I lost more than 40 kilograms, and I’ve maintained that loss. The weight loss itself took work, but keeping it off has made me think much more carefully about the habits and decisions that make a change sustainable.

It’s easy to focus on what to eat and how many calories to consume. Those things matter. Yet knowing what to do doesn’t automatically make it easy to do it on a stressful evening, during a holiday, or when there’s food in front of you that you really want despite having eaten enough. Reaching a target weight doesn’t make those situations disappear.

One of the most useful things I learned was to pay attention to the thoughts that came up around food. A thought such as “I’ve had a hard day, so I deserve to eat this” can seem perfectly reasonable in the moment. So can “I’ve already overeaten, I might as well start again tomorrow.” The problem is what happens when those thoughts routinely decide what you do next. Learning to question them, tolerate some discomfort, and return to my routine after an imperfect day has been an important part of maintaining my weight.

That experience is behind my book, Lose It and Keep It Off: A Practical, Real-Life, Evidence-Based Guide to Long-Term Weight Loss and Maintenance. I wanted to bring together the lessons from my own weight loss with useful ideas from cognitive-behavioral psychology, nutrition, and behavior change, and explain how to apply them in ordinary life.

What the book covers

I talk about planning meals and developing habits that can survive changes in routine, but I spend just as much time on the mental side of eating. That includes dealing with cravings and emotional eating, making decisions at restaurants or on holidays, interpreting day-to-day changes on the scale, and responding constructively when you eat more than you intended.

Consider the familiar situation of going off plan at dinner. You might be disappointed, and that’s understandable. But the conclusion that you’ve ruined your progress is a judgment, not a fact. You can acknowledge what happened, consider whether there’s anything useful to learn from it, and continue with your next planned meal. Practicing that response matters far more than finding a way to avoid every mistake.

Maintenance deserves the same attention as weight loss because it involves many of the same decisions over a much longer period. There will be celebrations, busy weeks, changes in appetite, and times when following your usual routine takes extra effort. I think it’s important to have an approach that takes those ordinary difficulties seriously.

If you are trying to lose weight, or if you’ve lost weight before and struggled to keep it off, I wrote this book with those challenges in mind. My aim is to help you understand the reasoning behind the habits, so you can adapt them to your own circumstances rather than imitate someone else’s routine.

You can find Lose It and Keep It Off on Amazon.

More support for weight loss and maintenance

I also explore the practical side of changing eating habits in my Udemy course on weight loss without emotional eating. If you’d prefer to work through your own challenges with me, I offer one-to-one weight-loss and maintenance coaching through Mindset Over Menu. You can reach me, Costin Liculescu, at +40 752 578 044.