Maintaining your weight loss

If your employees lose weight, you can cut costs, but what if they put it back on again? One of the biggest problems that people face when losing weight is keeping the weight off once they have lost the weight. The key to losing the weight and keeping it off once you have lost it is to understand what motivates you. When you lose those first few pounds you are going to feel some excitement because you have managed to achieve some weight loss. In order to continue losing weight and keeping it off you are going to need to find a way to turn that excitement into the willpower that you need to stick to your weight loss plan. The reason for this is that you are going to hit some ups and downs during your weight loss and to help you get through the downs you are going to need some coping strategies.

Here are some things that you are going to need to do to turn your eating and exercise strategies into a lifestyle that will lead to lifelong weight control.

• Ask questions - you are going to want to ask yourself some basic questions to get yourself in the right frame of mind. What gives you the strength to resist temptation? Can you form new habits that you can live with forever? What are your rewards from weight loss? How badly do you want to obtain those rewards?


• Get real - make sure that you are being realistic about the goals that you are setting. Only losing 1 to 2 pounds each week is a realistic goal. If you set yourself up with unrealistic goals you are not going to be able to achieve them, which will cause you to suffer disappointment. To find out what a healthy weight is you will want to talk to a healthcare professional.


• Stay balanced - in order to keep your weight from going up and down you are going to need to balance your intake of calories with the energy that you burn. For example, just the difference of one 12-ounce soda, which has 150 calories, versus 30 minutes of brisk walking on most days can add or subtract about 10 pounds to your weight every year.


• Shop smart - begin your food control when you are at the grocery store. When you go grocery shopping you want to make sure that you never go hungry because you will be more likely to make impulse buys. You also want to write a list and stick to it while at the grocery store. When buying food make sure that you read the labels on the food you buy and skip any food that is not on your eating plan.


• Take notes - as you begin planning your eating and activity strategies you want to keep records of what you are doing. Write down what types of foods you are eating, how the calories are adding up, and how much you are exercising. Then you are going to want to start tracking your weight loss, you want to start making notes on what strategies are working for and which ones are not. If you need to review your notes so that you can eliminate the things that are not working for you and focus again on the things that are working.


• Weigh less - you do not want to get on the scales every day. The reason for this is that if you have not lost weight that day you will be disappointed and disappointment leads to not continuing with your plan so you will not be able to maintain your weight loss. You should only get on the scale about once a week and rather than weighing yourself try measuring inches to see how many inches you have lost.


• Plan ahead - plan all of your meals ahead of time. Figure out what you are going to do when you are going through your ups and downs, but also plan ahead for the holidays. Keep in mind that if you do what is right, such as eat healthy 75% of the time; you are going to succeed in the end.

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