weight back and what you want normal life to look like when the diet is over, then build your next attempt around keeping the result as well as achieving it
Discover Lose Belly Fat with Better Life →
The Better Life Founders Journal
Written with the suspicion that any ‘miracle diet’ requiring you to become a completely different human being every January may have overlooked the whole idea.