YouTube Live Q&A 

In today's episode, I'm talking about the most important lessons I've learned in maintenance. 

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The Laid Back Guide to Intermittent Fasting: How I lost Over 80 Pounds and Kept It Off Eating Whatever I Wanted

Overcoming Weight Loss Obstacles: How To Keep Going When Things Get Difficult 

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ALL THE INFORMATION CONTAINED ON THIS PODCAST IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. IT IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR MEDICAL ADVICE. YOU SHOULD ALWAYS CONSULT A MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL BEFORE GOING ON ANY DIET OR EXERCISE PROGRAM.

 

The following is an AI generated transcript of this podcast. 

Welcome to the Six Miles to Supper podcast. I'm your host, Kayla Cox, and I've lost over £80 with intermittent fasting six days a week, eating whatever I wanted at my meals, taking a cheat day every Sunday and walking six miles a day. And I'm here to help you on your weight loss journey.

Hey, guys, before you get into today's episode, I just wanted to take a minute to let you know about something you might not know about, which is my live Q&A, is that I do on YouTube. These happen on Fridays at noon Eastern, which for you international people, that is UTC minus four in these lives. I take questions from people in the chat.

So if you have any questions, you just can join up and you know, ask your question. Usually I'm live for about an hour and I'm usually able to answer all the questions that are asked. I'll put a link in the show notes to the live and if you are subscribed to my channel, you can also choose to get notifications and then that will alert you whenever I go live.

These lives are always a good time, so I hope to see you there. And this episode, I'm going to take you through my two maintenance experiences and talk about the similarities and the differences and what I've learned. I went from 220 to down to about 157 158, and that was my initial weight loss. I was really happy at 157 and I remember thinking, you know, we're coming up on the holidays.

I don't really know if I'm going to be able to keep this off. It felt so easy that I wasn't really sure, you know, like would it continue to be easy or what? And so I decided to maintain and I wasn't really sure what I was supposed to do. I kind of had it in my head, you know, Is it.

It was this question of is it is it like failure? If I continue to do the plan or some version of the plan, like, you know, is it kind of like graduating from the weight loss program and then you got to go back to real life? You know, this is where I had always failed. I had always gained the weight back, which was, you know, at this point in my life, I had done it many, many times.

I don't know how many times I had, you know, lost weight, gotten down to a goal away and then just promptly gained it. All right. Back. So I wanted to do it right. So I made some decisions that I think were really important right upfront. And that was, first of all, I cannot go back to eating how I was eating before, like eating all day, no boundaries with food, overeating, you know, on a regular basis, snacking all the time.

Those things I didn't think would be wise, you know, to do anymore. But as far as the day to day planner wasn't really sure. And so I decided to just keep the experimental mindset. And I just wanted to see, you know, like, what exactly do I need to do in order to keep the weight off another decision I made that was really important was to continue to weigh.

And my idea was, you know, I'm just going to do some experimentation here. But ultimately, if my if my weight start to trend upwards into a place where I'm just not comfortable anymore with the weight gain, then I'm going to stop. I'm going to, you know, change something up and I'll lose weight. My, my, my kind of vague idea was I'll I'll just go back on the plan that I know works and so I started experimenting and I tried to keep, you know, self-aware, like, you know, what's going on.

So there were days this would have been like 2016 and into 2017. I just would sometimes do, you know, homemade like I like to do. Sometimes I would do two meals a day. Sometimes I would do no fasting at all. Just eat, you know, like just be, you know, quote unquote normal, you know, just have breakfast and have lunch and have dinner.

And I would even experiment with like, okay, you know, like, what if I what if I snack? You know, what? What is that like? And I really wanted to see, you know, what works and what doesn't. And a big lesson I learned that year was that my walks were important and it wasn't because of calorie burn. I don't think, you know, it was more going for my daily walks put me in a good headspace, like it just made my emotional life better.

I found that I was a more patient person, both with myself and with my family, and I just didn't feel great if I didn't get out there and do my steps. So that was really the first lesson I learned in the maintenance journey was, okay, I need I need to keep active. And I found that I could maintain my weight pretty easily within like a £5 range based on my seven day average with really being pretty, pretty lax.

I would say like looking back at those times. I mean, again, I wasn't practicing intermittent fasting very consist ardently as far as like I didn't have a consistent plan. I was being really lucid. So maintaining my weight between 158 and 163 was pretty easy in my experience. It didn't really require too too much thought really, as long as I kept, you know, walking like I was walking and which was six miles a day and and just keeping on weighing that, that was really easy.

So then I decided in September of 2017 to start my YouTube channel, and I got it in my head that, you know, I really need to lose these last like, you know, it was at this point probably five or £6 to get, you know, into the normal BMI, which I know, you know, BMI is not perfect. It's arbitrary, quite frankly.

But it was the the yardstick that I had decided to measure, you know, by and and it did kind of bug me that I was a few pounds overweight. It did not bug me as far as my weight felt great. As far as me moving through life, I felt great. My energy levels were really good. I my joints were good.

I didn't I didn't feel like my weight was holding me back at all. But, you know, the idea of being on YouTube and having a journal about weight loss and being a little bit overweight, like, I just couldn't handle that. Like I was afraid of what people were going to say. And I wanted to be helpful to people like I didn't want the fact that I was slightly overweight to prevent people from learning about intermittent fasting and that kind of a thing.

So I thought, you know, like, I want to do this, I want to do it for myself, but I also want to do it, you know, just to show people that it's possible to do it. And so for the next year, I went on this journey of, you know, losing more weight. And so I went back to the plan that I had used to help me lose weight.

So that was eating one meal a day, walking six miles a day, and then taking a cheat day on Sunday. And I documented that process on YouTube. I just, you know, like every month I would sit down and give like a report of my numbers, what my weight did and all that stuff. And so I got down to a point by like the end of 2018 where I was like, okay, I feel like I'm just chasing a low number at this point.

Like, like there was there was just nothing that was like motivating me to lose more, you know? It was just like, Why am I doing this? I kept thinking, like, what? Like why do I continue to want to lose weight? I mean, and I wasn't even really wanting to is just kind of like, you know, you need a Y, right?

So I thought, you know, since I've been the type of person historically who's just never satisfied, like, no matter what the number is, it's like it needs to be one less, you know, like if I'm at 142, it needs to be 141. If I'm at 141 needs to be 140, and if 140, then I'll be happy when it's 139.

So I said, I'm going to stop doing that. I'm just going to be satisfied with that number, which I had been satisfied with. 158 So so I decided, okay, I'm going to try to maintain this and so here's what I've learned since then. So that started, you know, like at the end of 2018, I think it was around September or October of that year that I decided, okay, I'm done and now I want to maintain again.

And I wasn't really sure once again, like, what exactly does this mean? And I think that's where a lot of people find themselves when they get down to their goal weight. They're like, I don't know really what I'm supposed to do next. And so, you know, based on the the the things I had learned before, I knew I wanted to continue to be active, to continue to do my walks.

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