You’ve worked extremely hard to lose those unwanted pounds – counted every calorie, ate all the right foods and even exercised – but now that you’re at your ideal weight how do you maintain the new, healthy you?
Let’s take a closer look at how to maintain weight loss and ensure you don’t become one of the 95% of dieters that regain the weight back!
How did you lose the weight?
A major factor in the success of keeping those unwanted pounds off is the way you lost the weight to begin with. This is where my biggest pet peeve with “fad diets” comes in. Diets claiming you can “lose 20lbs in a week”, liquid diets and even those stating you need to remove a specific food group from your diet may lead to an initial loss of weight, but that weight isn’t permanently gone. Most of the weight you might lose on some of these diets is water weight, which you start to regain the second you take a sip of water. And other diets that say you can’t eat this or you can only eat that are next to impossible to stay on for the long term. In order to keep the pounds you lost off for good, you have to make permanent lifestyle changes that you are happy with.
Create a healthy lifestyle
By making permanent lifestyle changes, instead of temporary diet changes, you are more likely to keep the weight off. In fact, let’s forget about the word “dieting”. Nobody wants to spend the rest of their life counting every calorie or trying to add up the amount of carbs they ate in one day. And this doesn’t have to be the case. If you slowly implement healthy changes to your daily diet and/or exercise regimen, simple changes that you can easily live with, then there is no need to follow a rigorous diet plan.
Use the scale cautiously
The most widely used indicator of one’s weight loss progress also happens to be one of the most misleading, when used by itself. A scale alone doesn’t measure how much fat one has gained or lost and it doesn’t figure in the amount of water your retaining at any given moment. I personally have gained weight while losing body fat and never looked better. Had I’d measured my fat loss efforts solely by using the scale alone I would have been pretty disappointed. So what’s a better indicator of whether your maintaining your weight loss? How about the mirror. Are you happy with the way you look? Or your favorite pair of skinny jeans. Do you still fit into them? If you still insist on using the scale, weigh yourself no more than once a week and take the results with a grain of salt.
It gets easier
Those who have successfully lost weight and kept it off all say the same thing – it gets easier with time. It’s hard for people, in this instant gratification world, to grasp the concept that losing weight takes time and effectively controlling your ideal weight can take years. But if you’ve done the necessary steps to lose the weight in the first place there is already a light at the end of tunnel as far as keeping the weight off goes. If you’ve properly implemented small, simple changes to your diet and they are now just a regular part of your lifestyle, then keeping the weight off will be easy – and only gets easier with time.
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