Here is a cheat code if you're struggling to lose weight...
It's not what you think...
The truth about losing 15-20 pounds is that most people will put it back on. 4 out of 5 people who experience significant weight loss regain the weight, which is a huge bummer. It’s like we are good at losing weight but not good at keeping it off.
Maybe you have experienced a weight loss plateau after 3-6 months of successfully losing weight. This always seems to befuddle you, and you wonder why the weight stopped coming off because it feels like you’re doing things the same as you were. This, in turn, leads to frustration in the whole weight loss/get healthier process and then you recapitulate back to your previous baseline habits (which is the place of slow weight gain) and the vicious “dieting” cycle continues ad infinitum.
But there are things we can do in our life that make us more capable of losing weight and keeping it off. This quick article will discuss maintenance phases, one of my favorite tools for long-term weight loss…
The problem: You know how to lose weight, but not how to maintain your weight.
Individuals successfully lose weight every single day. It’s not easy, but it is simple: eat much less than you are eating now and that’s enough to create an energy deficit which causes your body to burn up stored fat and tissue to lose weight.
Got it. Happens all the time. Weight loss programs are everywhere and marketed to us constantly. We call this level eating in a calorie deficit.
But who knows how to eat to maintain their weight right where it is? What do I do when I lose some weight and want to keep it off, when I want to maintain this new normal for myself and keep a new baseline? We call this level eating at maintenance.
How much should I eat?
Should I exercise differently?
Can I go back to eating the same foods as before?
Does everything have to stay different? Do I have to diet forever to keep the progress I’ve made?
These are all questions that can be answered by mindfully maintaining your weight in what is known as a maintenance phase, or simply eating at an energy (food) level that matches what your body spends. Spending time at maintenance gives us the opportunity to cultivate our “normal routine” of eating and exercise to see for ourselves what maintenance looks like. How much time? That depends - weeks, months, or years are all great it simply depends on your goals and timeline.
The solution: learn how to maintain your weight.
Maintaining your weight means you are living life and getting the full experience it has to offer you. Maintaining your weight is where you should ideally spend most of your life, simply put. Not dieting weight off, or gaining weight, or the cycle of the two back and forth. The mental burden of always questioning “am I eating right? Am I eating healthy? Should I do this or that or do better?” is exhausting. Great nutrition coaches teach us how to eat in a way that we can maintain for life, that’s what we do at Forever Fit: make progress while learning to use food to enhance our life and our health. Maintaining is a huge part of that long-term health.
Maintaining weight means…
You aren’t eating in a calorie deficit, so your body isn’t burning fat for energy which means you’ll have more energy available and feel better.
You’re also not eating so much that your body is storing extra energy as fat and causing slow weight gain over time.
You can visualize this energetic sweet spot, what we call “maintenance,” as the right place to be to enjoy life, food, and activity.
The way we learn how to maintain our weight is by being mindful of our nutrition, our habits, and our lifestyle choices while trying to be healthier. We have to spend time, real time, real periods of life, paying attention to the food we eat.
You don’t have to be in a “fat-loss phase” or trying to diet weight off to pay attention to what you eat.
In fact, willfully turning a blind eye to our nutritional habits just because we aren’t dieting is the problem that keeps us from learning anything about maintaining our weight. I’ll tell you how you can avoid this and pay attention to your nutrition so you learn as you go and build a strong nutrition IQ. But first a quick announcement…
The HoliGains Challenge is all about building muscle and supporting our metabolism. Dieting through the holidays or feeling guilty about your food choices is stupid. There is a better way: make some holiGAINS and maintain a healthy weight while feeling great.
If you want to learn what healthy maintenance looks like, the holidays are the perfect environment to practice enjoying food in a balanced way that doesn’t have you gaining weight.
Sign Ups for the HoliGains Challenge are only open for a few more days, until October 29th. This 6 week challenge includes:
-Bod Pods before and after the Challenge
-Nutrition PDF and macro guide
-4 muscle building workouts a week delivered in our app
-1 on 1 coaching from professional nutrition coaches every week. This means check ins and direct messaging and feedback.
-Private FB Community to share recipes, be encouraged, and make new friends
-Female & Male grand prize: $300 cash + $100 Eddie’s Health Shoppe Gift Card
Sign Up for the HoliGains Challenge or learn more about it here!
What actions should we take to learn how to maintain?
First, we want to embrace the fact that maintenance is the healthiest place we can be. Even if you have weight to lose to become healthier, the end goal of weight loss is weight maintenance at a new healthier weight. So the fact remains that holding a relatively stable, healthy bodyweight is where our body will feel and perform its best.
Additionally, breaking away from the dieting mentality, or the “I just have to be smaller then i’ll be happier” mindset which is deflating and untrue can help lift us to a better mental state and become more accepting of ourselves and where we are on our journey. This can be a mental lift to encourage us that life is a marathon, not a sprint, so we can take our time as long as we don’t quit.
