Call it diet fatigue, burnout or simply boredom.
That's what Laura Howard, a Lean Plate Club member who has trimmed an impressive 60 pounds during the past 18 months, reports experiencing these days. To drop from 190 to about 130 pounds, she's done all the right things, including working out four times a week, changing her eating habits, even altering the way she thinks about food.
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Yet she's now slipping into "bad habit" quicksand.
"Over the past few months," she wrote in an e-mail last week, "I've been finding it harder to stay motivated . . . and am feeling the pounds come back. . . . I'm up to 136, which isn't a lot, I know. But I'm so worried I'm going to be fat again.
"The weird thing is, I don't do anything about it. I will sit around and worry about being fat and gaining the weight back, but I have no ambition to get on the treadmill or go for that bike ride except for once or twice a week. . . . I don't even have a reason like 'I'm too busy.' I just simply don't want to.
"I have hit a wall . . . and can't get seem to get back to the mind-set I was in during my most motivated time. Help me so I don't gain it all back!"
At the University of Pennsylvania's Weight and Eating Disorders Clinic, "about 100 percent of the people we see feel this kind of fatigue," said Leslie Womble, assistant professor of psychiatry. It's so common that Womble warns them about it before it happens so "they won't be surprised."
Most shrug off her alerts -- and a few get annoyed -- until it happens to them. That's because losing weight can feel exciting when reinforcement is strong.
"At first, when you're plugging away, it feels great because everyone is noticing," Womble said. "You start to look great and your clothes size is changing."
But maintaining those hard-fought losses takes just as much effort and comes with less positive feedback because it's simply keeping the status quo.
