This post may contain affiliate marketer links. Please, read my disclosure plan. 12 years and from my research/nutrition background. Today I needed to share with you just a little about my own experience with weight loss and provide you with some personal but also science-backed ideas for long-term weight reduction maintenance. First, a short run-down of my back story. I bounced around a bit in university, weight wise, but nothing extreme. The majority of my teenager and young adult life, I was a size 8 – sometimes 6, sometimes 10 – and I graduated college closer to the 10 side.
It was all those mango martinis and late-night snack foods that last semester whenever we were out celebrating. After college, and after I transferred to D especially.C. I began walking more, around the town just. I also started cooking more, here, and there. Then I started to get back into exercise.
As I began to lose weight, I began adopting more and more healthy habits. Ordering more healthy whenever we went out. Passing on a few of the treats they had at work. Making more of my own foods and snack foods. Year Getting results were encouraging and over the next, I lost more than 20 pounds. And I’ve kept it off for 12 years now almost, including through two pregnancies. And whew, was it harder after the second baby than the first! In addition, I’ve worked in the ongoing health and nutrition field that whole time, so I’ve seen a lot of the science behind weight loss and weight maintenance. So can be you prepared to think about maintaining weight loss for a lifetime?
Let’s start with the good news. You lost the weight! You worked hard, you stuck with it, you bounced back from setbacks, and you also reached your goal weight (or you are almost there and are extremely smart to be thinking ahead to another phase)! But maybe with a higher five, a pedicure and a long walk rather than food or beverages.
- The type of training you are doing
- Have your healthy foods prepared to meal prep
- I got complacent
- Cookies, cakes and pies (up to 71% sugar)
- Executive Summary
See, as hard as it is to lose excess weight, it could be just as hard – or harder – to keep it off over the long haul. That’s my bad news. I’m just trying to be honest and perhaps this is something you already know to be true. Yo-yo dieting happens for a reason and it’s because while it’s no walk in the park to reduce a chunk of weight, it’s seriously difficult to keep that weight off for a substantial time frame.
All that work you did day in and day trip over the past weeks or years to lose the weight even? It doesn’t ever stop. Let’s take a look at why. And as such, your body literally resets. Your hormones change. Your metabolism differs. Hunger increases as well as your ability to self-regulate lowers.
It’s kind-of a perfect storm for gaining everything that weight back. And just a little extra sometimes. Some describe it as your body trying to get you to gain the weight back desperately. It’s pulling to reset you at the higher weight. After a couple of years And you’ll think that, or even 5 or 10 years of keeping that weight reduction maybe that draw will away go.
That the body will stop fighting you and accept the new, lower weight. Sadly, science doesn’t keep that out. Neither does my personal experience. If anything, it gets a little harder in the future because our metabolism naturally slows once we age so not only is it at a lesser set point after slimming down, we continue steadily to need fewer calories from fat.