How Do You Maintain Your Weight After Weight Loss?

Maintain Your Weight After Weight Loss

Congratulations! You’ve exercised and developed healthy nutrition habits to lose weight, and you look and feel great. Now comes the hard part.

How do you maintain your weight after weight loss and avoid reverting to bad habits that packed on the pounds in the first place?

Here are a few effective strategies which can help you maintain your new figure, and they are easy to implement, providing a lifetime of benefits.

How Do You Maintain Your Weight After Weight Loss?

Whether your habits are good or bad, they are simply repeated patterns of behavior. And conscious actions performed frequently enough over time become unconscious and immediate.

This has been proven in multiple studies, and according to Temple University professor Jo Anne White, PhD, also a life coach, you can use this to your advantage in your efforts to maintain your weight after weight loss.

What Was Your ‘Why’?

White says that you can avoid returning to your unhealthy ways by taking conscious control of your daily life. If you’ve lost weight, tell yourself why you feel so good about your new figure.

Then write down your big “whys” for losing the weight. Was it so you could live a longer life for your family? Was it because you did not like the way you looked? When your “why” is big enough, you won’t allow yourself to slip back into old habits which deliver negative results.

The Destination Can Be Harder Than Journey 

Malena Perdomo, RD, is a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association, and she says that it’s sometimes more difficult to maintain your weight after weight loss than it was to achieve your goals.

She points to the busy, fast-paced lives people lead, and constantly changing family, work and other issues as possible monkey wrenches which can be thrown into the machinery of your healthy new habits.

Verbally recognize the occasions when you slip up, and don’t be too hard on yourself. Feeling down about returning to bad health habits can lead to depression and anxiety, which can cause poor health and even more bad habits in the form of binge eating.

Free Report: 15 Foods To Eat Before & After Your Workouts
 
Always Eat Breakfast

You may be tempted, when trying to maintain your weight after weight loss, to skip meals. Specifically, you may choose to skip breakfast. It makes sense why people do that. After all, you usually aren’t too hungry in the mornings and a lot of people have work early in the mornings, which means that many people lack the time to make a healthy, filling breakfast.

But skipping breakfast is a bad idea and all nutritionists would agree that it is extremely harmful to your dieting efforts. By skipping breakfast, you’ll give yourself less energy throughout the day, which makes it harder to get the energy necessary to exercise when you get home from work. Also, by skipping breakfast, you’ll be hungrier come lunch time, which makes chowing down on unhealthy food that much more tempting.

Hydrate Constantly

If you’ve lost weight, you probably exercising more. Firstly, keep to your exercise routine. Due to the exercise, you’re probably losing a lot more fluids than you normally would be. This makes it crucial to hydrate constantly. Being dehydrated can mess with both your energy levels and your appetite which, of course, affects your diet. Plus, cold water is a great way of helping to get through particularly tough food cravings.

Stick With Natural Foods

A lot of foods that are marketed as healthy in grocery stores are anything but. A good example of this is fruit juice. You may look at fruit juice containers, which are often marketed as substitutes for eating real fruit, and think that they’re  alright to drink. But they aren’t. Fruit juice is full of artificial ingredients and it has far too much sugar. This is a good example of why you should stick with natural, fresh foods instead of processed things.

Don’t Be Afraid To Snack

Often with diets, people think that they can only stick to the major meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) and have to avoid snacking in-between. But you shouldn’t be afraid to snack on something healthy like carrots or cucumber slices. And, if you’re trying to gain muscle, then high-protein snacks can really help with this.

Allow Yourself Treats

The quickest way to revert to old bad habits is by totally depriving yourself of your favorite foods. Reward your weight loss and new figure periodically with treats and desserts that you used to eat too much of.  This way, you’ll find it easier to stick to the fitness and weight loss program which got you the results you desire in the first place.

The Simple Way To Maintain Your Weight After Weight Loss

Your diet needs to meet your individual needs based on your age, gender, body type, lifestyle, and goals. For example, a post-menopausal woman who is vegetarian will need very different recommendations than a 24-year-old male who smokes. For the most up to date and relevant diet to suit you and your lifestyle download the My Food Diary.

This highly-acclaimed app, that’s available in desktop, iPhone and mobile versions,  contains over 100,000 foods to help you maintain your weight loss beyond just counting calories.