The key to long term weight loss is maintenance.
After a while of following a weight loss program, you’ll hopefully reach a weight that you’re happy with.
At this stage, you’ll want to start thinking about maintaining your weight rather than aiming to lose more.
With weight loss, you’ll probably have gotten used to being in a calorie deficit.
However, you won’t need to do this to maintain your weight.
Weight maintenance usually means consuming the same amount of calories that you burn.
How to Maintain Weight Loss after Low Calorie Diet
As we’ve mentioned above, weight maintenance is about balancing your energy levels.
This means that you shouldn’t consume much more or less than what your body burns.
Low-calorie diets put you into a calorie deficit by restricting the number of calories that you can eat.
This can sometimes be dangerous depending on how low your daily calorie intake is, and how long you follow the diet.
Thankfully, it is possible to maintain weight loss after a low-calorie diet. However, just as with weight loss, you should make any changes gradually.
You need to eat enough calories for your body to function. With weight maintenance, you’ll also need to eat enough calories to make sure that you don’t lose any more bodyweight.
Because of this, you’ll often need to eat more than you did on a low-calorie diet.
We wouldn’t recommend eating much less than 1200kcal a day even if you’re taking semaglutide.
This is because diets with any lower-calorie restrictions aren’t sustainable in the long term and will often cause you to gain weight after you stop.
Making sure that you eat at least 1200kcal daily also makes sure that your body is getting enough nutrients.
As well as this, weight maintenance becomes easier when you don’t severely restrict your calories to begin with.
Once you’ve reached your goal weight, you can start to adjust your energy expenditure.
We would recommend increasing your calorie intake.
You can do this either by slightly increasing your portion sizes at each meal, adding an extra snack, or using ingredients with slightly more calories.
You could also choose to reduce how much exercise you do.
However, you should remember that exercise is important for other health reasons.
Working out is good for your lungs, bones, muscles, and just about everything else!
How to Maintain Weight Loss after Fasting
Maintaining weight loss after fasting can be difficult.
Once you’ve gotten used to a pattern of eating where you restrict your calorie intake, it can be difficult to make any changes without weight fluctuations.
However, if you’ve been consistently losing weight with fasting, increasing your calorie intake may be all you need to do to maintain your goal weight.
For most people, this can just mean eating a normal diet and sticking to the recommended amount of calories. The NHS recommend that men need 2,500kcal daily to maintain their weight, whilst women need 2,00kcal a day.
Some people don’t need to eat this many calories to maintain their body weight. To find out how many calories you need to eat to maintain your weight, you might want to work out your BMR.
BMR stands for basal metabolic rate and describes how many calories your body needs to function.
This can vary depending on your weight, height, age, and even sex. You can work out your own BMR here.
Ideally, to maintain weight loss after fasting, you’ll want to be eating the number of calories that your BMR suggests for your activity levels.
If you’re at a healthy weight, this should roughly work out at around 2,000 – 2,500kcal daily.
This is the same as what the NHS recommend to maintain a healthy weight.
It’s still important to weigh yourself when you’re wanting to maintain your weight.
This is to make sure that your weight stays within your target range.
Weighing yourself every so often can help with weight maintenance as you should be able to spot any changes before they might become a problem.
How to Maintain Weight Loss after Dieting
It’s still important to make sure that you keep your healthy eating habits.
You don’t have to deprive yourself of anything though. All foods are healthy if they’re eaten in moderation.
It can sometimes be easy to let old habits creep back in.
To minimise this, we recommend always weighing your food. We have more advice about this in our article about portion control.
The lifestyle changes that you’ve been making throughout your weight loss journey should make it easier to maintain your goal weight.
However, it’s still common for people to gain some weight back.
Try not to get upset if this happens to you. You’ve already come so far and any bit of weight you’ve gained can be controlled.
This is part of the reason why lifestyle changes are recommended as the best weight loss method.
Once you’ve adopted healthy habits, it’s easier to make sure that you stay healthy.
If you do get bored with your current plan, don’t give up! Sometimes you just need to switch things up a little bit.
Try some new meals or activities. Sometimes when we get bored it can be easy to get stuck in a rut.
Feel free to join our facebook group for plenty of recipes and exercise ideas!
