Weight loss is a popular goal for many people trying to improve their health. There are many indicators of health, and weight is just one of them.
Although it sounds straightforward, losing weight is not as easy as “intake calories, burn calories.” Age, exercise level, body composition, illness, injury, and other factors all affect how many calories you need each day. The amount of energy (calories) our body uses each day is also known as our metabolism.
There are 3 ways our body burns calories in addition to the calories we expend while exercising:
- The energy takes to digest what we eat
- Daily activities that we carry out
- Mediation, surgery
Most of our body’s energy is spent on our basic body part functioning.
The Most Important Thing for Weight Loss is consuming fewer calories than your body burns per day
Proper Nutrition and physical activity can lead to weight loss. Going on a diet is not the way to sustainably lose weight. Instead of drastically cutting calories and dropping a bunch of weight quickly, you want to limit the calorie intake that you can keep up with over time. This can be done through a balanced diet.
The Most Important Thing for Weight Maintenance
After you’ve lost some body weight, we suggest maintaining that weight for a couple of months before trying to lose again (if you still have weight to lose). This is how you can permanently move your set point—the weight range your body likes to stay in overtime
Common factor for people who have lost weight and kept it off is daily exercise. This exercise doesn’t have to be consecutive streak; it could be 10-minute sessions throughout the day, too.
But if nutrition helped you lose weight in the first place, why is exercise more crucial than diet? Everything boils down to a calorie balance. While weight loss requires regulating calorie intake, weight maintenance requires a calorie balance. Daily exercise allows people to burn more calories throughout the day and, in turn, eat more without having an excess of calories.
Tips for Maintaining a Healthy Weight
Any changes you make to lose weight should be habits you can keep up for a long time. Luckily for us, little changes that you enjoy can lead to achieving them over time.
Aim to follow a balanced diet most of the time throughout the week and don’t worry about the rest. This results in diet control easily without any need for measurement.
Also, exercise can be a physical activity you like which can make up for the metabolism during the day.
To Conclude
Although minor lifestyle adjustments that you can maintain will help you succeed, losing weight might be challenging. Losing weight and maintaining it is a life journey, but a little step towards it can help set you up for success.
