7 Steps To Keeping The Kilos Off

Fitness guru Michelle Bridges reveals her essential advice for long-term weight management, plus three delicious recipes.

- Michelle Bridges

There is no magic bullet when it comes to maintaining weight loss over the long term. Sure, we can all lose weight by tidying up our diets and ramping up our exercise, but the uncomfortable truth is that, for most of us, the weight eventually creeps back on. For most people, keeping the weight off is really hard, some say even harder than losing the weight in the first place. Indeed, long-term studies are showing that within two years, more than 80 per cent of people who lose weight will have regained some, if not all, of it. The first thing to understand is that you and I can eat exactly the same meals, but our bodies metabolise the energy and nutrients very differently, depending on our age, genetic makeup, how well our thyroids function, our lean muscle mass, how stressed we are and how often we’ve dieted in the past.

Losing weight is a science and keeping it off is a psychology, and as our knowledge in these areas grows, we realise that the impact of both these factors on weight loss is greater than we thought. Complex factors in our biology and environment also exert powerful influences on whether we can sustain weight loss in the long term.

But this doesn’t mean we should despair and give up. On the contrary, we can now move forward armed with a good dose of reality. Rather than pinning our hopes on empty promises, we can focus on real solutions. When we know better, we can do better. And doing better means shifting our obsession with the outsides of our bodies to the insides. It means eating minimally processed, nutrient-dense foods and exercising, because this makes us feel better and helps us to think better.

1 Reframe your thinking

Maintaining a healthy weight is going to take a sustained and measured approach, gradually replacing old habits with new ones. Reframe the way you think about health and exercise.