Recently I’ve heard of several people, including some of our documentary subjects, who have fallen a bit off track (some might call it a relapse).

Often, “relapse” is a term used in the world of addiction, and I guess this term can be relevant in maintaining healthy eating habits as well. The truth is, anyone can relapse, no matter how successful they’ve been in the past. There are no guarantees that we can always stay on top of things.

So the good news, is there’s no reason to feel like a failure if we’ve gained some or all of our weight back.

I remember when this happened to my wife and me, just after our honeymoon. We had worked so hard to get into great shape, only to let it slowly slip away in a matter of a couple of months. We were on our way back to where we started!

But then, something stopped us - call it luck, or whatever…but we were fortunate to have an external event stop us down the path we were going. The people from the Body-for-LIFE contest, began calling Mariah to interview her about her physical transformation - because she was in the running to win the contest! While it was exciting - it was a wake up call! Who knows what would have happened if we never got the phone call. Nevertheless, it was at that moment when we decided to turn it back around - and get back on track.

We learned a very valuable lesson. No matter how quickly and how successfully you lose weight and get into great shape - you can gain it back even faster! One bad meal a week, turns into two or three. Two extra pounds quickly turns into 5 or 10 extra pounds…and that’s when we stop weighing ourselves. Because we don’t want to see how bad it’s become. We think we are just a few pounds away from our goal, so our minds allow us to stay comfortable with the idea that “we know what to do”. This however, is the problem sometimes. Our confidence gets the best of us, and we forget that our motivation to stay on track gets negatively affected the further we have to go. So as we allow that “comfort zone” to widen, our ability to motivate ourselves to stay on course weakens.

This happens to many people every year. Weight Watchers lifetime members stop attending meetings, because they don’t want to see the damage they’ve done. The very accountability that helped them succeed is exactly what they do not want — because it’s a tough thing to face the fact that while you were so successful, you may be back to where you started. It’s like almost getting to the top of a mountain, and slipping, only to end up at the bottom again, looking up at the distance to climb back to where we had ascended to.

Everyone always says, the difficult part is “maintaining”. While this sounds good, there’s nothing mystical about it. There isn’t going to be a time when we no longer love to eat pizza, cookies and candy…our favorite foods will always be there for us! Temptation is always around us, and the social tendency is to eat with friends and family, to celebrate and to cope with life events. So this idea that we can eat perfectly forever is really difficult - impossible to do all the time, for the rest of our lives. We won’t always be able to eat right, and we will (most of us) fall of track from time to time. The key, we have discovered, have more to do with understanding the importance of constant accountability and goal setting in life - and when we get rid of our accountability and fail to set new goals, we inevitably start to lose ground. So the so-called Yo-Yo diet syndrome has less to do with dieting and more to do with our human nature…to eat what we love to eat!
Ultimately, we can only choose to go in one direction - the right one, or the wrong one. So I say, might as well head back now…for us, it was a valuable lesson, that while we can be so successful, we can also lose track of what keeps us accountable and motivated, and easily let it all slip away. If you’ve gained some weight back that you’ve previously lost, don’t worry, consider yourself smarter for it. Time to head back.

“Some of the best lessons we ever learn, we learn from our mistakes and failures. The error of the past is the success and wisdom of the future.” — Tyron Edwards, Theologian