Maintenance Phase
There will be periods of time that you need to focus on maintaining your weight. These may be challenging times when you would have normally increased your weight, for example the death of a loved one, hectic work schedules, illness or injury, holidays, a period of celebrations. By maintaining your weight you are actually being successful because compared to previous times you are weighing less than what you would have.
Not all times are times to be losing weight. Life has many different ups and downs and healthy weight loss needs to be a part of that. Maintaining your weight until it is time to place weight loss as a priority again is a smart and successful strategy.
Maintaining weight in challenging times means doing the basics right. Go back to the 5 fundamentals (fat, fiber, five, fill up, fruit) and focus on them.
If you are unable to exercise cut back the carbohydrates especially those in the evening meal rather than in the morning.
If you are finding it difficult to minimise your portion sizes then make sure you are choosing the right types of filling and low calorie foods suggested.
Or if you are finding it challenging to not eat rich treat type foods decrease the portion size, minimise the temptation and fill up on the good foods for the rest of the day.
By focusing on the basics you can maintain your weight until it is time to get back into weight loss mode.
If you want to maintain your weight because you are happy with where you are at it is possible to do this and change your diet to be one focused more so on health by consuming more calorie dense and nutritious healthy foods.
To be successful at maintaining your healthy weight you will need to continue to be active most days and eat smaller portions that satisfy you as opposed to filling you.
With the moderators of movement and portion control you will benefit from a very healthy diet by making the following changes to your healthy weight diet.
The reason why the foods listed are minimised in the healthy weight diet is due to their energy density. You can still be overweight while eating a healthy diet with energy dense foods. Being overweight is an independent risk factor for your health whether you eat healthy foods or not. Therefore being a healthy weight is the priority.
