My mother used to say I could never stick to anything for very long. She didn’t understand that girls and boys need to learn about that, you’re not born with it. You try things out, drop them, try other things, learn, go forward and fall back, hold on and let go, and that’s all part of growing up.

Then, when you are grown, what it takes to stick to something is still very involved. It takes passion, commitment, tenacity, overcoming obstacles, withstanding failures, believing in yourself, giving up at times, forging ahead at times. But my mother didn’t know her cruel remarks about sticking and me would haunt me for such a long time, and interfere with the process of sticking to it.

This is my biggest personal issue, one that I confront daily as I try to lose weight. Her words echo in my head, and continue to hurt me and influence me: You never stick to anything.

But I know intellectually that those words are not right, that they are so wrong. And once I stop believing her, and start believing what I know, that’s when I’ll stick to it and finally be able to lose weight. And I feel that day is coming very soon.

After a lengthy process of dieting, there is a period in which you hold on to your old dieting behaviors. This is all well and good. It’s only natural at first to hold on to what you know. But you can hold on too much, or too tightly, to the point where you don’t emancipate yourself from a dieting mentality.

Moving beyond what you did when you dieted is a necessary step for weight-maintenance. Depending too much on your old dieting methods prevents you from feeling their loss. It also shields you from experiencing the new uncertainties you have to face. Under these circumstances you are not allowing yourself to do on your own what dieting supplied.

If you can break free of the hold dieting still has on you, you will be on your way to a new independence, an independence characterized by realistic appraisal, realistic action-taking, and incisive self-analysis. You’ll need these characteristics for the maintenance work going forward, and for leftovers, things about yourself that you didn’t quite work out during the dieting phase. 

By breaking free, but not too free, holding on, but not too tightly or for too long, you establish a set of internalized characteristics that will sustain you during post-dieting, and prevent you from regressing. This is the psychological step you need to take when you go from dieting to maintaining the weight you lost.

The pit of my stomach tells me much more about my feelings than it does about hunger for food. I am finding this as I concentrate on keeping off the 36 pounds I have lost.

I’ve tended to interpret those weird stirrings deep down as a constant need for food, but I know now that can’t always be right; no one is hungry twenty-four hours a day.

I want to get into the dieters hall of fame. That is where women go who lose weight for good. To become a member of that exclusive club, I now ask myself many times a day:

        “Who’s talking, the pit of my stomach— or the pit of my heart?”

What a loaded question. But you see, this is indeed the question now. It is no longer a question of following a diet word for word, ounce for ounce, calorie for calorie, because the extra weight is gone. I don’t need a diet any more.

I’ve got my before and after photos, and there’s a spectacular change, anyone can see that. But it’s only the outside part of the story, not what counts at this point, which is the inside, the deepest part.

Every person has moments of weakness and moments of strength, whether they’re short or tall, fat or thin, man or woman, rich or poor, shy or outgoing, unsure of themselves or self-confident.

Our point? You have moments of weakness and moments of strength too, just like everyone else. So it’s not helpful to go into a weight-loss plan thinking you will have totally perfect willpower at all times. It’s not a workable idea.

You need to accept this fact, and not try to ignore it.

What you can do, given this very human state of being, is anticipate those moments of weakness whenever you can. If there is an upcoming situation that you know has been difficult for you in the past, you can assume it will be difficult for you again, unless you have learned to handle it very differently.

So, you see the situation coming, one that has been a burden for you at other times. When you see it before it is actually there, you can use your strength to figure out what you can do. It’s when you come up against the situation without realizing it’s coming that you are the most weak.

Look ahead; anticipate; strategize when you have your wits about you; don’t wait until you’re suddenly right in the middle of the hard time, when you are too weak to think your way out of it. Use your strength to anticipate your weaknesses.

Boy, losing this weight is a bumpy ride. For the first time the clouds are parting, and the surface of my eating problem is beginning to show. What a surprise.

I see that my life is just the right mixture of things to promote my eating this way. It’s astonishing. It is the way I operate that allows this eating/weight problem to continue its existence.

So, the way is beginning to be less and less cloudy and unknowable. I need to change how I operate.

I see where I am now, and I see where I should be. How to get there is what I need to discover, and that means going further, and seeing what lies beneath the surface.

My eating problem lies close to my heart, and that’s what makes it tricky, and even scary. Getting that close to my real tender spots is something I’ve made sure to keep away from. But as I go closer, little by little, careful step by careful step, it’s getting less scary and difficult, and more and more eye-opening.

It is this new way of going about losing weight that is giving me the most hope I’ve ever had of solving the problem.