It’s pretty common to hear people talk about weight in terms of how much they want to lose. However, there isn’t a common conversation about what it means to maintain a specific weight. What happens when you’ve lost the weight but don’t want to gain it back?
You might not need to go into a caloric deficit in the same way you would when you were trying to lose weight. However, how do you eat to make sure that you don’t gain it back?
Thankfully, there are a few key tips you can implement in order to make sure that you’re successful with personalizing your diet for weight maintenance by checking the intermittent fasting guides for beginners.
1. Keep a Food Journal
For starters, you’ll want to remember that the scale is not giving you the full picture of your overall health. Still, it can be a helpful barometer when you’re looking at numbers. When you’re trying to maintain a specific weight, you have to also factor in temporary circumstances like bloating, constipation, or water weight that can impact the way the scale looks.
All of these things can play a role in how much you weigh from week to week. This is why you should not weigh yourself every single day. Try to weigh yourself once a week at the same time each week. This will help you to get a good idea of the five-pound range most people tend to stay within to maintain weight.
Keeping a food journal will help you get a better idea of the foods your body is able to process well. While quinoa might be great for some people, it might cause you to become constipated. When it’s time to weigh yourself, this constipation can show up as additional pounds.
There are two things you can do. You can either opt to cook the quinoa a different way to see if you get different results. Sometimes, certain grains and other foods need to be prepared a certain way in order for the body to process them better. On the other hand, you might need to remove that food from your diet if it just doesn’t agree with your body for optimal weight management results.
2. Adapt a Specific Method
You need to remind yourself to nourish your body in order to maintain a specific body weight. However, you might decide to try intermittent fasting on a weekly basis where you fast for six days out of the seven days a week. With intermittent fasting, you have some boundaries surrounding when and how often you can eat each day.
If you want to try a reverse diet that depends on metabolic adaptation in order to create a new normal for yourself, this is another option to try. Restrictive diets like the ketogenic diet and the Atkins diet may not be sustainable.
If you’re somebody who wants to do a plant-based diet, that can be more realistic because it’s not as restrictive to foods that are important to take in such as fruit and carbohydrates.
3. Track Your Vitamins
Weight management is not solely about calories. It’s also about vitamins and nutrients that your body is absorbing. You might not be getting enough magnesium. As a result, your body might be overcompensating in other ways.
Vitamin K, the B Vitamins, and all the other vitamins really play a role in how well your body will operate. As you feed your body whole foods, treat yourself like an experiment where you can see how your body functions as you track how much your body receives each day.
This will require you to measure your food. It’s also helpful to track it with a nutritional app or digital tracker. It’s not enough to just take a multivitamin in order to give your body the right supplementation. Take it a step further by making sure you’re consuming foods that will help your body run at peak performance.
When it’s time to lose weight, most people will tell you about the most ideal foods to eat. It’s pretty common for nutritionists to encourage fruits, vegetables, and other whole sources of food. However, there are plenty of people who get great results as they eat processed foods and other items that are not recommended. This is usually because they know their bodies enough to know what they can handle and enjoy while still losing weight.
The same concept holds true when you’re trying to maintain weight. You are the one that knows your body the best. You know your level of willpower and what you can actually execute. When you personalize your weight-maintenance plan, it’s much more sustainable.
Don’t try to think of this endeavor as a diet. Instead, consider this a lifestyle that you’ll maintain for the long haul. This is how you’ll be able to maintain your weight.
