If you decided you wanted to be able to bench press 100 lbs, you'd go to the gym religiously and eventually meet your goal. But you can't stop going to the gym completely then, go back a year later or even a month later and be shocked that you can't bench 100 lbs. any more. However, it also doesn't take the same level of effort or the same process to maintain that ability as it did to build to it.

I think, ultimately, we have to be as committed to maintenance as we are to losing weight to start with. I don't want to say that you have to do the exact same thing you did to lose weight, but you have to find what works for you and stay committed to it.

I don't want to think about this and we don't talk about it, because mentally it seems so overwhelming, especially early on in our journey. It takes everything I have to stay committed at a level where I'm losing weight. It makes me want to cry to think that I'll have to do this every day for the rest of my life. And my life isn't all that complicated, really. If your life is complicated, then what?

Yes, it gets easier over time, as our diet becomes more routine to us and we're more used to eating this way than the way we used to eat. But it still takes ongoing, serious, day-in, day-out commitment. That's hard. Really hard.

In the low carb community, there's a lot of happy happy talk about how easy this is and how there's no deprivation and blah blah blah. But if we're going to get real: It's easier than losing weight through plain calorie restriction, but I wouldn't call it easy. And you can't eat anything you want, which is honestly going to feel like deprivation sometimes. The talk about how "easy" it is disguises the real commitment that it takes, making it really easy to find yourself eating too much or eating crap or eating too much crap again without knowing how you got there.