Weight Maintenance

When your sessions fall

The program is built in four-week modules. Sessions come thickest at the start, when what you decide matters most, and step down as things settle. That is 5 sessions of 45 minutes across 8 weeks, counting the visit before week 1.

Week by week

1. Before you begin
   Before you begin

   This is the reading before your first visit. It starts by saying what this pathway is, because it is easy to mistake it for a continuation of the last one. It is not. Losing weight and holding weight are different problems with different mechanisms and different evidence.

2. Week 1
   Why holding is harder than losing

   If you have regained weight before and concluded it was a discipline problem, this week is the correction. Two of the best-known findings in this field describe changes in your body that persist for years after the weight comes off, and both were measured rather than inferred.

3. Week 2
   The muscle you are trying to keep

   This week you meet Tonia Burke, DPT, for 45 minutes. Weight loss is not only fat loss. Whatever route you took, some of what came off was lean tissue, and lean tissue is the part that determines what your body does with energy and what your life looks like in twenty years.

4. Week 3
   Eating for maintenance, not for restriction

   Everyone who arrives here has a diet that worked. That is why you are in this pathway. The problem is that the diet which produced the loss is almost never the pattern that holds it, and continuing to eat as though you are still losing is one of the most reliable routes back.

5. Week 4
   Halfway, and the medication question

   This week you see Cindy again for 45 minutes and repeat every measure from week 0. It is also the week for the conversation that most members in this pathway are either having or avoiding.

6. Week 5
   Sleep, stress and appetite

   Week 1 established that appetite regulation is altered after weight loss and stays altered. This week is about the two everyday things that push it further in the wrong direction, both of which are addressable and neither of which is about food.

7. Week 6
   The small regain, and what you do next

   This week you meet Kimberly Macon, our mindset coach, for 45 minutes. Regain almost never arrives as a steady climb. It arrives as three pounds, followed by a decision about what those three pounds mean.

8. Week 7
   Self-monitoring without preoccupation

   Every registry, review and trial in this pathway keeps returning to the same unglamorous behavior. Maintainers watch. Not constantly, and not anxiously, but regularly, and they act on what they see while it is still small.

9. Week 8
   Making it hold

   This is the last reading and the last 45 minutes with Cindy. Maintenance does not end at week 8, so this is a handover rather than a graduation, and it opens with the most realistic long-term picture available.