Have you ever lost weight while dieting and gained it all back? Maintaining the weight off might be the hardest part of the whole dieting process. Almost anybody who has been on a diet knows that struggle.
Just recently, on the Today Show, I heard that most of the contestants of the reality show “The Biggest Loser” had gained the weight they lost during the show, within a few years of completing the contest.
So why does this happen? What’s the best way or formula to keep the pounds off? All good questions.
How to maintain the weight off after dieting.
Recently, I read an article in the Mobile nytimes.com entitled, “Short Answers to Hard Questions About Weight Loss” that discussed this problem.
Even though the article didn’t offer any solutions to the problem of maintaining the weight off, it did, however, provide some answers to some other common questions related to weight maintenance.
Below are some of the questions and the answers provided in the article:
Q: Should you avoid snacks to keep the weight off?
A: You would think that avoiding snacks would help maintain weight loss, but according to the article, studies done on this topic did not confirm that.
Q: Will building muscle help you preserve a higher metabolism?
A: According to the article, muscles do burn fat. So, you would think that the more muscles your body has, the faster your body will burn calories. But again studies done by researchers did not support that 100%, especially that any muscle that you build (and most of the time those muscles are not active unless you’re flexing your muscles all day) are small compared to the other bigger skeletal muscles on your body.
Q: Is there a particular diet that helps keep the weight off?
A: According to the article, people who go on diets that are low in carbohydrates, gluten free or even diets that involve fasting, affirm that they are good at maintaining the weight off.
However, Dr. Kaplan a researcher at Harvard, states that no one diet program is guaranteed to work entirely in the maintenance of the keeping the pounds off.
Is there any hope in keeping the pounds off?
With so many studies and doctors not backing up any one particular method or formula to maintain the weight off, is there any hope?
There’s always hope!
Even though the article does not backup any particular method to maintain the weight off, there is one thing that caught my attention in this article, which is why I had to write this post.
The article states that based on accounts by people who had success in keeping the weight off, those people had some things in common:
- they watched what they ate very carefully to the point that they were measuring and weighing their food portions.
- they exercised often.
- they monitored their weight very carefully.
- they resisted the temptations to eat the wrong foods as best they could.
So this made me think that maybe the answer lies not in searching for the secret formula to maintain the weight off, but in not stopping.
In other words, you have to keep constantly working on your weight. You can’t stop. Just because you reached your desired weight loss is no reason to stop dieting or exercising.
CNN reported in an article that Ali Vincent, the first woman to win “The Biggest Loser” contest, shared her story on the Oprah Winery show on how difficult it was to keep the weight off after losing 112 pounds.
“The truth is I kind of spiraled,” she said. “I got home, and I was like, ‘What do I do? What do I do without the ranch?’ I went out; I partied with my friends. I woke up, and I was just like, ‘This isn’t me. I don’t want this life anymore.”
What a lot of people don’t realize is that when they decide to go a diet plan or exercise program to lose weight and improve their bodies, what they are actually doing is changing their old ways and trying a new way.
So, is it possible that maintaining the weight off really comes down to embracing a new lifestyle of eating right and exercising regularly and letting go of your old unhealthy eating and sedentary ways?
Let us know in the comments section of this post what you think?
If you are having a hard time breaking bad eating habits, I recently wrote a 6-page guide, entitled “4 steps to breaking your bad eating habits”. This guide mentions 4 foods that you can start avoiding immediately and start seeing changes around your waist. You can click on the link below to get it for FREE:
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