Key Strategies to Sustain Weight Loss

Posted: Mar 27 in Weight loss, Weight Management Strategies by Dr. Lazarus

“It’s not about the food!”

If you have worked hard to lose weight, that is only part of the battle. Read on to learn strategies to keep the weight off.

Sustaining Weight Loss

Don’t believe everything you read – keeping weight off is actually a lot harder than losing it in the first place, and it has nothing to do with willpower, trying hard, or laziness. Keeping weight off is hard because of something called adaptive thermogenesis. As you lose weight, your body fights back both by lowering metabolisms and by increasing hunger levels.

As the weight comes off, you get hungrier, less satisfied, and it doesn’t take a lot of calories to push the weight back up. Your body is trying to restore the lost weight to what it perceives as normal. The new, lower weight, while perhaps more normal, is not normal to your brain – it is a weight-reduced state.

Top tips to combat Adaptive Thermogenesis

That’s why when it comes to keeping weight off, it’s not about the food! It’s about finding strategies to reduce hunger, increase satiety, and improve metabolism.

Reducing Hunger / Improving Satiety.

1. Get plenty of sleep! When you don’t get enough sleep, you end up tired and hungry all day. Plus, while you sleep, your body makes hormones including Leptin, a natural appetite suppressant, adiponectin, an insulin sensitizer, and your brain burns tons of calories! So, if you don’t get enough sleep, you are tired, hungry, and crave carbohydrates.
2. Reduce the stress in your life. Let’s face it – one of the main drivers of unhealthy eating is chronic stress. Do you get home after a tough day and crave a salad? Of course not. If we don’t deal with the stressors that made you gain weight in the first place, how are we supposed to keep the weight off?
3. Continue on your weight loss medication. Decades of experience and countless clinical trials have shown that part of the treatment of obesity includes anti-obesity medications. If you were on medication to lose the weight, it is important to continue the medication to sustain the weight loss. Or, if medication was not used during weight loss but you are having trouble sustaining the weight loss, consider adding anti-obesity medication.

Restoring Lost Metabolism

1. Make sure to get plenty of physical activity, and part of that activity should be resistance training. Staying active at least an hour daily has been shown to improve the odds at keeping the weight off. And, resistance training (weights, yoga, pilates, therabands, theratubes, etc.) can improve your muscle mass, thus restoring some of the lost resting metabolic rate.
2. Focus on eating plenty of protein, and watch the carbs. This can help restore lost muscle, and when you have plenty of protein and controlled carbs, your body has to expend energy processing the protein to create the other nutrients it needs. This helps improve the thermic effect of food, causing your body to expend more energy processing what you are eating.
3. As above, get plenty of sleep! Your brain burns a ton of calories during sleep!

Read more tips here…

Give yourself a shot at long-term success. Don’t give up – sustaining weight loss is a journey. There are always ups and downs. But by following the above tips, you’ll not only improve your weight loss success, you’ll also feel better and have more energy.