Four Great Tips To Maintain Your Weight

One important tip to maintain your weight loss, is to keep the healthy habits that you acquired while dieting. Rather than seeing your diet as a process in which you must go hungry, you should take it as a learning experience.

Surely you’ve heard about the rebound effects that occur after a diet ends? In many cases, weight is gained gradually until the person returns to their original weight, before starting the diet. This is due to nothing more than the regression to old eating habits. If you don’t want that to happen to you, keep the following tips in mind to maintain your weight.

While dieting you learned how to cook in a healthy and balanced way. All you need to do now is continue applying what you learned from your diet, but, in a more flexible way.

Eat five meals a day

It’s important to follow through on the habits that led you to reach your healthy weight. One important habit is to eat at least five meals a day. This is broken down into three main meals – breakfast, lunch and dinner- and alternating snacks between them. This is a great way to regulate the feeling of hunger. It can also prevent overeating when it comes to mealtimes.

Keep in mind that just as a car needs gasoline to function, our bodies need nutrients. These nutrients are consumed throughout the day. Therefore, it’s best to consume them throughout the day and at regular intervals.

Have some flexibility

The diet is over. You achieved your goal and now you have to maintain your desired weight. You no longer need to follow a rigid diet and for that reason, you can treat yourself from time to time. Go back to enjoying that occasional unhealthy snack that you looked forward to so much, or have a tasty dessert once a week.

Give yourself a treat once a week, it will make you more motivated to eat healthier the next day. When treating yourself consider the following things:

1. There is a difference between a whim and a habit. Sometimes what begins as a treat ends up becoming a habit. We recommended that you shouldn’t have more than two unhealthy meals a week. For example, you can eat healthily during the week and take a break during the weekend. There should be no excuse for not returning to your healthy routine on Monday.
2. Don’t feel guilty. While dieting you learned how to eat healthier and to measure the number of sugars and fats you ingested per day. You also learned to be aware of how badly you may feed yourself on occasions. This knowledge may prevent you from enjoying a meal with friends or it may make you feel guilty about eating pre-cooked dishes again. Keep in mind, however, that it does not hurt to be flexible from time to time.

Plan a weekly menu

Surely while you were following your diet you had a weekly menu plan? This is a good habit to continue when your diet is over. Take advantage of Sunday afternoons to plan for the week ahead and prepare healthy meals.

Your weekly menu shouldn’t be as strict as the one you had to follow when dieting. One advantage of this habit is that it reminds and encourages you to buy and cook healthy foods. A great tip is to leave Friday or Saturday nights empty for improvisation. Improvising once a week will give you some flexibility which will help you maintain your desired weight.

Portion control

Sometimes once the diet is over, gradually and almost without realizing it, we increase the sizes of our portions. This also occurs with desserts and snacks. This means that the number of calories ingested a day also increases and we end up eating more food than the body needs.

If this happens repeatedly, there will be weight gain. We recommend being more flexible with portions, but maintaining a limit. If you want to have a little more food, that’s not an issue. The issue arises however, if you make bigger portions a habit.