@deMuralist, @Sandy119kg, earlier this year Yoni Freedhoff of
weightymatters posted a 7 year chart of the weight record of one of his clients:
This Is What 7 Years of Real-Life Weight Management Looks Like
http://www.weightymatters.ca/2015/01/this-is-what-7-years-of-real-life.htmlI like it because it's real world, real life, intriguing, has plateaus, and shows progress over time despite the far from straight line. It reveals the point of finding something we can live with and emphasises that it is always the long-term that matters, and thus what we can live with, not the pace of weight change.
The fact that her loss is anything but a straight line is pretty damn normal because truly nothing in life is a straight line.
What's not normal, or at least what isn't common, is that year and a half segment from the fall of 2008 through the spring of 2010 where her weight pretty much stayed the same. Not that people's weights can't or don't stabilize, but rather that most folks who are trying to manage their weights tend to give up if the scale doesn't keep going down.
Of course had she given up back then she probably wouldn't have gone on to lose 50 more pounds and may well have regained the 35 or so she had lost before her weight first stabilized.
Weight loss is about embracing your own personal best.
My favourite takeaway (my emphasis):
All this to say, and I've said it before, success is about consistency, embracing imperfection, and being proud of your best, where your best is the healthiest life that you can enjoy living, not the healthiest life that you can tolerate.
Her best, and yours, are great, and scales can't help you to determine what your best is.
So, at different points, ADF, 4:3, 5:2 or a daily eating window might be what works for us. The pace might not suit our emotional needs or arbitrary events, but if it's what we can live with at the same time as enjoying/coping with the other areas of our lives - then it's the appropriate schedule at the time.