Posted by It is possible to lose weight and then maintain that weight loss if you follow a few simple guidelines. A recent study, conducted by Graham Thomas, PhD from Brown University, of 3000 participants registered with the National Weight Control Registry revealed their secrets to successfully keeping the weight from coming back. Dr. Graham evaluated questionnaires from participants who had been with the registry for at least the preceding ten years. Three quarters were women and almost all of entire group had a college education.
The objective of the questionnaire was to find out how this group was able to keep off the pounds they had originally lost. Many of these overweight respondents averaged 224 pounds before their weight loss. Out of an average of 69 pounds lost, most were able to keep off 51 of those pounds. This weight gain is not unusual because most people regain a certain amount of weight after losing it in the first place. So how did they do it?
Here are the strategies used by those who kept off most of the pounds to keep it from coming back listed in order of importance.
- Keep a daily diary of everything you are eating or drinking.
- Eat breakfast on a regular basis-don’t make excuses for missing it. Get up in the morning and eat. If you don’t feel like eating right after you get up then make yourself have something little that you like and train your stomach to eat in the morning. If you don’t have time to make one up then do it the night before.
- Walking, when used as a weight control method, is an excellent low impact means of exercising. To get the most out of it, get about an hour per day.
- Weigh yourself at least twice a week. Doing so keeps you on track and reminds you to back off the eating or drinking if the weight starts to climb again.
- Use one of the free internet sites to keep track of the calories and grams of fat you take in each day.
- Limit eating out and decrease your dependence on the fast food places to once a week, if even that often.
- Stick to high quality food each meal and each day. Avoid splurging on the holidays and other special occasions.
- Decrease television time to no more than ten hours a week. Less is even better.
In looking over the questionnaires, those who kept the weight off did so by limiting their calories to 1800 per day. They paid particular attention to the amount of fat calories and limited these to less than thirty percent of the entire calorie amount for the day.
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