How to Keep the Weight Off -- Permanently

Tammy Simmons-Hurmence had reached a point of no return.

Early this year, her weight had ballooned to its all-time high of 166 pounds. She does stand 5 feet 7 inches, but she longed for the number to be lower. Her dress size had become what she considered a too-plump 10. So, time to do something.

With her doctor's help, Ms. Simmons-Hurmence began to lose weight. She followed a healthy-foods regimen and started walking fast, seven days a week. Soon, the pounds melted away. Nine months later, she weighs 125.

But what everyone wants to know is: Are you keeping it off? Or, how are you keeping it off? The more aggressive are even inclined to say, "But will you keep it off?"

For anyone who has lost weight, whether it's just a few pounds or as much as 100, questions about keeping it off are nothing new. There is, of course, hard reality behind the questions. In an age when many people are overweight, weight gain and loss -- then gaining it all back -- are as old as the yo-yo itself.

A recent study by the Exploratory Center for Obesity Research at the University of Washington revealed that 90 percent of people who lose more than 10 percent of their body weight will gain it all back within five years.

It gets even more depressing. A U.S. government study conducted in 2005 showed that people should exercise 30 minutes a day to improve health, 60 minutes a day to keep from gaining weight but up to 90 minutes a day to sustain weight loss.

That's right -- 90 minutes a day.

Not exactly the most comforting news to Ms. Simmons-Hurmence, a mortgage originator who lives in Sachse, Texas, and whose dress size is now 4. It's not a size she plans to surrender without a fight.

"Now, every bad food I'm tempted to eat, I think about it," she says. "I may want a bag of chips or a candy bar, but I don't just automatically eat them. I compromise. I love bread pudding. So I went to a restaurant recently and ordered it but cut it in half. I put the rest away in the fridge. I allowed myself just a little. So far, it seems to be working."

It's also working for Melanie Schein, 48, who took a more dramatic path to weight loss. A 5-foot-5-inch mother of three who lives in Plano, Texas, Ms. Schein opted for gastric bypass surgery in 2002, when her weight reached its all-time high of 252 pounds. She lost 130 pounds.

A Never-Ending Battle
Her dress size, once a 24, now ranges between a 4 and a 6. But as recently as a year ago, she says, "I was down to a 0 or 2." She's regained "10 to 15 pounds," every ounce of which carries with it a measure of fear.

She worries about her husband being "one fabulous cook." She worries about "grazing" after feeding the kids and wonders, "Why did I do that?" She worries about being able to "eat a lot more now than I could after the surgery. I can sit down now and eat a whole sandwich instead of a half ... but if I start eating like I did before I had the surgery, will I gain all of my weight back? It's a terrible fear."

But any time temptation rears its head, there's the comfort of remembering the past and how it differs so dramatically from the present.

"Family and friends look at me and say, 'I remember when,'" she says. "Looking through old photos, I look at myself and say, 'Oh my God.' I can't believe I looked like that. You try not to have your picture taken. You know, you get in the back. You put all of the kids in front of you. Because it's so embarrassing."

Lona Sandon, a registered dietitian and an assistant professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center, counsels individual clients about losing weight and keeping it off for good.

She contends that one of the reasons people reacquire lost weight is that they never approached losing weight with the proper mind-set in the first place. What most look for instead, she says, is the "quick fix," which she calls Sin No. 1 in losing weight and then giving yourself the best chance possible of putting it back on.

"Far too many people want only the quick fix," she says. "They want it now. They want it for something special, a class reunion, a birthday, a vacation. What we need them to do is see it as nothing less than a permanent lifestyle change, and I do mean permanent."