Newsletter

Lifetime Weight Management: Achieving It, Celebrating It, Maintaining It

By making the time to read this article, it's clear you're committed to the concept of reaching and maintaining a healthy, lifetime weight. Congratulations! And in case you need it, here's a reminder of what you’ll gain:

• increased energy
• appetite control
• a healthier body
• a younger, more fit appearance
• a better metabolism

This article will give you advice on not only reaching your ideal weight, but maintaining it and celebrating it. 

Achieving Your Lifetime Weight Management Goals

If you've reached your healthy lifetime weight, congratulations! You can skip this section and go on to the next. But if you still have weight to lose, here's a high-level overview of how the Atkins Nutritional Approach™ (ANA) can get you where you want to be.

Induction

Induction—the first phase of the ANA—is a short-term experience with long-term impact. This is your opportunity to shift your metabolism from storing fat to burning fat. Read more about Induction here.  

Ongoing Weight Loss (OWL)

If you've reached the second phase of the ANA—Ongoing Weight Loss, or OWL—then you've experienced ANA weight loss results and are ready to personalize the program to fit your needs. Read more about OWL here.  

Pre-Maintenance

Pre-Maintenance is like the final training period before a big competition.  Now is when you gather together the incremental changes you made during Induction and OWL and truly make ANA your own. Read about pre-Maintenance here.

Tip: Pre-plan and set yourself up for success in Lifetime Maintenance.  Visit the newsletter archives at Atkins.com and search for topics most applicable to you.  Print and create a motivation binder to inspire you as you approach your lifetime weight maintenance goal.

Celebrating and Maintaining Your Healthy Lifetime Goal Weight

Reaching lifetime maintenance is a huge milestone.  Whether you shed 10 pounds or 100 pounds—and whether you reached your goal by following the ANA  all the way to Lifetime Maintenance, or not—it required tremendous effort to achieve your goal. But first, before we address how to maintain your newfound health, take time to enjoy it! Embrace how fantastic you feel. Acknowledge your increased energy levels and how all aspects of your world feel better when you lead a healthier life.

Some trepidation isn't wholly unfounded as weight loss can, actually, be the easy part. All too often, people win the battle of weight loss only to lose the war of weight control. Once you commit to  make the mental shift to the Atkins Nutritional Approach™, you are on your way. Long to enjoy life while maintaining all you've worked to accomplish?  You can. The answer lies in five concepts that form the acronym W.E.I.G.H.

• Weigh or measure yourself routinely
• Exercise
• Indulge intelligently
• Get exercise in sneaky places
• High-protein, high fiber eating

Weigh Yourself Routinely

To keep an eye on your approximate weight, some find that in order for them not to go above their goal they need to weigh themselves. If this method is what works for you, by all means do it!

Others prefer to view the W in terms of "What do I look like?" Select an article of clothing that fits perfectly at your goal weight. Try this item on weekly as a body check-in and skip the pound-specific nature of the scale. Or you can use a tape measure and take your measurements. Up a few pounds or inches? Favorite jeans tight? Don't panic. E is right around the corner.

Exercise

Unsurprisingly, E stands for exercise. Studies show that if you exercise four-plus hours per week you're more likely to maintain weight loss than people who calorie-restrict alone. This is good news! Your workout routine should cover three areas:

• cardiovascular training
• strength training
• stretching

While this may initially sound overwhelming it, too, is a good thing. If you strive for 35 minutes of exercise a day and can break that down even further into three different activities your exercise time will certainly go quickly.

The key is to focus on leading a joyful life while you maintain your goal weight. Search for and find a workout routine you find pleasure in the process of doing. That way, if the scale slides up or your pants grow snug, you only have to increase something you already like doing until you're back at your goal.

Tip: The Atkins site has some terrific  exercise articles containing workout suggestions. Explore these for more specific ideas.

Indulge Intelligently

The letter I brings us to the fun part of being in lifetime weight maintenance mode: indulging. Now that you've made it to your goal weight, you can continue to select from a greater range of foods and consume more carbohydrates than you did in the weight-loss phases of the Atkins Nutritional Approach™.

If your metabolism can handle it, you can—in moderation—eat many of the foods you used to enjoy. To maintain your goal weight, you must know your metabolic needs. Your Atkins Carbohydrate Equilibrium (ACE), which you found during Pre-Maintenance, lets you know how many carbohydrates you can eat each day to maintain your weight. Stay right at or around that number and your weight should not fluctuate beyond the perfectly natural range of two or three pounds. (Hormonal changes and other daily fluctuations in your body account for a small seesaw effect.)

You also must conquer your former bad habits and learn how to cope with real-world challenges. Maintaining weight loss is as much a mental challenge as a physical one. For example, you need to eat right even under stress. How? By realizing that we tend to reach for sugar and starchy foods for comfort, when proper food choices like higher protein intake can actually lessen the impact of stress on your body. Similarly, you'll need coping strategies for holidays and special occasions, as well as knowing how to get restaurants to serve you exactly what you know you should be eating.

Perhaps you can plan to cheat by cutting back for a few days before an event and then carefully choose a few indulgences. Or go back to a previous level of the plan prior to a vacation or holiday to give yourself some leeway.

As you did in the three weight-loss phases of Atkins, make weight control a constant priority in your life. Re-create that attitude and you can continue your success. One good tool is to—once and for all—get rid of your "fat" wardrobe. When your clothes are getting tight and you don't have the next size in the closet to retreat to, you'll be forced to confront your weight gain sooner. By never letting your weight vary more than three to five pounds, you'll head off trouble and get off the weight roller coaster for good.

Choose a lifetime weight range of five pounds, the low number being your goal weight. The higher number will be your maximum allowable weight. Whenever you reach the higher number, you must promise yourself that, within a week, you will begin the Ongoing Weight Loss phase until you reach your goal weight again. Do this and you will never have more than five pounds to lose.

Get Exercise in Sneaky Places

G is a gentle reminder of the trite but true "Take the stairs instead of the elevator—you'll burn extra calories" adage. Get exercise in unforeseen places. Life can be unpredictable, and even the best planners find their workouts derailed. Seize the exercise opportunities around you and get moving whenever you can.

Tip: Try viewing your entire day through the prism of: "Where am I missing chances to burn a few extra calories?" and see what you discover. You might power-walk the terminal the next time your flight is delayed or leave your desk and walk over to chat with someone instead of sending an email.

Small steps add up over the course of a day, and once you begin it becomes second nature. You might even consider coupling your indulging with your getting exercise in sneaky places: invite a friend or coworker to walk to a restaurant you've been longing to try for lunch. Maintaining can be fun and painless. It's all about thinking creatively!

High-Protein, High-Fiber Eating

Our final letter, H, is a reminder to keep high-protein, high-fiber eating a priority. The benefits of protein are many—for one thing, it boosts your metabolic rate for hours after eating a high-protein meal another is that you will feel satisfied for longer periods of time.  High-fiber foods offer huge benefits to your health, from controlling your appetite and regulating blood sugar to helping your digestion.

Remember—knowledge is power. As you move from weight loss into weight maintenance, you don't want to forget all the valuable information you learned along the way. To keep informed and motivated, you'll want to be sure to take advantage of the free, instructor-led discussion groups offered at the Atkins Learning Center. You'll find refresher information on the ANA as well as weight loss and healthy living discussion groups where you can connect with a support network of other people who are also committed to healthy lifetime weight maintenance.