If you’ve already reached your weight loss goal, your next challenge will be to maintain the weight you’ve already lost in the long run. This is much easier when you’ve lost weight in a sustainable way, as we recommend on the programme.
However, if you’ve lost weight extremely quickly like you might on a fad diet, weight maintenance can be very difficult. In fact, research shows that 83% of fad dieters gain back more weight than they lost in the first place. This is why we don’t recommend rapid weight loss.
Aiming for weight maintenance will be slightly different to weight loss. In this article, we'll discuss how to identify whether you’re ready to focus on weight maintenance and strategies to keep the weight off in the long term.
Even if you’re not at this stage yet and are still working towards a weight loss goal, this information can be useful when you’re going through a set-point plateau or for the future when you do reach your goal weight.
Remember that the ideal weight loss journey is interspersed with periods of weight loss and weight maintenance.
Am I ready to focus on weight maintenance?
It can be challenging to know when your body has reached its ‘natural weight’. Remember, your natural weight is the weight that your body will hover around when you’re eating in moderation.
Going above your natural weight takes consistent overeating or an excessive intake of ultra-processed foods. On the other hand, you might go below your natural weight if you’ve been ill or are actively choosing to lose additional weight. However, going below your natural weight through diet alone is typically unsustainable, as you’ll likely feel too hungry.
There are a few signals that might help you to determine whether you're ready to maintain your weight, rather than continuing to lose weight:
You feel happy and content with your new weight and have no desire to lose further weight. Remember when setting your weight loss goal, it’s important to have realistic expectations of yourself. Your goal needs to be based on a healthy and achievable weight for you, not someone else.
Your BMI is within the healthy range (18.5 to 24.9). BMI definitely isn't a perfect measure of health as it doesn’t distinguish between muscle and fat mass. However, overall it can help to predict our risk of chronic diseases. You can of course set a weight maintenance goal if you have a BMI higher than 25.
You’ve found your weight has settled, which means you may have plateaued for a period of time. There’s no hard and fast formula to calculate each individual’s natural weight, so it’s important to trust and listen to your body when determining what this is for you.
Mentally you feel ready to shift your focus from actively losing weight to weight maintenance
Choosing to maintain your weight might seem like an easier option than weight loss, but this isn’t necessarily the case! Weight maintenance can still be a challenge in itself.
How do I maintain my weight?
There are a number of considerations to take into account when switching your focus to weight maintenance, rather than weight loss. These include what you’re eating, exercise, tracking, and maintaining your healthy habits.
Your food choices
Our nutrition recommendations stay largely the same when maintaining your weight.
We recommend having three balanced meals a day while being mindful of your complex carb servings.
Make sure that you’re choosing a good source of protein with your meals, that makes up at least 25% of your plate. Protein can help us to feel full and reduce our appetite. This is very important for weight maintenance while our hunger hormones re-adjust to our new weight.
Keep up your water intake as well, because the body often confuses thirst for hunger.
If you’re noticing your weight is creeping up, we’d recommend keeping a food diary for a few days to help track what you’re eating. Sometimes additional snacks, desserts, or increased portion sizes can start to creep back in over time.
If you identify this in your food diary, it can be helpful to re-read our nutrition guidelines to refresh your mind. You might also like to do a ‘check-in’ with your carb servings and portion sizes, which might mean measuring your carbs more carefully for a few days.
Practicing mindful eating is also helpful to make you more aware of additional snacks or food choices that you’re making on autopilot.
Meal planning
When we switch our focus from weight loss to weight maintenance, we might naturally feel that we can ‘loosen the reins’ a little with our food choices. While it’s important to allow flexibility with your food choices to ensure these are sustainable in the long run, you’ll still need to be mindful of what you eat.
For this reason, you’ll need to keep planning your meals each week using the Meal planner in the app. This can help you to stay in control of what you're eating and prevent last-minute choices.
Exercise
People who succeed in maintaining the weight they’ve already lost in the long run tend to exercise a lot.
Several research studies have found that people who do frequent exercise, which is at least 30 minutes of moderate physical activity every day (or a total of 200mins a week), are more likely to keep the weight off in the long run.
In addition to this, resistance training has been found to have further benefits for weight maintenance. This is because this type of training will help to maintain and increase your muscle mass.
When it comes to exercise, the most important thing is to find something you enjoy doing. As we discuss throughout the programme, when you enjoy exercising, you’re more likely to keep doing it in the long run.
If you haven’t tried resistance training yet, now could be a good time to give this a go! We have beginner workouts in the Exercise toolbox in the app. Alternatively, you can ask your health coach for the best way to get started.
Continue to track
Continuing to keep an eye on your weight can be helpful to ensure you’re staying on track with your lifestyle choices. During a period of weight maintenance, we’d suggest doing this every 2-4 weeks.
You should set your maintenance goal within a weight range, rather than an exact weight. For example, if you're maintaining your weight at 72kg, your weight range might be 70kg-74kg.
This is because our weight isn’t static and can fluctuate a lot from day to day. Looking at your weight over several weeks gives a much more accurate picture compared to a single weight reading.
Also remember that there are other ways to measure your progress aside from weight. This might be body measurements or how well your clothes are fitting. You can read more about these here.
Habit maintenance
Alongside your weight loss journey, we encouraged a number of healthy habits to help you achieve your lifestyle goals. Habits are the key to sustainable lifestyle changes and will need ongoing attention, even if you’re focusing on a weight maintenance goal.
For this reason, we’d encourage you to continue to set and track your habits using the app.
If you've found it difficult to form and maintain these habits, we’d suggest re-reading our Prepare articles on habit development. Perhaps something in your habit cycle isn’t working and needs to be tweaked. You could try a different trigger, a different time of day, or a smaller habit. If you're keen to know more about habits, we’d recommend the book 'Atomic Habits' by James Clear and 'Tiny Habits' by BJ Fogg.
Written by Roisin Hickson, Second Nature Health Coach & Nutritionist (ANutr)