It’s clear there will be lots of short-term effects from your weight-loss regimen. The goal, however, is to achieve long-term, lasting effects. This is where hearts are wrung out to dry and hopes are usually dashed.

What makes it so hard to keep going until you reach your goal weight and stay there—forever?  Weight-loss research shows that the single best predictor of weight-loss maintenance is follow-up support. Counselors giving follow-up support to their clients and continued group participation are the mainstays of long-term weight-loss maintenance. 

Is it possible, though, to provide this kind of follow-up support yourself? One thing you could do to answer this question is to make a list of what a counselor and a support group would offer you in the way of help and guidance. What would they do to help you maintain weight loss? Once you make such a list, see if you can provide this kind of support for yourself.

For more on weight-loss maintenance, please go to The Reading Room and the White Paper, both of which are in the left-hand column of this blog at MariasLastDiet.com. Or, if you want to have an actual book or an e-book to read through and refer to, check out the weight-loss books for women section on the right-hand side of this blog, especially Psych Your Diet: A Daily Dose. Volume 3. Psych Yourself to Keep It Off.

If you need more specific help, email us at hi@mariaslastdiet.com and we’ll point you in the right direction.

Can you cope and adjust when you are faced with adversity? You will need this kind of capability if you hope to lose a lot of weight.

Actually for weight loss, you will have to be able to withstand various kinds of adversity and make the adaptations you need to move forward. Once into the process of weight loss, you will have to do without and go without. No more oversized meals of all your favorite fattening foods. Whatever has been causing you to pick and snack after dinner will have to be satisfied in some non-food ways. Rather than letting your mistakes and failures that will come with changing your eating pattern add up and throw you off your weight-loss course, it’s best if you are able to bounce right back into your weight-loss routine.

Are you this kind of resilient person? Well, if not, see what you can do to make yourself psychologically stronger. You are going to need it.

Don’t worry about getting weighed at your doctor’s office the next time you go. Your primary care physician, if he or she is like the majority of primary care doctors in the United Sates and Canada, won’t counsel you at all about losing some weight.

Research reported in the May 2013 issue of the International Journal of Obesity revealed that about 9% of primary care doctors counsel about 52% of the patients on 20% of the visits. This means that you have a good chance that your doctor will say nothing to you about losing excess weight.

What’s so good about that? Well, the good part is you don’t have to worry about feeling embarrassed or ashamed about being an overweight person when both you and your doctor avoid the topic of your weight.

Is there a bad part? You be the judge.

What makes you go on a food binge? Have you asked yourself this? If you did, what did you come up with?

Do you go on an food binge because the weight-loss method you are using is too restrictive and too depriving? Do you binge after you have a diet cheat and because you can’t help thinking I got it wrong so what’s the sense of me being careful anymore? Perhaps you binge eat for neither of these reasons.

Maybe you get in really bad moods and your out-of-control eating is your way of staving off a bad mood. You bury yourself in eating and escape the bad mood that way, and the guilt you suffer afterwards from eating too much food isn’t anywhere near as serious as the bad mood that kicks off your binge eating. There is still another possibility. You could binge as a way of attributing your bad mood to the binge itself rather to the things that are truly causing you to be in a bad mood.

As you can see, there are lots of possible reasons for someone to binge eat. What causes you to binge eat?

If you were asked if failing at losing weight is bad, you probably would say a resounding “yes”, with no doubt in your mind whatsoever. There you would be wrong. Weight loss failure isn’t bad; it’s necessary.

Failure is an important part of all that we do, including losing your unwanted weight. Without failure there can be no success. Successful weight loss is actually built on your failures. Take, for example, not sticking to your diet for lunch one day and then at dinner the next day. These are failures. What would you say to yourself about them? You might tell yourself to look more closely at what made you go off your diet, and then do something about that. Because of your failure you start a search process for what went wrong. Then you set about correcting it. Failure in this case spurred corrective diagnosis and then corrective action.

Failure is not only good for learning to do something better. Acceptance of failures, big and little, in the weight-loss process also prevents you from having lots of negative reactions to failing. It limits your frustration, negative thinking, feelings of humiliation, fear of failure, disappointment in yourself, and quitting rather than persevering.

As contradictory as it may sound, weight-loss failure makes successful weight loss possible.