5 Tips on Maintaining Weight Loss

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So you’ve worked so hard to lose 15 pounds in the last few months. But now you’ve hit your desired weight, or you’d like to take a break from your diet for the next few weeks.

How can you avoid gaining it all back or more?

Here are some of the steps I recommend to my weight loss patients who are trying to maintain their weight loss, and keep the weight off.

How to maintain your weight

Don’t go back

Once you’ve decided to stop or take a break from your weight loss diet, you shouldn’t just be going all the way back to the way you were before.

If your old diet and lifestyle caused your weight gain, going back to it will very likely cause the exact same weight gain.

You’ll need to make some permanent changes to prevent yourself from regaining the weight back.

Which changes you decide to implement is different for each person, but I recommend something you wouldn’t hate continuing to do, even when not trying to lose weight.

For example, if you used to drink 2 cans of pop a day, and during your weight loss diet you successfully cut them out and didn’t mind replacing it with carbonated water, I would recommend you continue this change of eliminating pop for carbonated water as you continue to maintain your weight.

If you picked up exercises during your weight loss protocol, and actually don’t mind doing them, I recommend continuing these exercises into your maintenance phase.

The key is figuring out how many of these changes you can realistically carry over from your weight loss protocol, keep as many of them as you can, and try to form them into lifelong habits.

The more changes you can keep, the less likely you’ll rebound in weight.

Enjoy in moderation

It’s normal to want to reward yourself for undergoing such a difficult weight loss diet. This is especially true if your diet restricted you from eating one or more of your favorite foods.

Avoid simply binging on all the foods you missed to make up for lost time.

Instead, try allowing yourself small amounts of those foods. Reintroduce just enough to satisfy the craving.

For example, if your diet prevented you from having too much carbohydrate, and you missed noodles or bread, my suggestion would be to re-introduce very small amounts of noodle and bread into just a few meals per week, and when you do have them, eat them slowly. Really enjoy and savor the flavors and mouthfeel.

If you’re missing chocolate or other sweets, reintroduce them into your diet in moderation.

Maybe by allowing yourself one small square of chocolate a few times a week.

Make sure you only get the good stuff. If you’re going to enjoy a small amount of it, make sure it’s worth it. Quality over quantity.

Don’t binge on them like you’ll never be able to eat them again.

Binging promotes rapid weight gain and leads to yoyo dieting. If you find it very difficult to control your binging, you may be an emotional eater, and will need to find strategies to manage that properly.

Track your maintenance

Don’t hide your scale away when you’ve decided to take a break from losing weight. You should be tracking your weight to prevent rebound weight gain.

I recommend weighing yourself as often as you did when you were losing weight.

So if you were used to weighing yourself once a day while on your weight loss diet, continue weighing yourself daily during your maintenance phase.

In addition to your weight, I would also recommend continuing to track whatever food you’re eating.

Like if you were using a food tracking app, or even just generally noting down what you had that week, continue with that.

This helps keep you continually accountable, and prevents you from flying way off track.

Maintain a good environment

Proper weight management is not just about the food we eat, but the environment we live in.

Even when you’re not actively trying to lose weight, try to maintain a positive social environment and lifestyle around yourself.

Positive social support can be very helpful at supporting your weight loss and weight maintenance. Let those around you know you’re trying to maintain your weight, and help keep you accountable.

Supportive online communities or forums are also good places to find helpful individuals if you don’t have positive support at home.

Continue to live a lifestyle that is conducive to weight loss, and avoid triggers and influences you know will negatively affect your weight maintenance.

For example if you know you have a tendency to snack, eat, and drink too much alcohol when you party, avoiding too many parties in the future may be a good idea.

Or if you know you have a weakness for snacking on chocolate, don’t start stocking your house with chocolatey snacks, just because you’re now allowed to eat it. And unfortunately saying that these snacks are just for your kids, is not a good excuse to start filling your house with unhealthy snacks.

Choose another diet

If you’re still having difficulty maintaining your weight loss, it may be because your initial weight loss diet was too extreme or unsustainable.

Having yourself carry out such weight loss protocols with sheer willpower alone will mentally and emotionally exhaust you, and make yoyo dieting much more likely.

This is because if you’ve powered through such a difficult diet for a prolonged period of time, it’s much more likely you will want to reward yourself when you stop your diet, which is totally natural. And for a lot of people, that means rewarding themselves with food, by binging on everything that they were not allowed to have on their diet.

Change or choose another weight loss diet that’s more feasible for you to follow.

Look for a diet that you can potentially create permanent good habits with. It might be a little slower, but like they say, slow and steady wins the race.

Summary

Maintaining any weight you’ve lost is an important part of any weight loss journey, and it’s important to acknowledge that for many people, maintaining their weight loss is more difficult than actively losing weight.

I recommend that, in planning your weight loss journey, don’t neglect to create some sort of weight maintenance plan: