Ways to Maintain Healthy Weight
Started to get active and lost a few pounds? Well done! You’re one step ahead of your journey of a healthy lifestyle. Just starting out on your journey? Great decision! You’ve come to the right place to begin your healthy weight management. For starters, you must first assess your weight by using a Body Mass Index (BMI). The Body Mass Index is a reliable screening process used to categorize weight and give details regarding the health aspects related to each weight category. By assessing your weight, you have the basic idea of your weight category (underweight, normal, overweight, obese). You can check your BMI online by using a BMI calculator or by a proper visit to a health professional’s office.
Next, you must know how the body works and how important creating a healthy lifestyle affects your overall health. Every food you eat has a measurement in calories, which is basically the energy your body gets from nutrients in the food you eat.
According to the National Institute on Aging (NIH), there are two main factors that directly affect your weight: calories in and calories out. Simply put, the more calories you eat, the more active you have to be in order to maintain your weight, and vice versa.
However, your age might also be an important factor because as you grow older, your metabolism (the body process that deals with getting energy from food) slows down and can lead to weight gain if not physically active. Other factors that may influence your weight include genetics, age, gender, sleep, lifestyle, environment and many more.
Some of these factors make maintaining a healthy lifestyle difficult, and sometimes discouraging. Although it is never easy, keeping your weight in check is definitely worth the time and effort. By taking proper steps in your weight management journey, you can lower the risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, high blood pressure and many more obesity-related diseases.
These simple tips and strategies might just help you in keeping your hard-earned weight loss progress in check!
Choose the RIGHT Food
In this world of convenient restaurant-to-door delivery, we sometimes forget what nutrients we are actually getting from the food we eat. Eating a bucket of crispy chicken or drinking sugar beverages seems delicious, but are we really getting the necessary nutrients our body needs?
Following a well-balanced, nutrient-packed diet is the best foundation of your strategy in maintaining your healthy lifestyle. Your diet must include high-quality proteins, carbohydrates, healthy fats, vitamins and minerals. By eating in this manner, not only can you maintain your weight. You can also maintain your body’s everyday functions and promote disease prevention.
Be Active
Whether you have lost excess weight or you want to maintain a certain weight, being physically active is important for overall good health. Each physical activity you perform contributes to the total energy you “burn” — calories out. In order to maintain a healthy weight, the calories you eat and “burn” must be balanced. You must be engaged in regular physical activity as well.
Whether it is running, lifting weights or doing yard work, developing your own routine and diligently following it will ultimately influence your healthy lifestyle.
Aside from maintaining weight loss, having a regular exercise routine affects overall health. It helps by reducing risk for cardiovascular diseases (hypertension, stroke, heart attack), diabetes, cancer, arthritis, osteoporosis, depression, and anxiety.
Drink Your Water
If you’ve been scouring the internet for healthy lifestyle strategies, you’ve probably come across the importance of drinking enough water in affecting your overall health. Water is involved in nearly all of our body processes. From carrying nutrients and oxygen to cells, to aiding digestion and waste removal. But when it comes to maintaining a healthy weight, strategically drinking water can boost metabolism and aid appetite management.
Water boosts metabolism by acting as an effective aid in maintaining metabolic processes ensuring that your body runs smoothly. In analogy, drinking water affects the body like how lubricants effectively maintain machine parts.
Drinking water between full meals or right before a meal can improve appetite management. Research has shown that people who drank water throughout the day have more appetite control. They found it easier to eat more carefully.
Sleep is Important
Whether you are a morning person or a night-owl, getting adequate shut-eye is essential in every healthy lifestyle. Sleep experts emphasize that the amount of sleep you get directly influences your daily activities and may affect your lifestyle. For example, when you lose sleep and feel tired, you are more inclined to postpone your exercise workout or submit to food cravings that satisfy your sleep-deprived body.
Getting that 7 to 8 hour quality sleep is just as important as eating the right food or regularly drinking water. Sleep is nutrition for the brain and supplementing the control center of our hormones. This regulates our eating habits and body processes, which can positively impact the journey of maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
Key Takeaway
To sum it all up, maintaining a healthy weight requires consistency, discipline and effort. Be careful in following fast weight-loss schemes and secret formulas that are abundant in the fitness industry. Remember, there is no secret in losing weight or maintaining weight loss. But by keeping these tips in mind will ultimately help you in achieving a healthy lifestyle.