5 Tips To Lose Weight & Keep It Off - Avoid Weight Regain & Maintain Weight Loss

Alrighty, today we are talking about a topic that I personally think is really important, but I also see a lot of questions about, and that is weight loss maintenance. Now something that goes hand in hand with that, but I also think increases anxiety around weight loss maintenance, is this infamous statistic that we see thrown around all the time, that 97% of people who lose weight will regain it, if not regain even more weight. So in today's video, I want to talk all about why people tend to regain weight once they've lost it, and also how you can have successful weight loss maintenance. Okay, so let's get stuck straight into this, and I first want to start with what weight loss maintenance actually looks like. And again, this is something that I talk about very, very often because I think it's really misrepresented and really important, but as I know from experience, weight loss maintenance does not mean that you are going to stay the same weight as your goal weight, or the weight that you end up at after a weight loss. It isn't reaching a goal and then staying there for the rest of your life, because that is totally unrealistic, and it is just not going to happen. We wouldn't expect it to happen. It would be very, very, very rare or weird if it did happen, because weight loss maintenance is going to include fluctuations. Your life is going to change, your goals are going to change, your hobbies are going to change, your work is going to change, your relationships, your health, so many different things are going to be fluctuating and changing all the time, and your body is going to be going along with that. Now, I know most of us rationally know that this is going to happen, but from my own experience, there has been big fluctuations dependent on different times in my life, and they continue to happen day on day, week on week, month on month, and year on year. So it's all well and good me telling you this, but I think it's better if I just illustrate this point with some of the photos of myself over the last few years. So as some of you will know, I lost 30 kilos about five or six years ago now, and once I'd lost the weight, this is what I looked like. About a year later, I was really struggling with anxiety and depression. I had also moved countries, and I was eating a lot more as well. I wasn't exercising, so this is what my body looked like. Around another year and a bit later, it was when I started calisthenics, so my body was adapting to a new form of training, and I was in a different country again, believe it or not, I moved around a lot, and my body looked like this. Moving forward a year or two, I became a personal trainer. I was in a new country yet again. I was meeting new friends, had a new job. I was socializing a lot more. I was training a lot more, but I was also eating a lot more, so I was gaining weight, but I was super, super happy, and I was really feeling probably my strongest at that point. Fast forward to 2020, everything was going really well. I felt really good, and then I had a back injury, which meant I wasn't able to even walk for about two months, and I wasn't training for between six to eight months properly, and so my body completely changed yet again, and this is where we're at now. I am back into full training. I have been prioritizing protein. As you guys will know, if you've been watching my previous videos, I've been adding some more resistance training in, so my body is constantly changing, and I don't really have any specific numbers for weight that I'm gonna give you because honestly, I can't really remember them for all these phases, and I don't really weigh myself ever. I don't have a clue what I weigh now. I also want to illustrate that it's really not that relevant what the scale weight says because it would be completely different for all these phases, and as you can see, my body looks completely different, but just because in some of them I may look smaller, it doesn't mean that I weighed less on the scale. In fact, often it was the other way around, so hopefully you can see from that that weight loss maintenance is not about you maintaining one weight and staying that weight for the rest of your life because it is just not going to happen. Some of those things that happened during that time were completely out of my control. That back injury was completely random. Having anxiety and depression was a curveball. There was times where I was working too much. I wasn't able to exercise as much. I wasn't eating the same way. Everything changes, and what I'm trying to get across is that this is completely normal. It would not be expected that somebody would always remain the same way, and even if you could eat exactly the same thing every single day and exercise exactly the same way every single day, your body is still going to change. Okay, so now we know what we're talking about when we say weight loss maintenance. We're gonna go through five of the reasons why people tend to regain the weight once they've lost it, and really addressing these five things are gonna be the things that set you up for successful weight loss maintenance. So the first one, and probably the biggest one, is a lack of understanding about how the body adapts to weight loss because when you lose weight, your body is going to be changing physiologically to adapt to that weight loss, and this is a really beneficial concept to be able to get your head around because once you can understand this, it starts to make weight loss a little bit less scary and also weight loss maintenance much, much easier. So as an example, as you lose weight, your body will require less and less energy to simply be alive because there's less of it. We expect to see a drop in your basal metabolic rate and therefore your total daily energy expenditure. That simply means that at a heavier weight, your body requires more energy than it does when it's a lower weight. Therefore, what was maintenance calories in the past will be a surplus at a lower weight. Another example of an adaptation to weight loss is that your body will reduce its energy expenditure along with a calorie deficit. So if your body can sense that there's less calories coming in, so less energy coming in, it's going to reduce how much energy you expend and you might not even notice this. Totally makes sense from a survival physiological standpoint because if your body is sensing that there's less energy coming in, it's trying to compensate by