Behavior Modification & Weight Loss Maintenance

While a substantial portion of effective weight loss is determined through your compliance with the dieting plan, the battle does not end when you reach your target weight. Keeping the weight off for good is the real challenge, and that is where most dieters fail. To avoid this common post-dieting disaster, you will need to practice simple behavior modification techniques to change your eating behaviors. Although simple, behavior modification is not easy, with time and effort you can make permanent changes to your physique.

Strict Mental Reprogramming

• Practice simple mental reprogramming to help you avoid weight gain during the post diet phase. Remember that the end of the diet is not an invitation to teach your hard-earned nutritional habits out and resume the eating patterns that landed you in need of a diet to begin with. Although the diet might be over, you should still continue to eat the same types of foods as you did while on the plan, only in slightly larger quantities to facilitate weight maintenance instead of weight loss. Bring your mind around to this point of view gradually but persistently by telling yourself "forbidden" or any other key word when you find yourself reaching for or craving an unhealthy item. Constant reinforcement is the key to reprogramming new and healthy habits, and although difficult at first, if you manage to hold off your cravings for long enough, you will find that the foods you previously considered dietary staples will become unsavory.

Behavior Modification Through Routine

• Begin a post-diet routine to help yourself avoid impulse eating and other forms of unplanned caloric intake now that the diet has ended. Set up a basic schedule that mimics the one followed while on your diet. For example, if you were eating five or six small meals per day while dieting, continue that trend. Providing your body with the same general patterns and rhythms it used to lose the weight will help to remind yourself subconsciously that you must continue to exercise effort to keep the weight off for good.

  Finally, practice further impulse control modifications by allowing yourself one meal per week to "cheat" on your eating plan. Schedule the meal at the same time of the same day every week--for example, on Sundays at 6 p.m. Knowing that you will have an "out" at the end of the week to indulge your cravings will make them easier to remove through the use of the mental reprogramming technique in section one, helping you to naturally regulate your post-diet behavior.