3 SIMPLE Ways to Maintain Your Ideal Weight

Now that you’ve actually made friends with your scale, how can you stay that way? How can you maintain that weight loss that you worked so hard to achieve? I'm here to tell you that maintaining your weight is not magic. And while it is a challenge like anything else truly worth your effort, it’s far from impossible to achieve. It is a skill. We are all born with the ability to develop skills.

For example, walking is a skill. As a baby you could not walk but as you grew and developed and saw people around you walking, encouraging you to walk; instinctively you developed this skill. At first you were only able to stand, then take a few steps until before long you were running circles around your parents. You learned this skill and you developed. Weight maintenance is no exception. It is a skill you must develop but unlike walking, it's not something that comes naturally.

When you want to possess a new skill, what do you do? You learn how to do it and then you practice it. You may not get it right the first time, you may not get it right the tenth time but if you do not give up....you WILL reach your goal of weight maintenance. Here are 3 tips that will help you develop your new skill of weight maintenance.

1. Know your weight. If you are trying to maintain your weight, I am assuming that you are at a weight that you are happy with (at least for the moment) and you would like to maintain this weight. You are agreeing not to try to lose any more weight for the moment. This doesn’t mean you're stuck to this weight forever, it's not set in stone. It just means that right now you're happy with your weight and are learning how to stay there. So, what's your weight? It's not a trick question. Get comfortable with the idea of you being this weight. This is the first step. This means that it is the weight you will base your whole weight maintenance lifestyle on, hence the word "maintenance." Hypothetically, if someone were to ask you your weight, you would easily be able to give them the answer. When that number begins to climb and you see yourself often weighing in a few pounds above this weight, you know you have to do something about it. For the next few days you may choose not to eat any sweets or you may decide to hit the gym for an extra hour. There is some thing that psychologically goes on when you commit in your mind to a weight. It makes it that easier for you to maintain that weight.

2. Weigh yourself every single day. Yes, I know; 10 years ago we threw our scales out the window. We were told not to let ourselves be tied to the scale. We were brainwashed into thinking that it wasn’t politically correct to regularly use the scale. Not in my world. As a weight loss coach, this is one of the most important tools you have and you must use it. Once you know your weight and you are happy with the idea of maintaining that weight for a while, you must weigh yourself daily. How else would you know if you are on track? You cannot depend on the way your clothes fits. By the time your clothes begin feeling tight, you've already gained 5 pounds! If you weigh yourself every day, you know exactly where you are and you can decide, based upon your morning weigh in, if you're going to have dessert or not. You can decide if you need to put in that extra work-out time. There is also something psychologically that goes on when you weigh in every day. You face your fears. Something that you once felt you had no control over is now something that is not magic. It has no control over you because you look it straight in the eye every single morning! This is the #1 most important tool because it is by this measurement that you will decide what your next step is. If you weight is good, carry on with your day. If you're up on your weight, bring it back down. Not a big deal. You just do it.

3. When your weight goes up, bring it back down. A huge mistake that dieters make when they are trying to lose weight and keep it off is to snowball. Once they see they've gained weight, they think they go into a downwards spiral. It actually happens prior to even weighing in. The interesting thing is, most of the time, we know when we are going to be overweight even before we step on the scale. How? Because we know we over-ate. So when we have those Buffalo wings dipped in ranch dressing with loaded potato skins and have that mud pie for dessert at 9pm, we can probably guess we'll be overweight the next day. The guilt and the fear and the eater’s remorse hits us and we don't even want to weigh in. The worse mistake we can make is to think this is irreversible. The thought that we're done, we've gained weight and we’ve failed only leads to one action...to repeat over indulgence of calories again. Don’t go there. Just bring the weight back down. REMEMBER: You cannot gain weight overnight. You cannot store weight in a day. So when you see the scale jump 5 pounds in 1 day, that just means that you have excess calories in your body and you have to work that day to take the calories out. Excess calories in your body for a prolonged period of time will lead to fat storage, if you get the calories out in time, the calories will not be stored as fat.

So repeat after me: KNOW your weight, Weigh EVERY day, KEEP your weight there.