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Maintaining your weight

By Sarah Clark

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Enjoy your food

One of the big ways that diets fall down is that they can be unappetising, leading people to discard them as soon as something tempting comes along. If you've lost weight through a traditional diet, you could also find that it's hard to get out of the "tell me what and when I should eat" mentality.

When you eat, really take the time to think about the food you want. How will it make you feel? Will it make you feel light and energised or heavy and sluggish? Is it cold outside and you feel like you need some warming food to sustain you? Or are you really not hungry?

Eat the food that you really want and not just the food you think you should want. That means just because you think you want some chocolate, because you've had a hard day, stop and think. Is it chocolate you need, or a rest? If you do want the chocolate, savour it and don't guzzle the whole bar in one sitting. Make a point of enjoying every mouthful, and you might find that after a couple of squares of chocolate, you are satisfied.

The same applies to healthy foods. If you really want a filling meal but opt for a ‘healthy salad' you won't be satisfied, and you'll soon be on the lookout for more to snack on.

Exercise

Many people think of exercise as simply a way to lose weight, rather than an ongoing part of a healthy lifestyle. It's all very well keeping up the regular gym visits while you're trying to shift the pounds, but if you suddenly stop, thinking your work is done, you won't stay at target weight for very long.

It's not just a weight loss thing, exercise and staying fit has a multitude of benefits, such as prevention of heart disease, strengthening bones and improving cardiovascular function. One surprising result from a survey showed that it isn't necessarily high intensity exercisers that keep weight off most successfully, but in fact women who exercised moderately.²

A walking fitness programme was prescribed to women after they had lost weight, and was found to improve maintenance of weight loss, fat mass, and waist circumference in the women walking two to three hours every week – while the women who put in more effort and walked for four to six hours a week saw no better results than the women who did no exercise. The three hours a week walkers also kept their fitness activities up for longer. Moderation really is key.