After a lengthy process of dieting, there is a period in which you hold on to your old dieting behaviors. This is all well and good. It’s only natural at first to hold on to what you know. But you can hold on too much, or too tightly, to the point where you don’t emancipate yourself from a dieting mentality.

Moving beyond what you did when you dieted is a necessary step for weight-maintenance. Depending too much on your old dieting methods prevents you from feeling their loss. It also shields you from experiencing the new uncertainties you have to face. Under these circumstances you are not allowing yourself to do on your own what dieting supplied.

If you can break free of the hold dieting still has on you, you will be on your way to a new independence, an independence characterized by realistic appraisal, realistic action-taking, and incisive self-analysis. You’ll need these characteristics for the maintenance work going forward, and for leftovers, things about yourself that you didn’t quite work out during the dieting phase.

By breaking free, but not too free, holding on, but not too tightly or for too long, you establish a set of internalized characteristics that will sustain you during post-dieting, and prevent you from regressing. This is the psychological step you need to take when you go from dieting to maintaining the weight you lost.