Let’s come back to the person who has seen weight loss stall and is frustrated about this plateau. Taking a break from dieting to spend time eating and living at maintenance can provide a mental and physical break from fat loss. This break can be rejuvenating for a future weight loss effort, and it can help you be more successful at those attempts by refining your healthy living/nutrition skills. This is super useful because often weight loss plateaus come from the little things creeping back into our routine without us consciously observing it. I’ll say again…
Weight loss plateaus come from the little things creeping back into our routine without us consciously observing it.
This is why what we do after a diet is more important than what we do during a diet. We should be mindful to ensure that as we eat more food and move into a maintenance phase we do so deliberately, adding back in energy (food) in a way that serves us as well as satisfies us and how we want to eat and live. If we just wing it, we are likely to overshoot those numbers and end up giving back the hard earned ground we made up during our weight loss phase.
After we have mentally accepted that maintaining our weight is good for us, and life isn’t fully about losing weight, we are in a good place to take action and practice the art of maintaining our weight…
A maintenance phase is intentional. You can’t just wing it and not look at your nutritional habits or choices and learn at the same time. Some of these actions, or tools, are similar to what we would use in a fat-loss phase or diet. But the difference is we are consuming more food to stay fueled and aren’t dieting!
Identify your maintenance calorie range. This is based on your body size, composition, and metabolism. A Bod Pod scan can provide this information accurately, and an online metabolism calculator can get you close. This tells you the range of calories you should consume on a daily basis to maintain your current bodyweight.
Track your food intake. This experience allows you to learn about the food you eat and its nutritional values. Don’t worry, we all generally eat mostly the same foods for most of our life. We are creatures of habit and routine. So once you have tracked your food for a few months you get a good picture of where the calories are in the foods you eat. Hence, why tracking calories or macros never needs to last forever. It’s a tool that helps you learn about what you’re doing, a tool that can be laid down when it’s no longer needed.
Weigh yourself regularly. This could be once a week, or it could be every day. Regardless, you want to observe this number over the weeks and months to see how your body is responding. Remember, weight fluctuations are normal, so look for more than just 1-2 pound difference over longer periods of time before thinking “my weight is moving.” If you see a slow trend upward, you’re consuming a surplus of food and should trim a few bites or snacks back down somewhere in your day.
Identify the obstacles or challenges to living healthy that are obvious in your life. Are there places you go that are filled with rich foods and drinks? Is there a high-calorie snack you could make a switch to a healthier version of? Are you drinking more than once a week? Taking inventory as you track your food will show you exactly where those extra or unnecessary calories are coming from. Remember, you don’t have to restrict and remove every fun food or place from your life. But you might need to pare it down to just once or twice a week. Moderation and balance are key components of our ability to maintain our weight rather than see slow weight gain over time.
The little things add up! Don’t feel like you only have to improve or adjust the large, glaring things in your eating routine. The small things that happen every day are very powerful too. This is great news because it means we can often make a small change but see drastic effects. This is easily seen when someone goes from regular soda to diet soda. Removing those 200 calories per soda can really add up to make a huge difference. Simply drinking diet soda has helped many people lose huge amounts of weight. Same goes for creamy coffee drinks, or reaching in the snack bowl every day at work.
Lift weights. Exercise. Stay active. One of the great things about eating at maintenance is you are optimally fueled and energized. Use this energy to pursue an active lifestyle. Go for walks, they’re good for your health. Lift weights, that’s good for your joints and metabolism. The food you’re eating can help you build muscle. Do the yoga, go for the hike - whatever it is just make a point to build those things into your routine. The point here isn’t to burn calories because you’re eating more. No, that’s old diet talk creeping in, forget that. The point is that moving more leads to a longer and more fulfilled life. Period. Science has proven it, and you know it’s true.
Take these actions, and add some of them to your daily life and they will help you learn as you live. If you want to learn faster by working directly with experienced nutritionists, the HoliGains Challenge is a great environment to work with coaches who can teach you as you go.
For 6 weeks through the holidays you will work with nutrition coaches to sort through your daily routines and find ways to improve them. You will be advised and supported by pros who have helped hundreds of people improve their body composition. The HoliGains Challenge is not a fat-loss challenge. It’s about building your body and your habits by focusing on a maintenance lifestyle. The holidays give us this great opportunity to train hard, build muscle, enjoy food, learn balance, and thrive during what is usually a stressful time of year!
The habits you learn during the HoliGains Challenge set you up for success on January 1st and beyond. If you have a future goal of weight loss, participating in this challenge is a great launch pad for that. If you’ve been trying to lose weight all year long, the HoliGains Challenge is DEFINITELY for you. You can even learn more about lifting weights and the best way to exercise for a stronger metabolism and more successful weight maintenance or fat loss. Sign up for the HoliGains Challenge here and let’s get your Bod Pod scheduled!
If you have questions about the 6 week HoliGains challenge or anything at all, feel free to respond to this email. You have until October 29th to sign up! If the challenge isn’t for you, I’ll bet you can think of someone who usually stresses about their health or body during the holidays. Share this article with them, the HoliGains Challenge can provide them the support and encouragement they need to have the best holiday season in years!
Talk soon,
Coach Stephen