Many individuals struggle to maintain a long-term loss of weight. While fad diets plus five-week bikini-body boot camps may assist you to drop pounds, retaining weight is tough. Research demonstrates that many dieters regain lost weight after a short while, that is, between two to five years, whereby many of them gain more weight than they did dieting. However, there are some common traits that have assisted people to keep weight off for a long. The following long-term strategies can help you maintain and achieve a healthy weight without straining.
1. Ditch Diets for Healthy Lifestyle Change
Diets fail to work and may even be injurious in the long-term maintenance of weight loss. For sustainable weight loss, you should concentrate on healthier options plus lifestyle changes. Diets regularly signify an all-or-nothing, black and white approach. Multiple lifestyle changes are broader, generalizable as well as adaptable to your needs and circumstances. Some instances of long-term lifestyle transformations you may adopt comprise eating vegetables with all snacks and meals or pairing protein with carbohydrates or fat to manage levels of blood sugar. Also, you can include mindful eating as a strategy to keep regaining weight at bay.
2. Move it or Gain it
Effective losers of weight exercise at least one hour daily. The American College of Sports Medicine recommends moderate-intensity activity, that is, approximately 250 minutes (50 minutes for five days weekly) to sustain weight loss. The guidelines may appear daunting, but exercise doesn’t have to be extreme r strenuous to lead to weight-related benefits. The most commonly provided type of exercise is walking, walking plus other moderate-intensity exercises that can assist you to sustain a healthy weight as well as generate multiple other health-improving results.
3. Build up Your Strength
Strength training assists in building and preserving muscle mass, which is normally lost with age plus calorically limited diets. Muscle tends to be expensive tissue and it costs your body so many calories to sustain. Therefore, the more muscle that you have, the more calories you will burn throughout the day, even as you rest.
Concentrate on working for all chief muscle groups several days weekly. In case you are not sure where to start, look for a qualified individual trainer to assist you to establish a strength-training program that may get conducted outdoors, in the gym, or at home.
4. Self-monitor
You can’t transform conduct unless you understand what, why, and why it’s occurring. Monitoring your exercise and eating behaviors assist increase your cognizance around the antecedents (I.e., what leads to a behavior) plus consequences (feelings, thoughts, drawbacks, and rewards) of engaging in certain behavior. Food and activity logs may be beneficial tools for self-observation. A sample activity or food log may include the following:
- How much you ate
- What you ate
- What were you feeling or thinking before you ate
- Where you were
- What you were doing as you ate (for instance, watching TV)
- How much time you spent to eat
- What were you feeling or thinking after you ate (emotionally and physically)
- Level of satiation or fullness after eating
Self-regulation or monitoring can get applied frequently to track exercise and eating, or it may be an approach used when upholding your behaviors get hard.
5. Seek Support
To ensure long-term behavior change, social support is crucial. With supportive family and friends, exercise and healthy eating end up being fun group activities that bolster enjoyment and adherence. In case your inner circle discovers carrots unpleasant and exercises a drag or bore, sustaining your healthy behaviors is going to be harder. Look for a group of like-minded people (online or in-person) with whom you identify issues, brainstorm answers, as well as provide and receive support. Guidance from a fitness and health professional as well enhances weight-related results. Maintaining contact with qualified health coaches may assist you to prepare and plan for progress and conquer hindrances that may emerge.
6. Don’t Allow Lapses to Become Relapses
Planning for setbacks can assist you to beat them once they arise. Consider probable setbacks that may hamper your capacity to eat well or be active (e.g., stress, busy schedules, and financial problems) and brainstorm remedies to these hindrances earlier. Instead of rebuking yourself for any barriers that may occur, view them as opportunities for growth and learning. With this, nothing will hinder your success since you will learn a lot about yourself plus what you need.
7. Remember your Why
Loss of weight is never factually about weight but it is about reducing multiple emotional or physical discomforts you encounter. When you have lost weight as well as feel better, it is simple to revert to old habits. You should minimize your risk for various diseases such as heart disease, and this is an example to help you to figure out the reason or the “why” you need to reduce your weight. Put this note in an area where you will view it regularly. This continuous reminder will assist you to stick and follow healthy conduct when things get tough.