Let’s say you’ve successfully shed the excess pounds. Often, the tricky part is maintaining your weight and keeping the momentum you have made in your weight-loss goals.
According to new research, you can employ certain methods, including regularly weighing yourself as well as planning for events where you can potentially backslide, in order to slow the rate at which weight regain often strikes among obese individuals who have already reduced weight.
Peeking Into Weight Maintenance Success
Some estimates show that a mere 20 percent of overweight people successfully keep off a minimum of 10 percent of their initial body weight for one year or more. So a team of researchers from University of Wisconsin-Madison went into a study not knowing what to expect.
"We knew that maintaining weight loss is hard and that previous maintenance studies have tended to focus on middle-aged white females,” said lead author Corrine Voils in a CNN report. “We were unsure if a mainly telephone-based program would work in a population that is primarily men and of mixed race.”
Their strategies, however, turned out to be effective.
The team studied 222 obese patients, which included only 34 females. All of those participants lost a minimum of 8.8 pounds in a 16-week program.
They then assigned the subjects to take part in an intervention group providing weight maintenance techniques for an added 42 weeks, or a separate group receiving typical medical care and no additional weight maintenance intervention. The first group embarked on group meetings and individual telephone sessions, where they received a maintenance calorie allocation and learned ways to exercise, monitor weight, and obtain social support.
In assessment sessions after 56 weeks, 58.6 percent of those in the intervention group regained weight or saw no weight change, and the same thing happened to 72.5 percent in the other group. In the intervention group, the average weight regain was around 1.6 pounds, versus the 5.2 pounds in the second group.
Then strategies then increased the proportion of adults staying at or lowering their weight after initial weight loss by 13.9 percentage points, the team found. However, it remains to be seen what actually was most effective: the regular weighing, the planning for unforeseen situations, or getting support from family and friends.
The findings were discussed in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.
Winning The Battle With Obesity For Good
Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that one-third of U.S. adults today are considered obese, or with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or above. The condition has been tied to a wealth of health concerns, including stroke, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain kinds of cancer.
When it comes to the challenge of weight management, studies stress the importance of maintaining self-efficacy, or the belief that one will be successful in his or her weight loss objective. Of course, there’s also the need to continually adhere to a low-cal diet as well as physical activity, according to Rena Wing from Brown University.
Wing emphasized the following techniques:
- Maintain high physical activity levels, or 250 minutes a week of moderately intense activities including brisk walking.
- Track your weight through weighing regularly.
- Watch your diet on top of overall lifestyle.
- Immediately act amid seemingly small weight regain incidents.
A separate study earlier this month suggested being mindful of people around you, as they may be consciously or subconsciously sabotaging your weight maintenance efforts.
