Hey there. It's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and in this week's weekly vlog, we are talking about the publication of the book Maintain and the five myths of weight-loss maintenance. This is the fifth book on food and weight loss that I have published, and I believe it's going to be the last one. I am working on a sixth book, but it's not about food and weight loss. It's about my life story and the dopamine dominant brain and the wild ride that it is to have one. So, this book is a capstone. It's the completion of the arc. It started with the first book, Bright Line Eating®, and we're all the way through the series now talking about weight-loss maintenance, which is a topic that people just get wrong. It's really not something that's talked about much in our society. There are unspoken myths shrouded in mystery in our collective unconscious, and I want to bring them to the forefront and talk about them in this vlog today.
Myth number one is that maintenance is just going to happen. It's the easy part that weight loss is the hard part. As soon as you get that weight off, maintenance will just happen from there. No, that's not how it works at all. It's actually as ridiculous as the notion that marriage is the easy part. You just have to find the right person, and as soon as you get married, you're going to effortlessly rack up 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years of blissful marriage after that because you found the right person to marry. No. That's not how it works. Anyone who's been married a long time knows that marriage is a thing and being happily married takes work and it's not just going to happen because you got married. We're going to talk about some of the other myths of weight-loss maintenance that make maintenance such a thing and make that myth so faulty and foolhardy.
Let's talk about the other four. Myth number two is that when you get the weight off, it's time to celebrate with food. I have so many people that I know who have a story of hitting some sort of self-conceived, magical number of a goal weight that they were aiming for, and then buying a bag of M&Ms on the way home after they weigh in at the clinic to celebrate. So many people do this. As a matter of fact, I think that there's an unspoken saboteur gremlin in our minds that believes that once you've lost the weight, now you get to loosen things up. Now you get to go back to eating how you used to eat. Now you get to, again, have that thing you've been depriving yourself of to get the weight off. That is the epitome of the weight loss, weight regain, yo-yo cycle, the diet mentality cycle, is that dieting is a state of deprivation after which you hit some target number and you get to unshackle yourself from the chains of the diet and eat some things that you haven't been eating, but that is exactly how we regain all the weight. So, the way to succeed with weight-loss maintenance is to make weight loss a series of building new habits, basically, and becoming someone who is devoted to a new way of eating and living. So, this is the first mindset shift that we talk about in this book Maintain. The first deep identity shift is becoming devoted, not somebody who's on a diet, but somebody who now eats differently, like a vegetarian becomes someone who eats differently. They don't eat meat anymore, and it doesn't matter if they're on a cruise or if it's their birthday. They're vegetarian. They're not going to eat meat just because they're on a cruise or it's their birthday. That's the level of devotion that you need to have to your new way of eating and living to be someone who will keep the weight off when you actually get it off.
Myth number three is that you know what you're aiming for. I don't find that that's by and large the case. I've coached thousands of people to get down to their goal weight and live there happily. What I find is that in two ways this is wrong. First of all, I would say most people don't know what they're aiming for, even in the literal physical sense of what number, what range, what's my target? What I find is that for a lot of people, the range of weight that they settle in on takes some years to discover and is going to shift over the decades as they keep their weight off. I've been keeping my weight off for 23 years at this point, and my target weight range has really shifted at various times. I don't just mean for my pregnancies, obviously, but also for times when things were going on hormonally, there was a time when I was really into bodybuilding and my weight range shifted at that time. My target range is typically about five pounds, but that range has shifted up and down the scale by 15 pounds during my years of Maintenance. A lot of people start Bright Line Eating, not knowing at all what might be a happy range, weight range for their body, because they've been living with obesity since they were a toddler or a little kid and they have no idea. For other people, their weight got so high that they don't know how much to account for loose skin and the shifts that have happened in their body by living with so much weight for so long. That's totally understandable. Oftentimes, you need to get the weight off to really kind of get down there and see how it feels, see if your body protests and complains as you try to get down to a number that it's not happy with and you're going to need to settle at a slightly higher range. It really varies. By and large, a lot of people do not know what they're actually aiming for in terms of a target weight range.
