Most of my recent blogs have focused on fitness and injury recovery. On this last day of 2012, I'd like to look back at weight loss and weight control, a.k.a. "maintenance."

2012 was the first full calendar year of maintenance for me. On January 1, I weighed in at 165.0 lbs. I thought I was done losing weight. 165 had been a stretch goal for weight loss that seemed unachievable, and I got there!

On December 31, I weighed in at 159.8 lbs. I wasn't trying to lose weight in 2012, I was trying to make the weight trend go sideways. The rear view mirror says the trend didn't truly become sideways until about the start of May. For the first four months of the year, I kept adjusting my concept of goal weight downward. Some time during the middle of the year, I settled on 160 to 163 as my desired goal range. Since May 1, I count 8 days when my weight was outside that range, 2 higher and 6 lower. The last three low points were December 23, 24, and 31, all at 159.8.

There's no secret why the weight is doing what it is; I've been running more, and not eating enough more. I'm trying to correct that. My current calorie range is the highest it's been since I've been on SparkPeople, and I may have to move it up another 100 calories to get myself to consistently eat a little more. This is scary. I did quite well on 2800 calories per day, and it's hard to adjust to 3100 calories. But I know it's way too easy to add an extra 2000 calories if I don't track.

Fiddling with the calorie range in response to what the scale does has worked for me in 2012. The lower end of my calorie range (which I think about much more than the upper end) has ranged from 2200 to 3000 calories in 2012, depending on what was going on. Here's what the weight did in 2012:



Longer term, here's what the weight did from 2002 to 2012:



Edit to add: The labels didn't show up as well as I hoped. From left to right, they are: End of 2004, First time weight lifting. End of 2007, Budget becomes major focus. Summer 2009, 2009 Rodent Diet. July 2011, Started SparkPeople. Early October, 2011, Started maintenance.

One of the nice things about weighing daily is that I can look back at where I've been and connect it to what was going on in my life at the time. I won't bore you with all the details, but here are a few highlights that relate to how I ended up in maintenance on SparkPeople.

I went through a divorce process that lasted from August 2002 to August 2004. In late 2004, I made my first serious effort at weight loss, focusing on eating only when I was hungry and getting some exercise, primarily walking. I took up weight lifting in January 2005, and I was impressed with my success on the weight front. Then I bounced off 185, which was still 3 pounds above the top of healthy BMI for me.

Various things happened in my life, and I struggled to maintain. At the end of 2007, my daughter dropped out of college. This simultaneously increased my expenses while cutting my after-tax income. As a result, my major focus in 2008 had to be learning to budget. I was successful; but the weight piled back on and I achieved my lifetime high weight of 221 in late December, 2008.

In 2009, mice were spotted where I work. My employer instituted a new food policy: No food at the desk. All food brought for consumption must be in sealed containers, and must be consumed in the first floor cafeteria. No open containers food were to be on the working floor. I jokingly called this the "rodent diet," and it helped me lose weight down to 191. Until the restrictions, I did not realize how many times I was mindlessly wandering away from my desk for a piece of chocolate.

After the rodent diet restrictions relaxed, I tried to maintain the same discipline, with mixed success. I got my weight down to 185 again, but failed to keep it there. In the summer of 2011, I visited my sister. She was thinner than I remembered ever seeing her before in my life, and she nudged me into SparkPeople. I grudgingly admitted that I couldn't out-train a crappy diet.

I set what I thought was an ambitious goal, 175. I achieved that in 12 weeks and spent 8 more weeks nominally in maintenance but actually losing another 10 pounds while learning how to not lose weight.

The weight loss phase with SparkPeople stands out on that graph, doesn't it? The rodent diet showed a comparable result of losing, but the loss wasn't sustained. However, with SparkPeople I think I've figured out maintenance. Yes, that sideways trend is short on the scale of 11 years; but it's a sideways trend of more than a year, and a tight sideways trend of 7 months.

These days, I'm more focused on the fitness side than the diet side. I'm concerned with how much I can run, how many pullups I can do, how much weight I can lift. These things aren't trivial; but managing my weight is a higher priority. It just happens to be a fairly easy priority to achieve, which allows me to have a lot of attention for other priorities.

I can't believe I just wrote that managing my weight is easy. But there you have it. I benefit from living alone and controlling the food that comes into my house as well as the food that goes into my mouth. If I weight, measure, and track everything, it really isn't that hard. The only tricky part is recognizing when the targets for what I eat need to change. And I've got some weight graphs showing I've managed to do that acceptably well in 2012.