reducing how much energy it's expending and therefore to simply keep you alive. But if we're not aware that this is happening, we can see the ramifications of this in terms of a weight loss plateau or weight loss slowing down, for example. And usually this means people think that they're failing or what they're doing isn't working when simply just knowing what's happening means you can compensate for it in other ways. Our bodies are incredible and all they're doing is simply responding to the stimuluses and inputs that we give them to keep us alive in the best way possible. So one of the reasons why a lot of the time people tend to regain weight that they've lost is because they have a lack of understanding or they don't expect that these things are going to happen and these adjustments and changes to weight loss and they feel like their body is against them or that they have done something wrong and they failed when simply it's just a normal physiological function that we would expect to see. Now that pretty nicely leads on to point number two, which is the deterioration of adherence. To put that simply, what we're talking about is people kind of taking their foot off the gas pedal when they've been doing weight loss for a little while because they either see weight loss progress slowing down, which again, referring to the last point, we would totally expect to see and as a normal physiological adaptation to weight loss, or they see a decent amount of progress and they feel like I can take a little bit of a break now. Maybe they become a little bit less active or they'll start to eat a little bit more than they had to be eating that had previously been working for them, putting them up to maintenance, maybe that creeps up into a surplus and slowly but surely they regain the weight and this usually leads to the mindset that they failed when they simply haven't noticed that they've just taken their foot off the pedal a little bit. And that's not to say that you need to be going pedal to the metal all the time, not at all, but what it is is that it's something that subconsciously happens and then people tend to feel like they failed and then it leads them back to where they started. So really it's just being aware that certain things might cause your adherence to what you've been doing to deteriorate slightly and therefore slowly take you in the opposite direction than you're expecting to go and therefore maybe making you feel like you failed. And it's reasons like this, why understanding what your body is doing when you're losing weight and understanding what's happening when you hit a weight loss plateau can be really, really useful. I actually think this is where some of the sort of famous weight loss companies or the famous diets kind of come undone a little bit because they simplify what constitutes weight loss but in doing so they remove the real world application. So I've often worked with clients who have done some of these diets in the past and it's worked for them but as soon as they come away from those diets or those companies, they don't know how to apply that to a real world situation. So being able to understand energy intake, energy output, understand energy balance, understand adaptations and how you can manipulate all these things is going to be super beneficial and just keeping you going and being able to adapt as your body adapts. Ooh, this is completely unintentional but somehow that has perfectly taken me on to point number three, which is to be adaptable. Now this isn't something that you can just click your fingers and suddenly you can adapt to any situation but more so it's about along the journey of weight loss, working on being adaptable and being able to understand the fundamental things that go into place in terms of your weight loss that you can then change as and when situations in your life change because it's inevitable, things are going to happen and they're going to change and to be adaptable to that is a really key factor in terms of being successfully able to maintain your weight loss. And a key concept here is learning that it's all individual and that there's no one size fits all in the world of weight loss. It really is about creating an individual weight loss strategy full of lots of little switches and dials which you know how to turn in different ways to be able to adapt and change to things that are going to change in your life. So as an example, maybe your work hours have increased for a few months and you've suddenly not got enough time to be as active or to exercise as much or to prepare your food or whatever it might be that you've been doing. So having something in your toolkit that's individual to you that you know works for you that you can then input to adapt to that situation. And likewise, maybe you have an injury which means you can't exercise. So then going back into your toolbox and being able to put out something that you know nutrition wise is going to be able to just be able to tweak a little bit and then keep you on track to what your goal is at the time. Okay, so point number four and you would have heard this so many times but not having a strict diet mentality as in I'm on a diet and it ends at this point and then something else happens in the future. I know it sounds cliche. It really is a lifestyle and it is going to be lifelong. There is no fixed end point that you're going to get to because as I always say, you'll get to it and then the goalpost will just change and also life happens. So along with not having a diet mentality in terms of it's just a fixed period of time, also not having a diet mentality around good foods versus bad foods. I've exercised so I deserve to be able to eat. On a diet, off a diet. It really needs to be a maintainable lifelong journey and this is something that I have learned over an extended period of time and I'm still tweaking and adjusting it but knowing that you're trying to set yourself up with the building blocks for your life. This is not just a temporary period of time and there'll always be something else that you're trying to attain as well. So having the mindset of this is my life and I want to make it as sustainable, enjoyable, maintainable as possible. In some ways, when you start to think of it as basically a lifelong journey, it takes a lot of the pressure off and you don't feel so much need to be rushing it and to try to do everything perfect because we wouldn't go to university on day one and expect to come out with a degree. It just doesn't work that way but the