Keeping the Weight off once You’ve Lost It: It’s a lot easier to lose weight than it is to keep off the excess pounds. When you are trying to lose weight, you’re singularly focused on the task at hand. But once you’re down to your targeted weight, you have to balance weight maintenance with other factors in your life. On a daily basis, that requires you to continually correct yourself and bring yourself back on course. Weight management is a journey rather than a destination.
PSYCHOLOGY OF WEIGHT MAINTENANCE: Positive thinking patterns are crucial to successful, long-term weight management. People who are not successful at managing their weight tend to… ~Make excuses, that let them overeat or not exercise. ~Focus narrowly on the pleasure of eating, and forget their weight-management goals. ~Doubt their ability to change. ~Set unrealistic expectations, for themselves or others. ~Judge themselves, and other people harshly. In contrast, those people who are successful tend to… ~Remind themselves of their long-range goals. ~Notice even small success, in weight management. ~Use positive self-talk, to keep themselves on the right track. bit.ly/3zrz7L
STRATEGY FOR WEIGHT MAINTENANCE: ~Make exercise a regular part of your life. Without regular exercise, weight maintenance is exceedingly difficult. Of course, making exercise a part of your daily routine is easier said than done. I recommend you choose a range of activities that you enjoy and can turn to when you’re in different moods, or confronted by bad weather. Example: I walk outside for an hour a day. On days when it rains, I cycle on a stationary bicycle indoors. ~Reduce fat calories to 30% of your daily intake. Most Americans eat more fat than they need. We’re exposed to a lot of fatty, highly palatable foods, so we develop a taste for foods that are readily available. However, you can change your taste buds and actually lean to prefer low-fat foods.
Strategy: Start small. Eat bread without butter, salad with little or no dressing and chicken without it’s skin.
Bonus: After consuming low-fat foods for a while, you’ll find eating fatty foods makes you feel physically and psychologically uncomfortable… bloated, sluggish, even nauseous. ~Control binges… Between 25% and 50% of all people who attend weight-management programs are binges. The biggest trigger for binges is negative emotions, anger… depression… anxiety.
Strategy: Keep a two-week journal to record your eating behaviors - meals, snacks, binges. Also record the circumstances - how you feel, what you are doing and you identify triggers for eating and develop strategies to avoid them.
Example: Say you often feel angry and respond to your negative emotions by bingeing. Once you identify your anger as a trigger for excessive eating, you’ll be able to examine your anger cycle and pick and choose which battles to fight and when to let the anger pass away. You will learn to express your anger by confronting the person who had precipitated the anger in you, for instance… in ways other than eating. ~Eat moderately: To successfully maintain a low weight level, you must keep your caloric intake under control.
Strategy: Eat anything you want, but keep your calories in a moderate range. The government recommends between 1,600 and 2,800 calories each day to maintain weight for most adult men and women. However, your best range for maintaining weight will depend on your age, sex, lifestyle, activity level and other factors. Experiment with adding on and taking off calories to find the range that’s best for you. ~Think smart. Focus on your long-term goal of weight maintenance, give yourself instructional thoughts and pat yourself on the back for positive behaviors. ~Mistake: At the office, a coworker is passing around slices of chocolate cake. As a slice comes your way, you see only the chocolate cake, not your goal. You realize, telling yourself that you’ve been good for weeks and you shouldn’t be deprived when everyone else is eating it. ~Better: As a slice comes your way, remind yourself that you’ve worked hard to lose weight, you feel great and you want to keep the weight off. You tell yourself that the momentary pleasure of the chocolate cake isn’t in your best interest. You decline the cake. As your coworker moves on to someone else, you feel good about yourself and congratulate yourself for forgoing temptation. ~Handle lapses: Everyone backslides on occasion.
Strategy: Avoid tuning a lapse into a relapse. Instead of having a second donut, go to the gym to burn off the calories or cut back on calorie intake tomorrow. ~Creating a lifestyle that is satisfying to you: The last thing you want to say at the end of your life is that you devoted the majority of your life to watching your weight. While weight maintenance is important to health and psychological well-being, your life should be about something more meaningful. Create a mission that makes you feel your life is worth living. Find a way to be creative, contribute to society or do something that’s important to you. " Faith is taking that first step even when you can not see the top of the staircase."God bless and happy maintaining… TY bit.ly/3SgCxe
