5 Best-Kept Secrets To Staying Sim Forever

The key to maintaining your weight loss is a few simple but strategic changes to your daily routine. Here’s the expert-approved plan.

- Hallie Levine

You’ve worked hard to lose weight, and you aced it. Now comes the next challenge: keeping it off.

Most likely you heard about the Biggest Loser study last year that found 13 of 14 contestants had regained substantial amounts of weight within six years. Suddenly, headlines were blaring that rebound weight gain was inevitable. Here’s the thing, though: It’s simply not true.

The Biggest Loser contestants are unusual because they lost extreme amounts of weight, which is hard to maintain over the long-term. Among people who lose more modest amounts (for example, the majority of us), 60 per cent keep most of it off, according to the latest research. All it takes is some strategic diet and exercise tweaks, says Dr Caroline Apovian, an obesity specialist at Boston University School of Medicine.

First, understand how weight loss changes your body. When you lose a significant number of kilos, your body goes into “starvation mode”. Your system slows its production of leptin, a hormone that suppresses your appetite, while at the same time pumping up your levels of ghrelin, a hormone that makes you hungry, says Dr Louis J. Aronne, the director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Center at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York- Presbyterian, and the author of The Change Your Biology Diet.

The good news: You can often lose up to 10 per cent of your body weight without triggering that hormone change, Dr Aronne says. So a 68kg woman can shed around 7kg and keep them off with little to no resistance. But even if you’ve lost more than that, maintaining your new weight is doable with these science-proven techniques.

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