It is not possible to maintain your weight after being on a diet!

Welcome to planet mother-@#@%er! It took me a long time to really get this through my head. When you go on a diet, you are eating a small amount of calories, most likely so small that you can't possibly go through life living on that amount of daily calories. Look at any diet, and ask yourself an honest question, could you eat that way forever? I don't think anyone could answer an honest "yes," to that question. Well why is this? It is because it our culture, there is just too much "tasty" high calorie food to eat. A diet is a deprivation of all that tasty food that we are exposed to on a daily basis. After all, how do you think we put on those extra pounds?! Can you really go to a holiday party and have a couple slices of turkey (with no gravy,) some beans and carrots, a small scoop of plain mashed potatoes and nothing else to eat all night? And go back to my post where I talk about how I try to eat only 1250 calories a day which is my BMR. I reach 1250 calories before dinner, eating what is considered a "normal" amount of food. Remember in my earlier post about the difference between the lifestyles of prehistoric man and modern man? Man was meant to live a "gorge-fast-gorge-fast" lifestyle, and it was influenced by the food abundance followed by food scarcity cycle. Modern man never experiences the food scarcity phase of the cycle so we are always in some form of the gorge phase. For this reason we are always over-eating. Unless we make an effort to create an artificial food scarcity phase, by restricting caloric intake ourselves. This is difficult to do though because it goes against our natural instinct. We receive messages from our brain that tells us to gorge when food is readily available. Prehistoric man only stopped eating when they had no choice, food not being around to be eaten.
I did some research into this theory by seeing if there were any studies that showed that people were able to keep weight off after being on a diet. One study did make this claim, but after reading the article more closely it showed that even people that did a fairly good job of keeping the weight off there was still a small weight gain on average over the years. Other alarming stats such as the average weight of North American women over the years. Women seem to be gaining weight at a steady state until they reach their 50s. (chart)
What does this all mean? Basically it just means if you want to maintain your weight you will need a new strategy, just returning to "normal" eating behaviors is not going to help you. Unless you don't mind a slow steady weight gain over the years. Which brings us back to my point, that becoming a yo-yo dieter is one way you can experience thinness, as you age.