Maintaining weight loss
Maintaining a lower weight was often a hard-won victory for those who were able to do so. Invariably, it involved long-term changes. For Maxine Mary,...
Regaining weight after weight loss
I don’t think an overweight person who loses the weight ever can afford to drop their guard.’ (June)
Maintaining weight loss can be difficult to achieve and many people who lose weight then regain it. This can take place multiple times in a pattern known as ‘weight cycling’, often through a process of ‘yo-yo dieting’. We talked with people who described their own experiences of regaining weight, which we explore below.
Changes to routine
Changes to routine were a common thread in people’s accounts of how they had regained weight. Holidays and Christmas – as Shirley mentions – were key moments at which it could be hard to stay on track with diet and exercise. Before she adopted a 5:2 way of eating, Heather found she would regain weight every time she went on holiday. She said, ‘We’d go on holiday and I’d eat and drink lots more food than I would do at home but I wouldn’t do anything about it when I came home. So it would stay a bit high and then the next holiday it would go up a bit more and a bit more’. Weddings were similarly difficult, Stuart found, because of the huge amounts of food given to guests.Following participation in a local NHS weight management services for people with chronic conditions, people like Tommy, June X, Joan and Sue Y learned to think differently about occasions like Christmas and holidays. For example, Tommy said that he now realises that there is no reason why he should expect to put on weight just because he is on holiday.
A new job, shift work, changes in access to food (at work and home), retirement, an operation, or an accident could all affect diet and exercise. Tommy had been able to manage his weight through exercise, which was mostly based around his place of work. When he retired at the age of sixty, he lost access to the facilities he had been using and his weight crept up. After being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and sleep apnoea, Paul Y was motivated to lose weight and lost 15 kilos through exercise. However, he then took another job which was more office-based and ‘It just caused me irregular eating, weight crept up, less exercise’. After a stressful period of time, including relationship changes, Paul Y had to give up his job and developed high blood pressure and high cholesterol. He found it harder to exercise, and put on some of the weight he had lost.
Managing weight alongside health problems
Sometimes people with co-morbidities find it hard to balance advice for the different health conditions. Jim, has regained some weight since his stroke, and would like to cut out carbohydrates to see if that helps him lose more weight. However, his wife Linda, a pharmacist, suggests that, because of his type 2 diabetes, he should have some carbohydrate with every meal. He also has atrial fibrillation and worries about how to find the right balance of exercise because walking up hill makes him ‘quite puffy’.
Stressful life events and emotional eating
Sometimes, stressful events, such as a family member’s illness, or changes at work, could contribute to people regaining weight. In 2006/2007, Angela’s Dad was really ill. She stopped attending Weight Watchers and says, ‘I just continued to stuff my face’. As she describes below, she was also negotiating a stressful time at work.Emotional eating was a key factor in regaining weight for some of the people we spoke to (see also ‘Emotions, emotional eating and self-esteem issues‘). As well as taking less and less exercise, June said, ‘there’s like a pattern really which is emotional eating, I think, to cheer myself up or as a treat So every decade I would say I’ve gained a stone which is a lot, but when it’s very, very gradual over ten years, it’s not that you don’t notice it. It becomes your new way of life’. Boredom, depression, and the winter months were other triggers which people mentioned led them to regain weight.
Physical changes
A change in medication or an operation were other things which people said had caused them to put on weight they had previously lost.Stuart, Myra and Heather all said they had regained weight after an operation. Before her hernia operation, Myra was told by her doctor that she needed to lose weight and managed to lose 4 stone. After the operation, she put a stone back on.
Reaching goals and losing motivation
For some people, reaching their weight loss goal meant that their commitment to a healthy lifestyle dropped off and they started to put weight on again.
‘My problem has been over the years, and this is the ongoing problem is the fact that in common with a lot of people who are severely overweight, I have a difficulty, I don’t have so much of a difficulty taking off a pretty significant amount of weight, but I have a terrible difficulty keeping it off and sustaining that lifestyle.’ (June X)
Sometimes this coincided with stopping their membership of a weight management group, such as Weight Watchers or Slimming World. In the past, before she discovered the 5:2 plan, Heather had found that she would stick to a strict diet until she reached her target weight, but then the weight would gradually come back on. Rosemary said, ‘It’s usually because either the occasion has gone past, so I might have dieted for a wedding or for a holiday or the occasion will have, the motivation will have gone’. The same was true for Ellie: ‘I would do a diet for such and such. I would lose that and think, ‘I’m now good’ and then I would think that’s it, I don’t need to bother anymore and then I didn’t go out and binge or anything, but I would gradually just get back’. Trevor found that each time he tried to lose weight after regaining it, the task was harder.
Physical benefits of losing weight and effect on chronic conditions
To be able to do that (climbing a hill) is like, well, gold medal and it's all down to weight loss. That's all it is....