But I also mean this myth that you don't know what you're aiming for to be, or I guess the myth would be that you do know what you're aiming for. It's also true spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, because I think we hang a lot of our identity and our hat on this weight loss peg, and we make it out to be something it really isn't. What I notice is that there's some sort of phantom of success or self-esteem or something that we're aiming for, but it's a mirage. It's not going to materialize when we get there. This is actually related to the fifth myth that's coming up. So, I'm just going to propose that it's worth doing some really deep examination of what are you aiming for and why. Before you scamper up a ladder and put a lot of effort into that climb, make sure the ladder is leaning against the right building because thin is not well and thin is not happy and thin is not fulfilled. Thin is lean and slender. We put a lot of value on that in our society. We're doing not so great of a job of undoing that neurosis that got gifted to us mainly through fashion trends, frankly, in the 1920s is where it started. Coco Chanel and stuff ushered in this age of people should have flat bodies that clothes could hang on a certain kind of way. That's not what most bodies look like. So boom, body obsession was born and we've been dealing with the repercussions of that now for over a hundred years. It's a big weight to carry, no pun intended. Back before then, thin was never considered wealth. Thin was considered sickly and unhealthy, sort of right sized was considered well. You didn't want to be too thin or too big. You wanted to be right sized for your body. So, anyway, I just encourage you to really think, do you really know what you're aiming for? Because for example, I see people sweating over the last five or 10 pounds, and I'm just wondering, what would really change in your life if you got those five or 10 pounds off? Really, who cares? Is there anyone who would think you were more attractive or more lovable? Is there any yoga pose you'd be able to do or mile you'd be able to run? My guess is that what you actually need to be doing is jogging or doing yoga to get better at those things, not getting five pounds off. Nobody cares. And really you don't care either. You believe that you do, but you actually don't. Not really. So, I just encourage people to stop chasing the mirage.
Myth number four is that 100% of you wants that weight off. When you're losing weight, you can feel so aligned that you want that weight off. In Maintenance or approaching Maintenance, the truth comes out and you might start tinkering with your food plan, hovering above goal weight in a state that we call finish line anxiety. Thank you, Everett Considine, for that phrase. It's brilliant. Finish line anxiety. Or just flat out hitting goal weight and regaining the weight again. In those experiences, the truth that you're not 100% aligned with getting that weight off. You have Parts of you that are scared of the notion of getting that weight off and keeping it off. That starts to come to the surface. So, what do I mean? You might have Parts of you that are holding onto fear about living in a slender body because of sexual attention you might get, because of physical vulnerability, you might feel maybe there's sexual trauma in your past. There is for a lot of people who've carried a lot of weight for a long time. It could be that you're afraid of loose skin or wrinkly skin or looking older. That's super common. It could be that you have Parts of you that aren't down with letting go of beer and nachos on Friday night or just eating in the way that you would need to eat to keep this weight off for the long term. They're a no thank you to that life. They were maybe more reined in or kept in check while you were losing the weight. But as the reality of Maintenance settles in of doing this for the long term, those Parts are like, "No, thank you. No one consulted us about this and I'm a 'no' for this. I don't want to live this way long term." So, you might think a hundred percent of you is on board with getting that weight off, that there's nothing you want more. In this book, Maintain, I invite you to really look at the fears that you might have and the Parts of you that might be dragging their feet and there's some work you can do about that. Life is tradeoffs and we have to pick our heart and often we're not fully aligned inside about what we want in life. That's just true and bringing that to the surface and doing some honest soul searching about it is really helpful.
