You’ve Reached Your Goal Weight – 12 Tips for Maintenance
May 14, 2015You've had surgery, lost weight, endured plateaus, eaten healthy, began exercising and you're at your goal weight. Yea you! You've reached your goal weight - now what? You've been focused on losing weight and improved health so now is the time to shift from weight loss to weight maintenance.
When you're at goal, or lost the majority of your excess weight, is your life now a "happily ever after" and you can ease up on the habits you've followed? No! For some of us, maintenance is more difficult than losing weight.
When you've had weight loss surgery and start losing weight, it is exciting. You're losing weight quickly, dropping sizes in clothes, have more energy, people are noticing and you feel more control with your eating than you did before surgery. Now that you've achieved your weight loss, you won't have that experience of losing weight quickly, finding bones you never knew you had that were covered up by excess weight, a steady stream of compliments and the highs of things you haven't been able to do (or don't have to do). Your weight will stabilize and the highs of losing weight now become your norm of maintaining it.
The question of "you've reached your goal weight - now what?" is important. You need to have a plan for "now what." You've built habits to lose weight; for maintenance, you need to build on those habits for your new norm.
“Often when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else” - Fred Rogers
12 Tips for Weight Loss Maintenance
- Adjust your food intake from weight loss to maintenance. Add a new food choice and after a period of time, weigh yourself. Another option is to work with a dietitian to help you find the balance between weight loss and maintenance.
- Don't fall into the trap of thinking you can revert to old habits that caused you to be morbidly obese. If you return to pre-op habits that caused you to be morbidly obese, you will not maintain your weight loss and experience regain.
- Put your "Before" photo in a prominent place. Put "Before" photos on your refrigerator, bathroom mirror, or your office as a reminder of how far you've come, and don't want to go back there.
- Make a Maintenance Non-Scale Victory list. Make a list of things that you enjoy now such as having more energy, more confidence, wearing regular size clothes, sit at a restaurant booth and add to it regularly.
- Find activity and exercising you like. Changing your eating choices and habits are the driving forces to lose weight. When you're in maintenance mode, regular exercise and activity are a must to keep your weight loss Exercise is good for health but in the weight loss phase, what you're eating matters most. To maintain your weight loss, regular exercising and activity are a must.
- Try new recipes. Add some variety with your food choices. When you've adjusted your dietary changes for maintenance, try new healthy recipes that you might not have eaten when losing weight.
- Weigh regularly. When you begin maintenance, weigh more often such as weekly or bi-weekly. As you find your balance of eating and exercise to maintain your weight, you can choose not to weigh as often.
- Create a "Weight Window" for yourself. A Weight Window is a range of a certain number of pounds that you will allow before you pull back on your food choices and/or increase exercise. With a Weight Window, you're less apt to experience a regain. 5 pounds can turn into 10, 10 to 20, or more, before you know it.
- No perfection exists in Maintenance. Just as life happens when we lose weight, and pull us off track temporarily, the same can occur in maintenance. There isn't perfection when you maintain your weight. If you've veered off track, don't beat yourself up but instead consider it a way to fine-tune your maintenance. Check in with yourself as to what was going on that led to the blip in your eating plus learn from the experience so you know how to avoid it in the future.
- Helping others helps you as well. Anytime you support someone else, you are giving yourself support too. When you help someone else, as an example - in the OH community, you share your own WLS journey, tips you've picked up along the way, and can be a reminder of how far you've come.
- High Five to You! When you were losing weight, you probably received lots of compliments. With Maintenance, not as much. The accolades and validation in Maintenance Mode is what you give to yourself. For each success you have, acknowledge what you've done and how far you've come.
- Focus on your "Now What" Reflect back on things you wanted to do but didn't due to your weight, body size or other limitations that held you back. Now, you can do those things! What would you do if you knew you would not fail? Your "Now What" could be taking a class, quitting a job and starting a business, walk or run in a competitive charity race....the list goes on and on.
Please comment below how you've maintained your weight loss and share your "Now What" of maintenance.
Photo credit: herbeauty.co cc
 | ABOUT THE AUTHOR Cathy Wilson, PCC, BCC, had RNY surgery in 2001 and lost 147 pounds. Cathy is a regular contributor to the OH Blog and authored the "Mind Matters" column in ObesityHelp Magazine. Cathy is a licensed pilot and loves flying. She is a member of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS) and the Obesity Action Coalition (OAC).Read more articles by Cathy! |
