Sometimes it takes time for your body to adjust to consuming fewer calories. If you have maintained for awhile and are ready to lose some more weight then increase your physical activity. If you are consistently walking one mile every day that will help you lose ten pounds in a year. That means rain or shine.
Weight Maintenance
Losing the weight is only one step in the journey to better overall health. After the weight is gone, it's all about maintenance – adopting a lifestyle that incorporates healthy eating, daily exercise and continued goal setting. And there are lots of different ways to maintain your weight that help make the lifestyle switch easier: eat breakfast daily, load up on fruits and veggies and establish manageable weight loss habits like walking once a day. All of these can be easily incorporated in your healthy weight maintenance plan and keep you from putting the pounds back on.
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Dr. Kelly Traver , Internal Medicine, answeredI encourage you to try to keep plugged into a healthy social network, whether with family, friends, or work colleagues. Think carefully about your personalized plans for maintenance. Continue to work on being your own best coach. The more support you create for yourself, the more likely you are to be successful in continuing your new, healthful habits for the rest of your life.
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Dr. Kelly Traver , Internal Medicine, answeredSee All 8 Answers
To help you keep weight off once you have lost it:
- Weigh yourself every morning. Give yourself a three-pound window within which to fluctuate. Within that range, don't panic. Fluid shifts can easily account for fluctuations of three pounds. But do weigh yourself every morning or at least a few times a week. Weight tends to creep up slowly over time, so if you aren't keeping a close eye on it on a regular basis, it can happen without your noticing.
- If you exceed the three-pound limit, start keeping a log of your daily food and exercise again. Review all the tools you have learned in this program and focus on being more diligent until you get back to your target weight. If you jump back into a more vigilant mode as soon as you cross the three-pound limit, you should get back to your target weight in no time.
- Take care of emotional issues, since these do tend to influence weight control. Effective management of stress, anxiety, and depression will not only help your overall health, it will optimize your weight loss maintenance efforts as well.
- Finally, and most important, exercise regularly: Consistent physical activity is probably the most important factor in long-term weight loss maintenance. Among national weight control registrants, walking is the most popular activity, followed by cycling, weight lifting, and aerobics. The amount of time typically spent exercising by those who are maintaining weight loss is about 40 minutes a day.
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American Diabetes Association answeredSee All 16 AnswersAs you plan your weight loss program, think ahead about how to maintain your new weight. Many people are successful in losing weight but have a hard time keeping it off. What are the strategies used by people who get it off and keep it off?
Weight Loss and Physical Activity Together
- Remember that weight loss and physical activity go hand in hand. Studies show that exercise is an important part of both taking the pounds off and keeping them off. People who keep lost weight off say that daily exercise is an essential part of their lifestyle. They also report eating more fruits and vegetables than before, a healthy habit they hung on to even after they went off their “diet.”
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Darrell Chichester - Elite Trainer , Fitness, answeredSee All 2 AnswersThe key to weight loss and long term weight loss control is a change in lifestyle. There are 3 ingredients to this change: diet, exercise and setting realistic goals. The combination of the 3 is what will lead to your success.
The first part of this change is modifying your eating habits. An extreme calorie reduction diet, for instance, may produce good results for a few weeks but in the end the weight loss stops, you get frustrated, and end up going back to your old eating habits, and, in a lot of cases, actually gain some weight back. Learning new eating habits (replacing fatty, sugary type foods with healthier alternatives) will greatly increase your chance for success.
The second part is exercise. A cardio type exercise routine is the calorie burner and resistance training is the metabolism booster. A cardio workout can be as simple as walking for 30 minutes a day. Resistance training helps build lean body mass (muscle). Muscle requires more calories for maintenance which means your metabolic rate will increase (burn more calories at rest).
Finally you need to set goals for yourself that are realistic. You should set long term goals as well as short term goals. If the goals are set too high you will set yourself up for failure (losing 30lbs in 30 days for example). So first, decide how many pounds you need to lose. Next, how long it should take to reach this goal. A short term goal of 1lb a week is a realistic goal. So for example if your goal is to lose 30 lbs, figure on a long term goal of 30 weeks. By setting a goal that is realistic you will see slow but steady progress. Working with a fitness professional would be a good way to help you develop a diet, exercise, goal setting plan that will become your new life style. -
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Terrance Evans , MMA Conditioning Specialist, NASM Elite Trainer , Fitness, answeredSee All 2 AnswersOnce 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.
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See All 9 AnswersControlling your weight comes down to one thing: managing calories. Your body is a complex machine that requires fuel to run your metabolism and perform all movement. Calories from the food and beverages you consume provide this fuel. If you burn all the fuel you take in, your weight will remain stable. If you end up with excess fuel that isn’t burned, it will be stored as body fat and your weight will increase. Similarly, if you burn more fuel than you take in, you’ll lose weight, it’s that simple. By managing the calories you take in and the calories you burn, you can successfully control your weight. -
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Dr. Ramani Durvasula, PhD , Psychology, answeredSee All 2 AnswersHere are some tips to help shed those last pounds in your weight loss goal:
1.Zig-Zag your calories! Your body will adjust to food (calories, really) just as it does to the mundane routine of walking on a treadmill day in and day out – yawn – and when it does, it stops working as hard as it could to burn fat and calories. So crank it up! How, you ask? Well, you must keep your body guessing. Say you’re consuming 1,200 calories a day, you’ll want to start the week by consuming 1,100 calories a day, then 1,050 calories, the next day 1,100 calories, then 1,200 calories, and so on. The trick is to keep the body guessing by reducing or increasing 50-100 calories each day. Eating this way turns up the body’s energy-burning power and kicks your metabolism into high gear.
2.Eat your water! Eat high-volume foods like veggies, fruits, lean protein (grass-fed meats), fish and poultry that contain lots of nutrients and water. Eat more of the foods that are high-volume and contain high-concentrations of nutrients instead of those that are calorically-dense and have few nutrients (candy, cakes, pies, cookies, soda, chips, corn curls and highly processed foods).
3.Start your day with a sundae! This sundae is made with fresh fruit: strawberries (half-cup), half of a banana, low-fat Greek yogurt, 1 tbsp ground flaxseed, and sprinkled with my favorite secret ingredient – matcha green tea. -
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Dr. Kelly Traver , Internal Medicine, answeredSee All 3 Answers
Most experts agree that keeping weight off after you have lost it is harder than losing the weight in the first place. There are several reasons for this. One, people tend to experience diet fatigue after they have been on a diet. They are able to maintain their enthusiasm for a diet in the short run, but after a while, they get tired of paying such close attention to what they are eating and not being able to enjoy whatever they want. What's more, people who have lost weight need fewer calories to sustain that lower weight. Generally, for each pound you lose, you need eight fewer calories per day to maintain your new weight. Often, the increased exercise and muscle mass from a good exercise program have increased your resting metabolism to compensate for some of the energy gap. But chances are that if you've lost a significant amount of weight, you are going to need to stay at a lower calorie level just to maintain your new, lower weight.
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Dr. Ramani Durvasula, PhD , Psychology, answeredSee All 2 AnswersThere is no single treatment - there are numerous factors that are brought to bear in weight management - the amount of weight to be lost, behavioral factors, medical/metabolic issues, and age. It is essential that a person see a physician to rule out any medical contributors or understand factors that may impact the kinds of interventions used. In a small subset of cases, surgical interventions may be considered. But in general, the majority of weight management interventions include dietary changes, activity, and examination of the psychological and structural factors (e.g. relationships, finances) that are contributing to certain eating patterns. We all gain weight for different reasons so we need to use different approaches to losing it.