How I Will Achieve Weight Maintenance This Year

Last year taught me a lot about weight maintenance and how important it is to incorporate into my everyday lifestyle. After having done well with my weight for several years, the pandemic proved to me that I am not immune – so to speak – to habits such as bad food choices, overeating and skipping my regular exercise.

Focusing on Long-Term Weight Maintenance

Having worked hard to overcome my pandemic pounds, I’ve been focusing on two main things in my lifestyle ever since.  The first is weight maintenance, the second is making sure that my immune system is as healthy as it can be.  I’ve talked about the latter in a past post, but I want to give the former a little more attention to start this year.

I feel that this is one of the best “Happy New Year!” starts I can make on my blog. It’s important to learn how to lose unwanted pounds in a healthy way of course but keeping them off is something that doesn’t get nearly enough attention.

My Steps for Long-Term Weight Maintenance

The following are my steps for weight maintenance. You’ll notice that none of them involve any extremes, secret ingredients, or anything else that can’t be achieved by virtually any average healthy person.

1 – Eat a balanced diet

To me, a balanced diet means that on most days, I eat a variety of different fruits and vegetables, as well as whole grains, proteins and some healthy fats in moderation. Yes, I’ll have take-out and junk food on occasion, but for the most part, I focus on learning lots of different delicious but simple recipes featuring healthy ingredients.

2 – Be active every day

I don’t mean that I go to extremes to exercise for weight maintenance.  Instead, I just make sure that I’m active on a daily basis.  For the most part, this means walking. I also like yoga and tai chi. I do a touch of strength exercises every week for muscle preservation, balance and strength too.

3 – Make changes gradually

I never completely overhaul my lifestyle for any goal. Instead, I work with smaller changes that I introduce a bit at a time.  That way, I can find what works for me, step by step, and make sure that the good habits are firmly in place before I take on something new.  Remember that weight maintenance means being able to keep up the good habits over time. It’s not going to help if I do everything at once only to quit after a few weeks – or days!

4 – Get some sleep

Sleep is, in my opinion, at the core of all health and wellness. This is the case with both physical and mental health. Everything is harder and less effective when I haven’t slept well. Building a solid bedtime routine – even if that means using the best supplement for sleep I can find until the habits are in place – has been a priority for me. If you read my blog a lot, you likely know that about me because I talk about the importance of sleep for seniors all the time.

Weight Maintenance is Everyday Habits

I find it very important not to think of any of these steps as being any kind of a diet or program. Instead, I think of them as my everyday habits. They’re how I live my life. That way, once I have formed the habits, my weight maintenance happens naturally.