Don’t panic.

From time to time your plan will stop working and you’ll gain weight. Don’t panic. Gaining weight is perfectly normal. Controlling you weight is not easy. In fact, the design of your body purposefully makes it hard.

The threats never go away. Your environment will always be full of wonderful and cheap high calorie foods filled with fat and sugar. The smell, the thought, and even the sight of food will always make you hungry. You will always be tempted to eat more than you should because food will always taste so good. Your brain will always want to make short-term emotional decisions. Your body will always want you to survive by gaining weight. Life will always give you hard times and temptations. Industry will forever bombard you with advertisements and create new tasty foods for you to love. It will always be easier to sit around and do nothing than to be active. And as you get older, your metabolism will slow down.

With all that, how could you always control your weight?

That’s why learning to forgive yourself is so important. You will go through periods where you gain weight and then lose it again. Hopefully your feedback system will keep the amount of weight gain low, but it will happen. Don’t let it make you give up and quit. Expecting adversity means you won’t be shocked when problems happen and that puts you in a better position to respond without panic. We can do some pretty stupid things when we panic.

What can you do, or think about, when your plan isn’t working?

1.      See your doctor. Maybe something has changed with your body and you just don’t know what it is yet. Please reread the See Your Doctor Now strategy for some thoughts on this subject.

2.      Are you running your weekly spins? The Designer Way helps you to continually get better at staying on your diet. If you aren’t using The Designer Way you are ignoring a major weight loss strategy.

3.      Has your life changed recently in such a way that you need to update your plan? If it has, take a look at the Changes in Your Life Means Changing Your Plan strategy for some help.

4.      Are you eating more calories than you think? Revisit how many calories you are actually eating, using the How Many Calories are You Really Eating? strategy. You may not be counting foods that add a lot of calories to your diet. I once found that my innocent-looking snack of a handful of peanuts had 800 calories! A friend found she was drinking 400 extra “hidden” calories a day from the milk in her coffee. You never know where calories might hide.

5.      Is your calorie target correct? Maybe your daily calorie target calculations from the How Many Calories Can You Eat Each Day? strategy is off. Try recalculating the numbers. Your body may be different now. If you’ve lost weight you may need fewer calories than you did before. You can also try gradually lowering your calorie target in 100 calorie increments to see if it makes a difference.

6.      Reexamine your daily routine. Keep a daily activity log for a while. This is where journaling is helpful because you can look it over for clues. Where are your Safe Zones letting you down? Where are you slipping up? Where are you eating extra calories? Where aren’t you getting exercise? Talk it over with your support group. Then ask yourself which strategies you can add to create Safe Zones that will prevent any problems you have found. Take a look again at the strategies in this book and also see if you can think of any new ones that fit your life.

7.      Are you always hungry and thinking about food? Maybe your calorie target is too low and you aren’t eating enough. Keep your calorie deficit small so you can keep the starvation response away. Take a look at the How Much do You Want to Lose in a Spin? strategy for some help.

8.      Are you getting enough exercise? Perhaps you can add a few more exercise-related strategies to see if that makes a difference.

9.      Do you have any new automatic eating scenarios you aren’t dealing with? Take a look at the Put the Brake on Automatic Eating chapter for some help.

10.  Are you following the strategies? Are you creating Safe Zones where it is hard for you to slip-up? Try some new strategies, even if you don’t like them at first. Take a look at the Daily Reminders strategy; it can really help.

11.  Are you extreme enough? Can you dial up some of your existing strategies a notch or two? Walking at faster pace, for example, really burns a lot more calories. Maybe there other strategies where you can be more extreme.

12.  Is the diet you have selected appropriate for you? Maybe the diet you are following isn’t working for you and you need to pick another one.

13.  Are you visiting your support group? Participating in a support group is one of the most important strategies for keeping you on target. I know it seems like you can blow it off, but it really does help.

14.  Are you working Joyful Eating into your life? Joyful Eating can be the fun that helps keep you on plan. Don’t ignore Joyful Eating. Diets don’t work if they are just about denial. You need joy in your life too.

15.  Reexamine your reason for wanting stay on a diet. Maybe getting in touch with why you are working on your weight might help. Redo the exercise in the Why do You Really Want to Stay on Your Diet? strategy.

16.  Maybe you are just going through a rough patch? Weight loss is frustratingly unpredictable. You go weeks without losing weight, and then one day 5 pounds just disappears. Maybe that’s what you are going through.  Wait it out a while longer. Keeping using The Designer Way and keep doing the right things. Don’t give up.

17.  Could you be destined to be big folk? If so, don’t get sucked into thinking it’s the end of the world or it is some deep personal flaw. You can still be fit and big and live a great life. See Big Folks Health FAQ at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/fat-acceptance-faqs for more information.

18.  Visit http://YourDesignerDiet.com for more help, support, and inspiration. Maybe somebody at the site can help your figure out what’s going on.

19.  Hopefully all these questions and suggestions will give you ideas on how to handle the inevitable weight gains and plateaus.  It’s helpful to consider, what else are you going to do? Do you really want to give up and start doing all the wrong things again? You know that won’t work. Be patient. Let the process work. It will in the end.