How to maintain weight? Managing to keep it after losing or gaining it is more challenging. According to studies, around 80% of people who lose a few pounds struggle to keep the weight off in the long term. However, maintaining weight is essential to ensure a healthy lifestyle.
Excess weight can harm the human body, being a risk factor for conditions such as heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke and diabetes. On the other hand, losing weight in large quantities also generates health risks, which can cause problems such as osteoporosis, anaemia, and fragility in cases of infection.Â
Therefore, health professionals value maintaining a healthy weight by the person’s BMI . To avoid the accordion effect — when the body gains mass shortly after losing it, constantly — you need to have a diet and exercise plan that meets your body’s needs.
Attitudes That Affect Weight Maintenance
- Restrictive diets: when you restrict your diet, your metabolism works slower, altering the functioning of appetite hormones.Â
- Lack of sustainable habits: There may be better ways to maintain weight than changing your eating habits for a short period. To always stay healthy and at the right weight, you must adopt healthy habits, such as physical activity, in your daily life. Lifestyle changes can encourage you to practice practices that help you maintain your weight.
- Wrong approach: If you think of dieting as a quick process for long-term results, this may affect your weight loss process. Instead of adopting a quick and super-restrictive diet, how about rethinking your entire diet? This can be more efficient when it comes to having a healthy life.
- Stop exercising: maintaining weight is not so easy when you stop exercising. If you’ve lost weight with a diet plan and exercise routine, the lost weight will return. This happens because this weight loss plan is based on burning many calories with less consumption.Â
- When you stop exercising, your body stops burning more calories than it ingests, consequently gaining weight. If you want to maintain weight, always follow your exercise plan. However, if this is not possible, you can talk to a personal trainer or nutritionist to create a new eating plan if you need to stop activities.Â
- Intermittent fasting: this technique is only used to lose and maintain weight in a short period. The lost pounds will also return once your eating routine returns to normal. Maintaining an intermittent fasting routine can also be dangerous, as the practice affects the functioning of appetite hormones.
How To Maintain Weight?
The first step to maintaining weight is knowing the right amount of calories to be ingested. Experts argue that a man should consume an average of 2,500 calories per day, while a woman needs 2,000 calories to maintain a healthy weight.Â
Furthermore, it is essential to maintain the changes made to lose or gain weight. Returning to old habits only contributes to deregulating what you worked to achieve. Some essential tips for maintaining weight are:
Exercise Frequently
Exercising routinely helps maintain and lose weight and improve metabolism and calorie burning, two factors that are used to balance the body’s energy scale, in addition to being beneficial for well-being. You can maintain your weight when you burn the same calories as you consume.
Some studies indicate that doing 30 minutes of exercise daily is ideal for those who want to maintain weight.
Eat Plenty Of Protein
Eating protein helps promote satiety and reduce appetite, helping to maintain weight. Research shows that eating protein can help reduce levels of hormones that cause hunger. Therefore, choose a diet rich in proteins to maintain your weight.Â
Practice Mindful EatingÂ
It is possible to maintain your weight with the help of mindful eating, which recommends paying attention (literally) to the ingredients on your plate and enjoying every detail of your diet. Before you go out eating, how about asking yourself if you are starving? Pay attention to the signals your body is giving you, and if you feel like eating something, savour each bite as if it were your last.
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