Tips For Maintaining Your Weight Loss: Part Two
Losing weight while on your diet is only half the battle, so last week, I gave you five tips for keeping the weight off once you’ve lost it. Here are five more ideas, particularly aimed at making sure you enjoy your new, thinner life!
6. Enjoy Holidays – But Get Back On Track Afterwards
One of the nice things about maintaining is you have a bit of leeway to let healthy eating slide during the holidays! By all means, enjoy times like Thanksgiving, Christmas and birthdays without giving a thought to calories: this can also help to prevent you from becoming unhealthily obsessive about your weight and food intake.
But … hop on the scales once the holiday is over, and see if you need to make any adjustments. Like most people, I invariably end up putting on a few pounds over Christmas – but it doesn’t worry me as I know that once I’m back to eating healthily in January, that weight will drop right off again.
7. Snack Thoughtfully
Snacking is one of those topics that dieters are divided on: some prefer to have three “proper” meals a day and avoid eating in-between, others find that they lose weight best when they eat little and often. If you do snack, do so thoughtfully. That means thinking about why you’re snacking:
- If you’re hungry, have something nutritious and filling.
- If you want a “treat” (maybe a chocolate bar, or a couple of cookies), select something you really want and take the time to enjoy it.
- Don’t snack while cooking – you won’t enjoy the food, and you can hoover up a lot of unnoticed calories this way.
When you’re maintaining your weight, you can definitely allow yourself a few not-so-virtuous snacks, but make sure you savour them. Take your time over that first cookie, and ask yourself whether you really want a second.
8. Enjoy Exercising
The key to sticking to an exercise regime, especially when you don’t have the structure of a diet to help you, is to find a form of exercising that you enjoy. For me, it’s my Tuesday “Legs, Bums and Tums” class: the instructor is great, I always come out feeling like I’ve worked really hard, and best of all, we have a move where we get to punch at the air (I get rid of all my pent-up aggression on Tuesdays!)
For you, it might be long, solitary walks round beautiful countryside; trampolining with the kids; playing a game of basketball or football with workmates; swimming; cycling … there are lots of possibilities. Keep trying out different types of exercise and activity until you find something that you really love. Life’s too short to force yourself to go to the gym three times a week if you hate it.
9. Install Good Family Habits
If you’ve come the successful end of a dieting journey, you probably had your nearest and dearest on board. But just having the support of your family may not cut it long-term. You don’t want to spend your life preparing separate meals for yourself, and you want your partner and kids to eat healthily too.
Try to get the whole family to adopt good habits. That might mean a “family challenge” for everyone to eat their five-a-day, or it could mean everyone giving up chocolate for a certain period of time (such as Lent). Exercising together as a family – even something simple like going out for a walk after Sunday lunch – is a great way to enjoy being healthy together.
10. Relax and Enjoy Yourself!
My last tip is simply to relax. You’ve done hugely well to lose weight – give yourself a big pat on the back! Have fun trying out new clothes and new styles; break any old fears about “I can’t wear that.” Cook delicious meals and savour every mouthful. Try out new recipes with exotic ingredients.
And don’t stress overly about putting on a couple of pounds; as I said in the first part of these tips, most people’s weight fluctuates a bit. Of course you don’t want to undo all your hard work, but neither do you want to spend your life counting every calorie. Enjoy your food, enjoy being active, and enjoy the rewards of all your hard work.
Do you have any great tips for making sure you keep off the weight you’ve lost? We’d love to hear them in the comments!
Written by Ali HaleRelated posts:
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