What happens when I reach a healthy weight?

Once your body has reached your healthy weight, you will need to adjust your diet for your new weight. A personal trainer, fitness expert, doctor and or dietician can help you find out how many daily calories you need, based on your activity level. If you continue to consume those extra calories that you needed for your former heavy weight, it's possible to end up back at that weight. You need to focus on what routine you need to maintain and continue to improve (strength training, cardio, diet and stretching). Now that your weight is healthy, find out what your healthy body fat percentage is and improve on that. Congratulate yourself on your progress and let this help motivate you to keep pushing to the next level.

After you reach a healthy weight, add about 200 calories of heart healthy food to your average daily intake. After a week, if you’re still losing weight, add a few hundred more calories. If you change the amount of physical activity you do, adjust your eating. Keep a record of what you eat and how much physical activity you get so you’ll know how to make adjustments.

The goal will be to maintain your healthy weight, which has been an elusive proposition for most dieters. The large majority of people who lose weight can’t maintain it primarily because they participated in an unsustainable program (e.g. very low calorie diet, excessive exercise, drugs/injections, etc.) or they lost motivation to maintain the lifestyle that got the weight off. All that said, when you reach a healthy weight, make sure you start a new maintenance program using the Sharecare MILI application. You will be prompted exactly what to do including how to eat (meal plan examples with the amount of calories needed to maintain weight) and move (complete exercise plans from walking through weight training and cardio if desired).

Successful weight maintainers never stop paying attention to their weight or body fat changes. In today’s world, weight gain DOES happen by accident but weight loss or maintenance DOESN’T – you HAVE to pay attention! Below is a list of a few attributes of successful weight maintainers:

• Consistently record food intake
• Eat at least four small meals daily and often using meal replacement bars or shakes for 1 or 2 meals
• Exercise at least 3 days/wk with walking different speeds being the most common form
• Weigh or measure regularly (generally once weekly)
• Incorporate motivational devices like pedometers or other body sensing devices that capture activities and/or calorie burn