It’s one of the most demoralising things that can happen to a person on a fitness journey. You work hard and you manage to get down to your goal weight, but then after this initial success, you end up putting some of that weight right back on in the following weeks and months. Some of the reasons are obvious, others a little less so. Here are some reasons you regain weight you lost.
You may have lost the weight as a result of a strict, restrictive diet, but you will soon find that that kind of lifestyle isn’t sustainable and you can’t keep up the strict nature of the regime. There is only so long a body can go without a lot of the sustenance that it needs, and you can’t fast forever, so if you have been following an unhealthy, unrealistic diet, then there is always going to be a breaking point where you snap.
If you lose too much weight too quickly, your body might actually go into survival mode where your metabolism slows all the way down in order to try to preserve the energy it has. This protective reaction to a restrictive diet is probably going to have the reverse effect and end up with you putting on more pounds because of your slow metabolism.
If you go straight back to living a sedentary, low energy lifestyle, then you are always going to put weight back on. You might not have to keep up with the excessive diet and physical exercise, but you still need to be active to accommodate your new weight and your new life choices.
Dieting alone isn’t going to help you keep the weight off. When you go back to a more normal diet after dropping the weight, the only way to make sure that those extra calories are burned off is through increased amounts of exercise to counterbalance the food.
Be wary of indulging in too many treats to ‘celebrate’ your weight loss, because those kinds of treats can start to become a super regular thing without you even realising it. The best thing to do is limit yourself to one treat per week rather than one per day.
Some people make the mistake of thinking that once they get to their goal weight, that is the finish line and you can go back to how things were before just with a new body. That doesn’t make any sense if you think about it, because it was your old lifestyle that caused your body to gain that weight in the first place!
It can even be a case of getting so used to your new body that you forget how hard it was to achieve it in the first place. You can get complacent about the hard diet and hard exercise, and slip back into old habits that will end up with right back in your original starting place.