Myth number five is that you'll be happy when you get there. It's such a fairy tale that we hold onto, very much like the rom-com fantasy of when you meet the perfect partner and you kiss on your wedding day, you'll be happily there ever after from then on. It's not what life is like. There isn't a happily ever after. Now, this myth is a quasi-myth because I will say as someone who lived with obesity in my 20s and lived with a weight struggle my whole life and has been liberated from that and being liberated is the third shift that we talk about in the book Maintain. I will say that I love being liberated. And when I first lost those 60 pounds and started keeping it off my body, I really did feel like Walt Disney himself had come over and anointed me Cinderella and I got to live in the Magic Kingdom castle. I was so blown away at shrinking from a size 16 to a size four and then keeping it off year after year. It was a pinch me I'm happy kind of experience, and life soldiered on. Being thin did not solve any of the problems in life other than I got to wear the same size of clothes finally, instead of having a closet that was devoted to sizes of clothes that didn't fit my body at any given moment, which was maddening, that feeling of I don't have anything to wear, that feeling of, I'm going to a Christmas party and I don't want to go because just nothing fits and I feel terrible. It did solve that problem, and I was grateful for that. But again, related to the, you know what you're aiming for notion here, what's not going to happen when you get to maintenance is that everything's going to be magically perfect and solved now.
If you're one of the folks like me who used to look at people who were in a slender body and think that they had some sort of perfect life, some sort of fairytale life that you were exempt from, that's not true and it's not about to be manifest in your life just because you get weight off. Here's the litmus test I want you to use. If you're on a weight-loss journey, let's say you have 50 pounds to lose, let's say you have 150 pounds to lose. If you're five pounds from wherever you think you're trying to get, are you already experiencing 98% of the happiness that you expect to get when you get those last five pounds off? Because if you're not, you have magical thinking going on. It's not a hundred percent better to get the last five pounds off than it was to be in a state where you had almost all the weight off. The reality is that to eat in alignment with your values, to be treating yourself well with food, to have developed the habits of someone who is well resourced and doesn't need to turn to food to cope with life anymore, to have so much of the weight off that you're five pounds from what is probably going to be enough and to get to wear the clothes that you now get to wear, to have all of that behind you and to be living in that new lifestyle should be conferring pretty much all of the happiness that you're going to get when you get those last five pounds off. But if you've got diet mentality going on and you're obsessed with a number, you may very well feel not much of that happiness that you're expecting to be there when you get those last five pounds off and that's a big red flag. That's a sign of diet mentality. I love it when I'm coaching people who've lost 10 pounds, 20 pounds of the hundred pounds that they expect to lose, and they already feel like they've hit the jackpot.
The reality is that the Maintenance mindset starts the minute you adopt it, the minute you decide that you're devoted to this plan, that you're not going anywhere ever, you've found it. The moment you fixate on becoming more resourced, on building the habits, both on the daily level, like meditation and a gratitude list, and regular food shopping, and food prep, and a good brisk daily walk, and those types of habits, and also the macro tools of like, "I got to get into therapy and figure out what my deeper issues are." "I got to do some deep Parts Work and befriend the exiled wounded inner children inside of me." " I've got to really, really look at my life history and what went off the rails." As soon as you start doing that work, you're devoted, you're resourced, and you're liberated from the food struggle already. You're like, "I'm doing it. I'm eating the way I want to be eating. I'm doing it for the long term. I'm liberated already." The people I coach who have that kind of experience, the Maintenance mindset toward the beginning of their journey, they haven't even lost yet 80% of the weight that they're going to lose, but they're already feeling like they're there. They've arrived. They're on the path they want to be on. Those are the folks that will be happy when they get to maintenance, but no happier than they are right now. They're already there. They're already there.
You can have that experience, that Maintenance bliss, that I have arrived bliss the minute you dial in your journey in the right way with a Maintenance mindset from the beginning. This book teaches you how to do it. Don't go thinking that thin is well and there's some magical number that's going to solve your life problems. It doesn't work that way. It's a myth. It's a myth, but it is lovely to get on a path that's real and deep and purposeful and get devoted and resourced and liberated and stop with the yo-yo dieting already. It is amazing and you will be happy when you get there. So, congratulations to our community. We've now birthed five amazing books. Maintain published yesterday, April 21st, 2026, the 10-year anniversary of Prince's passing. Rest in peace, beloved Prince. Happy birthday, Maintain. That is the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
