Maintainers ~ How do you measure success?

I lost a boatload of weight, and it was exciting to see every pound drop. I would jump for joy, and I was working to achieve a goal.

Now that I am maintaining, I hop in the scale and the only thing that goes through my head is "okay..." and then I go on about my day. It's almost depressing I don't get that feeling of success anymore.

So I was wondering how you all measure success, or if you continue to have milestones and reward yourselves.

Hey star - I've been maintaining a 130 lb loss since January.  I find that my current motivation and excitement comes for working to burn off 5000 calories a week.  I also made a resolution to learn, without logging, how to keep my weight within a 5 lb variance.  So far, so good.  I am a bit concerned about your being 16.5% body fat. That is a really thin athletes body fat and you are not exercising.  You may want to consider getting fitness tested.

16.5% is good I was told by my doc. I'm not much fat really.. I'm pretty much skin and muscle and bones. *shrugs* I'm not worried if it's accurate or not, I just know I like my size, and I'm in good health.

 

PS: I've worked out for 4 days in a row! Happy for me. Tonight will be my 5 days for the week, then tomorrow I can rest. Good stuff. It feels good. Just so darn time consuming.

wow!  congrats on the weight loss!!!  170 pounds?!  that is really awesome!!!  :D

i just came to the maintainence forum today.  hubby said i'm too skinny  LOL  i'm not...  i really want to lose more, but i guess i'm happy with my weight & just need to tone up or something.  i'm 5'8, f, 149.  :(  i wanted to get down to 124, but my bmi is 22.5

anyway, i love the bracelet idea!!!  :D

star -- there are a **thousand** ways to track progress from working out: speed, distance, length of time, weight lifted etc.

check out runningahead.com and stumptuous.com for two of my favorite exercise related websites. runningahead has a fabulous log (if watching #s is part of your thing) and stumptuous is an awesome site for women getting into weight lifting :)

congrats on weight loss. time to get faster and stronger :)

I am also having problems with maintaining. My target was 140 (from 190, 2 years ago).  My diet was basically no sweets and no over-eating.  Thanks to the flu recently , I ended up at 135 and feel better than 140.  Since everyone is yelling about my weight (including my Dr.), I'm still trying to get back to 140, but there seems to be this fear in the back of my mind of gaining weight.  I'm not sure what I should eat for the extra calories.  Going back to sweets and McDonalds doesn't seem like a great idea and  I don't want to cut back on working out (run about 10 miles a week and exercise machines).   Good Luck!!! 

I came to terms with the fact that I'm lazy.

:) Is that so bad? I guess I'll have to find my own way to measure my own success. I'm going on a 8 mile hike in a few weeks, but this stationary bike ride has got to go. I'll find something I'm interested in.

mortongrove ~ I had that mindset for a while. I didn't want to consume fat because I felt it didn't have any need for me since I already had so much of it I wanted to get rid of.

Yesterday I bought a yummy avacado I'm going to make part of my lunch. Nuts are an easy way to get in calories, and so is drinking them through juice (buy a juicer if you dont want to drink the non nutritious store bought stuff). It's more mental than anything. Have a yummy dessert! You'll be okay.

Congrats for keeping up the exercise!

Lazy for not liking the stationary bike? Nah, normal. I bike and run outside, and find a stationary bike a form of torture. Just sitting on the thing, pedalling away, for xx minutes? It feels good to be fit, but the activity itself is very tedious.

Good luck at finding activities that work for you.  Hiking is great, and there are so many other physical activities to try and see what you like.