How To Keep The Weight Off After Losing It

May 5, 2017 by Spencer Rowles Blog Weight Loss

It was a long and hard road to get all that weight off but here you are – you finally reached your target!

After working hard and sticking to your Protein Sparing Modified Fast regimen – you successfully reached your desired weight. You have put in the hours and carefully monitored your protein intake. You made sure you avoided Catabolysis – the process when your body starts to eat up your muscles and even organ tissues for protein and energy.

More than that, there is also the small matter of being a part of the elite few. Statistics reveal that among those who made New Year’s resolutions, only 8% actually reach them. As the case is every year, most of these resolutions revolve around dieting and taking on a healthy lifestyle. Regardless if you wanted to lose weight as part of a new year’s resolution, the fact that you lost the bulge is already a feat in itself. The question now is, how do you maintain the new you?

As you might have heard, motivation gets you started while habit gets you going. How will you apply this to your goal of keeping your weight off?

Here are a few ideas you can look into to help you keep your current body weight.

Watch your weight regularly

This is one of the simplest and easiest things to do when you are trying to maintain your new weight after a PSMF diet. You can weigh yourself on a regular basis to check if you are adding weight. However, be mindful that you might be gaining muscle and a simple weigh in every day might not reflect what is really happening inside your body.

Incorporate an exercise routine

Another way to ensure you do not gain the weight back is to exercise on a regular basis. Why not consider a high-intensity interval training or HIIT? According to Huffingtonpost.com, HIIT is a great way to induce the afterburn effect.

Technically speaking, this is the excess post-exercise oxygen consumption EPOC. This simply means that the more intense the routine is, the greater the need for oxygen after. This allows your body to burn more fat and calories during recovery and well after you are done performing your exercise program.

Plan your meals

Just like how you planned your meals during your Protein Sparing Modified Fast regimen, you need to keep it up. Continue planning your meals to keep the weight off. This will not only help you avoid binge eating. It will also help you save both time and money. After all meal preparations usually come out less expensive. It allows you to plan around any leftovers thus maximizing what you spent on your food expense.

Meal planning helps you stay away from impulsively eating away and adding back the pounds you lost from your PSMF diet. As you plan your meals, you already have an idea what you will be having next. You then lower the risk of ordering take outs or entering fast food chains just to ease hunger pangs.

Do something you love

If you are in a particular sport or physical exercise, turn it into a hobby. That will motivate you to do it on a regular basis without it feeling like a chore. If you do not have that, find one. See if you can pursue running or biking. Maybe you can swim regularly. Or you can probably join the local basketball, volleyball, badminton, or even tennis team. Find a sport you can fall in love with. It is one thing to look for an exercise routine that can help you burn fat and keep weight off. It is another to find something you will genuinely want to keep doing. There will be days when you will find it hard to get up the couch and do the exercise. This is where choosing something you love can be helpful.

If you love a certain sport such as baseball, basketball or even football, you can choose to participate in pick-up games to keep you moving. There are also exercise programs like yoga or pilates that you might fall in love with. The idea is to find a physical activity that can help give you that extra motivation you need especially on your off-days.

Create a support system

These are people who have the same vision as you in terms of healthy living. This can be your trainer in the gym. It can also be a teammate in the sport that you just joined. It can even be the friend you met while completing the Protein Sparing Modified Fast program. These people know the value of the hard work you put into the new you. Their presence could help you keep the weight off and encourage you to reach for higher goals.

Not only that, if you tell others about your goal, you get to feel more accountable for your actions. It keeps you on your toes knowing people around you can check-up on your progress anytime.

Keep tabs on your food intake

Start keeping a journal of what you eat. As you check your weight regularly, you should also list the meals that you have on a daily basis. When you look back on what you have eaten, you get to see the bigger picture. You are able to recognize patterns and address those that pose a threat to your healthy lifestyle.

For instance, observe what you normally eat when you are feeling stressed. Or when you are pressed for time, what do you end up eating? During the weekends, do you eat differently compared to weekdays? These patterns will help you understand what makes you eat healthily and what does not. This gives you the chance to manage your stress level so your food intake is not affected. This way, you are able to treat the main problem and not merely the symptom.

Get enough sleep

Who would have thought that sleeping can help you avoid excess weight? A study published on NIH.gov shares that clocking in only a few hours of sleep tends to elevates ghrelin level. Ghrelin is more commonly referred to as hunger hormone. Simply put, the less sleep you put in, the hungrier you get and you run the risk of putting on the pounds that you lost during your PSMF diet.

The solution is to put in enough hours of sleep in a 24-hour period to help regulate your hunger. Of course, moderation is key as well because too much sleep could also have adverse effects on your health and you risk putting on the pounds again.

Thinking successful diets are one and done type of programs

You can go back to tried and tested diet regimens if you want to in order to help maintain your weight. Just like how the Protein Sparing Modified Fast has helped you lose weight, it can still be a great program to get you back on track in case you start to gain some pounds. You need to understand that though the PSMF diet regimen is not meant to be a long-term diet but it does not mean that you cannot go back to it time and again.

Create or add new health goals

An effective way to keep the weight off after losing them is setting your sights on new health goals and challenges. It can either be losing more weight or even aiming for something that was not possible with your old self. It can be training for a full marathon, joining a triathlon meet or even taking bodybuilding seriously. All these will not only help you keep your current weight but create a better you.

Bottomline is, if you want to keep the weight off, you have to learn to be comfortable with the new you and set your sights on taking a better healthy living approach.