Quick Tips: Maintaining Weight Loss
Quick Tips » Common Issues » Quick Tips: Maintaining Weight Loss
If you have lost weight in a healthy way, maintaining it will be much easier. Try some of these tips to maintain your newly found fitness success:
1. Continue Tracking What You Eat:
This way you'll never be caught off guard. When you are not keeping track of what you are eating, extra weight can creep up on you very quickly. If you've kept track for a while, you probably have a very good idea of how to make this process as simple as possible. The entire process should not take more than a couple of minutes a meal, so continue doing it to ensure that you stay in control.
2. Balance the Equation:
When losing weight, you have to eat fewer calories than you consumed. In weight maintenance it's a simpler process. Just balance your intake with your requirements. Find out what your new maintenance requirements are and eat accordingly.
3. Check Your Measurements Regularly:
Take your weight and waist measurements once every two weeks. A gain in weight could be healthy if you are doing intensive muscle building exercises. This is why measuring your waist can help paint a clearer picture.
These two methods together are good, uncomplicated indicators of how well you are maintaining your fitness goals.
4. Take Quick Action:
Losing two pounds is much simpler than losing 20. If you see an unwanted increase in weight or waist measurements, take immediate action. Exercise more or eat less. Either way, try to lose the excess weight as soon as possible.
The more you procrastinate, the more difficult it will be to lose the extra pounds.
5. Reevaluate Your Daily Requirements Every 6 Months:
With age, your daily caloric requirements will decrease. Even though the decrease is minimal, this small change can make a substantial difference in the long run. Reevaluate your daily requirements at least once every six months and you will be ready to make any changes necessary to your daily consumption or exercise.
6. Eat 100 Calories Less Than the Maintenance Level:
Once you have achieved your fitness goals, try eating a hundred calories less than your daily requirements to maintain weight. This makes up for the occasional binge.
7. Help Others:
Not only will you be performing a great service for others who want to lose weight, the concepts that got you to your fitness goals will remain fresh in your mind. Not to mention, you can collect a lot of new information from others.
8. Don't Let Go of the Good Habits You Have Developed:
If you have lost weight in a healthy manner, you've probably developed some great habits: Keeping track of what you are eating, exercising regularly, eating less fried foods and so on.
It's extremely important to hang on to these good habits and improve on them if possible.
9. Take it One Step Further:
It's essential to keep the actual weight loss process as simple as possible. However, now that you have done the hard work and understand how weight loss and general fitness works, why stop here? A great way to ensure you don't go back to the unfit days is to work on ways to improve your fitness even further. If you have a clean bill of health, this could be as varied as body building or entering (and training for) a marathon.
Of course, simply maintaining your weight is perfectly fine. But if you try to take yourself to new levels of fitness, you may be surprised at your own potential.
10. Use Your Intuition:
If you dislike counting calories, try an intuitive approach to maintaining your weight. Once you are at your target weight, eat the quantity and quality of food that "feels" right. Continue keeping track of your weight once every two weeks to ensure that you are still at your desired weight.
Please note that not keeping track of your calories is not recommended during weight loss.