Sustain to Maintain

I was at my 15 year high school reunion last night.  Two things struck me - First, I'm in better shape than I generally was back then, which obviously made me feel good about how I presented myself going back to see everyone.  Second, people still remember me as 'the fat kid' even though I was nearly as thin, though a bit more muscular when we graduated.  Their image of me was set in stone so much so that the recency effect of the last image they had of me wasn't strong enough to overcome that.  The result was lots of comments about how I look great, and 'wow' type comments.  That's awesome, but it's also funny how no one remembers that I looked almost the same 15 years ago.

OK, enough about that - the reason I'm posting is different.  I had a chance to catch up quickly with one of my closest friends from high school who I have been talking to about her diet to try to help her get closer to what she's wanted physically.  And, I have to say, she's doing great.  This is someone who was always athletic, but, by her own admission, struggled to have the body she wanted or that represented her level of fitness.  She also loved and lived on a lot of the things that are not allowed on the Slow Carb Diet.

So, with that background, in very short order, she's really cut out a lot of the key offenders (sugar, bread), and has been upping her intake of the good stuff.  I am really proud of her, and was so incredibly thrilled to see the smile on her face, and the energy that radiated through that smile.

We had a great conversation around how you make this work in the long run.  While you can go super hard core to speed up your results for the short term, the chance of falling off the wagon eventually is fairly high for a lot of people.  I feel very strongly that you have to make this work for you, your preferences, your goals, etc.  I keep telling people that this isn't black and white - if you have yogurt with breakfast, you can still lose weight.  If not having yogurt will lead you to be on the diet for a short term period - thus going to the wrong definition of diet (something you do to lose weight unnaturally and unsustainably vs what you eat day in / day out to be healthy) - then the cost of complying fully with the diet is too high to be worth the benefit.  It's much better to have the results you want on a slower time table that includes the rest of your life and staying on target for that period than to fit into that bathing suit once and never again.

So, find a norm that's better than today and yet still sustainable.  If it's sustainable, you will eventually get to your goal, and it will be maintainable.  Ultimately, that's what you want - something you can live with, be healthy with, and not wake up a year later, and wonder what happened to all that hard work you did in the past.