big silver lining is when you do think about the longterm, it just gives you so much freedom and flexibility to be able to enjoy it, to be able to have fun, to be able to see yourself as a bit of an experiment, to see what works best for you and then build those skills, be able to develop yourself, really, really start to appreciate what you can do. It can actually become exciting and that brings me on to the last common reason why we see weight regain and that is because you're doing it for the wrong reason. I was actually thinking about this the other day in terms of my training and I think this is a really good question to ask yourself because we always say you need a good reason why. If you want to lose weight, you want to get into fitness or whatever it might be, it's really, really important to really delve into the reason why you want to do that and more importantly, if it's coming from you and something that you want to do, it's going to be a lot easier to maintain. So ask yourself this, if you want to do something, would you still be doing it if there was no one else around to see it? So that could be regarding training, it could be regarding weight loss, it could be regarding anything at all, would you still do this if no one was around to do it? And if the answer is yes, I probably would, maybe not at 100% but I still would do this, then that suggests that it's a pretty good reason as to why you should be doing it. Now I want to quickly mention this because I feel like it comes up a lot but there seems to be this idea that if you say you want to lose weight for aesthetic reasons because you want to look in the mirror and you want to be happy with the way you look, it's almost frowned upon. People are a bit nervous to say that nowadays, that they want to lose weight for aesthetics but it is completely okay if you want to lose weight to look a different way. I think most of us would be lying if we said that in some way, the way that we look doesn't cross our minds or have any impact on what we do. And that's not a problem if it's important to you but it's also important to be rational about it and it not to be the only driving force and to be able to see the bigger picture. When I started losing weight, one of my key drivers was I want to lose weight because I didn't like what I saw in the mirror and I lost weight and I've made a whole video on this but it didn't make me happy. If anything, it made me more critical of myself and more self-conscious than ever before but I learned so much through that journey which actually addressed those issues. I will link the video down below, if I remember, that you can go and check it out because I think it's a really important topic. But to bring it back to my main point in terms of successfully maintaining weight loss, it's going to be so much easier if the reason that you did it in the first place or that you're doing it is really, really solid and strong and more importantly, what you want. All right, so that is five of the more common reasons why we see people tend to regain weight once they've lost it and also things that you can address if you're looking for successful weight loss maintenance. So to give you a really brief recap on some things to do when you want to maintain your weight loss, you want to be curious, learn as much as possible, ask questions, try to develop knowledge about your body and this doesn't always have to be from external resources. Your body is giving you feedback all the time so just get really curious, listen to what it's saying, start to pay attention, almost see yourself a little bit like an experiment. If you tinker with something, if you twist this dial or flip that switch, what's the impact? Ask yourself questions like, why do we experience weight loss plateaus? What's the impact on some of my lifestyle factors such as sleep or stress, on my hunger or my energy levels? How does the body adapt to weight loss and how can you adjust and adapt to these in the future? And why do we see fluctuations on the scale? Secondly, just sleep soundly knowing that our bodies are not in a fixed state and we are always going to experience fluctuations even if we did everything exactly the same. It is totally normal. On the outset, this looks unfortunate but sustained effort and continued adherence is always going to be crucial in terms of weight loss maintenance and therefore a really good way to approach it is to look at it as a lifestyle, look at it as a long-term change, look at it as building habits in terms of what you want to achieve in the future and knowing that you can adapt to any situation based on the building blocks that you have put in place. I mean, there are literally thousands of things that I could say, but of course, as I mentioned, they're going to be individual to you. But as an example, it could be having mindful eating practices, having alternative ways of dealing with stress, working on your mindset and developing a better relationship with yourself and your body and understanding the impact of non-exercise activity, for example. And finally, just knowing that you are an individual and you can create a lifestyle that you enjoy, that works for you. It doesn't have to be like anybody else's. In fact, that's exactly what you should be striving for. So that is pretty much it. I feel like I've gone a little bit more in depth than I normally do. So hopefully it wasn't too much, but you guys can let me know down in the comments. I tried to keep it as succinct as possible. I feel like this is a topic that I could delve so much further into as it's something that has deeply impacted me, but not just from a physical level of educating myself around my body, but also from a mental aspect. And weight loss itself, I feel like there's so many mental aspects that aren't really spoken about, aren't researched as much. And I won't lie, even to this day I struggle with, such as your identity after weight loss. But we can talk about that in another video. In the meantime, I just wanna leave you with the thought that yes, weight loss can be incredibly important to a lot of people. It has played a huge role in my life as well. And it still does impact me to this day. But your body is incredible. Whatever it is like, it's not out to get you. We all experience fluctuations. We all experience changes and that is okay because in the big scheme of life, life is just too short. So on that note, I hope you have the most beautiful day. Don't be mean to yourselves and I will see you guys in the next video. Bye.