Maintaining Your Fat Loss Results

Have you ever finished a fat loss phase, achieved your goal and then at some point in the future you put it all back on again?

Why do you think it happened?

One of the many reasons this happens is because most people do not understand that you deem your fat loss phase successful when you have maintained your results for at least 12 months! This is the impressive part of a fat loss phase!

If you have found it difficult to maintain your results after a fat loss phase here are some things to consider:

1. The calories required to maintain your results aren't as high as you might think! If you suddenly start eating out a lot more, eating what you want, when you want it and generally not staying somewhat near the nutrition behaviours you had before, it often just leads to weight gain.

2. You should know your maintenance calories before you start a fat loss phase. I usually ask clients to record somehow what they have eaten for a week and we monitor their weight daily to see where they started and where they end, if the average weight stays the same = maintenance.

3. Come up to maintenance calories when the fat loss phase is over. Remember Maintenance does not mean you will put on weight, the clue is in the name, Maintenance not Surplus! Coming back up to an amount of food where your weight remains stable within the range you are happy with. It's not healthy for your metabolism or life in general to stay in a fat loss phase for years. So

4.  Allow yourself a weight range (if you have been weighing yourself) maintenance does not mean you weigh exactly the same every day, the same as during a fat loss phase, your weight will fluctuate. So, set a range that you are happy to fluctuate between.

5. The activity behaviours you were doing through your fat loss phase need to be continued for life (ideally!) If you have been averaging 10,000 steps per day and then start averaging 3,000 steps that's a lot of daily movement gone which was helping to keep you in a calorie deficit and in maintenance can means that you can eat more food because you are still very active, day to day.

6. Don't stop the exercise you have been doing. Hopefully you have found ways to exercise that make you feel great and give you the many, many health benefits too. When you fall in love with a form of exercise, hopefully you will want to do it for the rest of your life.

7. If you want to reduce your daily activity because it doesn't feel sustainable in your life for years in the future. I would come down to a weekly average of 8,000 steps. You need to be mindful that an increase in food and a decrease in activity will inevitably lead to some weight gain, it's a balancing act to find the right amount of activity and food to maintain the results you have worked so hard for.

8. If you are embarking on a fat loss phase, make sure you or the person helping you discusses maintenance and that you start to think about what you are going to do after the fat loss phase. This dieting and subsequent putting on weight is the yo-yo dieting I think we are all tired of.

If you need some support, get in touch and we can have a chat x