Wanting to lose weight is common and everyone attempts to do this in a healthy way. Going on a diet will usually result in you consuming fewer calories than you need which in turn helps you to lose weight. Unfortunately, many people who go on a diet never really get back to where they started from and end up heavier than before. If you want to keep the weight off for good, it’s important to understand what went wrong.
What Went Wrong
When you cut out a certain amount of calories from your diet each day, your body adjusts and tries to compensate by storing more calories as fat. Unfortunately, this also means you store more calories than you need and this encourages you to eat more which in turn leads to weight gain. To keep the weight off permanently, it’s important to understand how your body gets activated to store more energy and calories so you can combat this process.
The Stress Response
As we mentioned above, when you cut out a certain amount of calories each day, your body stores more calories as fat. To keep the weight off, you need to understand how your body stores these extra calories. When you restrict your calories, your body will go into survival mode and start storing the food it finds around it as energy. This is why if you ever went on a diet and decided to break the diet, you would immediately start gaining the weight you lost. Your body doesn’t realize there is no longer a restriction and goes into storage mode as usual.
To avoid this, when you go on a diet, it’s important to try and reduce the stress you feel. If you are constantly under too much stress, your body won’t be able to function properly and this will make it harder for you to stay fit. Finding ways to reduce the stress you feel will help you to get rid of the extra weight and keep it off for good.
Over-Exercise
Too much exercise can also lead to weight gain. While we don’t want to be over-bearing and encourage you to sit around doing nothing all day, if you really need to work off that extra weight, walking is a great option. However, if you are doing too much of it, your body learns that it can gain weight when it exercises and starts storing it as fat. This means that even when you are not on a diet, you will still put on weight because your body is constantly going into storage mode to compensate for the calories you burn by exercising.
Healthy Habits
To keep the weight off, it’s important to establish healthy habits. When you follow a healthy diet and get some exercise, your body will start responding in the right way and this will help you to keep the weight off. You need to make sure that you continue to practice these healthy habits even when you aren’t on a diet or trying to lose weight. This is why when you decide to break your diet, you should also start working out and eating healthy again. If you want to avoid putting on weight, it’s important to maintain healthy habits regardless of what your diet says.
The Final Step
Finally, when you are trying to lose weight, it’s important to set realistic goals. It’s easy to get disheartened when you don’t see the pounds melt away as you hoped, but if you set yourself a goal to lose ten pounds, you will feel much more motivated to keep going. Setting smaller goals along the way will also help you to stay motivated and continue practicing good nutrition and regular exercise. When you reach your goal weight, pat yourself on the back and you’re done! Celebrate with a cookie or two (or five), and you’ll be set for another round of slimming wins.