Maintaining weight loss is not as hard it seems

There is a lot of pride that one can have after losing a lot of weight. This world is very appearance conscious and is becoming more and more health conscious as time progresses on. You learned that eating healthier and working out was only part of the battle – a huge part – but still just a part of a greater whole. Continuing to live a healthy lifestyle is not a simple one. Easy never factors into it because when you look out into the world all you can see around you are temptations. Temptations of your pocket book, temptations of faith, the body and yes – junk food. The temptations are vast and unyielding. It takes strength of character and a conviction to remain true to your self.

There is a cold hard fact that anyone can lose weight. It really is true – no matter your circumstances you can lose the weight. The truth, however, is that only 5% of those who lose weight will actually be able to keep it off. Are you someone who wants to regain weight or are you destined to be one of those 5%? I hope the latter.

Losing weight is not a fly by night process. In fact it is a life long journey. I do not want to compare to addiction but it really is. If you are addicted to food it really is a drug that needs to be controlled as well as limited. Let us take a moment to go over the top two reasons why long term diets fails:

* Stress. Stress causes depression and when we are depressed we look for comfort – the usual comfort we find is in the form of food. When that occurs, old ways return and we can kiss the weight loss good bye.
* Taking an extra bite. It is true – if you take an extra bite here or there you can take another extra bite and another until finally the old habits return and you can’t stop.

There are other factors too that are sometimes out of our control like an illness or being confined to a bed. Family also plays a great part in long term weight loss. So what are the reasons that keep that 5% maintaining their weight loss? Here are the top 7 reasons I found to be true among them all:

1. Acceptance of failure as a dieter and thusly moving on. It’s important to know where you may have failed and keep going despite of it.
2. Do not deny yourself the things you love. If you keep a pretty steady diet there s no harm whatsoever in allowing yourself to indulge once in awhile. Denying yourself those tasty things you like make you crave them all that much more.
3. Weigh yourself often – allow the scale to be your inner voice. Make yourself answer to it.
4. Get in daily exercise of at least 30 minutes working up to an hour every day.
5. In your day to day routine add activity. Do more things. Park further from the entrance. Train yourself to push yourself just a little bit more.
6. Diet is an important factor in maintaining your weight loss and following a diet that is high in carbs and low in fat is the most effective diet plan.
7. Eating often. Never allowing yourself to go into starvation mode. Eat 5 to 6 small meals each day.

Keeping these things in mind you can have a better chance of becoming one of the 5% to keep the weight loss!