Researchers Sumithran, Priya and Proietto, Joseph in the Clinical Science journal article “The defence of body weight: a physiological basis for weight regain after weight loss” summarise the 5 strategies for successful weight loss maintenance.
Despite life throwing the most temping foods our way and with constant temptation there are those who lose weight and more significantly KEEP IT OFF.
This data comes from the National Weight Control Registry, The data consists of 4000 adults in the U.S.A., who have kept weight losses of at least 13.6 kg (30 lb) for at least 1 year.
Those who have reported the successful weight maintenance strategies have lost an average of 30 kg, and have maintained the minimum 13.6 kg weight loss for an average of 5.5 years.
Most of them lost weight because of a medical or highly emotional event in their lives.
They are mostly white (97%) and women (80%) are recruited via newspaper and magazine advertisements note that the data is self reported.
Okay here are their strategies:
- Eating a low-calorie low-fat diet with minimal variation like the Source Diet . They ate a mean of 1306 (women) to 1685 (men) kcal/day, with <25% of calories coming from fat. They do keep their food variation the same without change on weekends or holidays. Those who do not are more likely to regain weight
- Eating breakfast every day (78%) .
- Frequent self-monitoring. 78% of the successful weightloss maintainers weigh themselves at least once a week, and 50% count calories or grams of fat.
- Undertaking regular exercise (91 %), equivalent to walking 45 km (28 miles)/week or around 1 h/day of moderately intense activity [136]. They spend more time engaged in physical activity, particularly in high-intensity activity, than people who are stable at their baseline weight, whether lean or obese
- Limiting television viewing. A total of 62% report watching television for fewer than 10 h/week compared with the national reported U.S.A. average of 28 h
Well there you have it – simple and effective way to keep it off.
regards Sophia
see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2312642.
