Lose Weight and Keep It Off by Combining Strategies

If you’re reading this, I probably don’t have to tell you how hard it is to lose weight and keep it off. I’m sure either you or someone you know has experienced the frustration of watching their weight go up and down like a yo-yo.

After looking through hundreds of scientific studies, I have discovered several truths about diets and weight loss:

• Most diets can help you lose weight in the short term (6 months or less). 
• Research shows that more than 80% of the time diets fail to keep weight off for the long-term (12 months or more).
• The number one reason diets fail is because people can’t stick with them.

With a failure rate that high, there must be something fundamentally flawed with the diets themselves. While the topic of adherence to diets and ways to achieve sustainable weight loss is still in its infancy in terms of scientific research, we are learning some ways that can improve your chances of success.

I pieced together the findings of research so far and discovered a missing link in the pursuit of ways to lose weight and keep it off. It takes more than just a diet and exercise to succeed.  You must add other strategies to lose weight and keep it off. 

Lose Weight and Keep It Off by Combining Strategies

Below is a summary of the major steps you can take to improve your chances of achieving and maintaining a healthy weight.

• Choose a diet or design your own diet as the foundational strategy.
• Experiment with macronutrients to find the best combination for you.
• Find your “satisfaction” nutrient(s).
• Choose one or more supporting strategies for the best long-term results.
• Get moving.

The idea of combining strategies for long term weight loss isn’t new.  For example, some diets include support groups in their programs. But even that may not address all the reasons that make it difficult to keep the weight off over the long haul.

This article is a broad overview of a 98-page report “How to Lose Weight and Keep It Off by Combining Strategies”. It covers a lot more than I can in this post.  CLICK HERE to sign up for our weekly newsletter and get your free copy.  

Choose Diet for Foundational Strategy

Most diets can help you lose weight.  Even diets based on bogus theories can achieve weight loss.  Below are some things to think about as you make your diet selection.

• How motivated are you? If you don’t have a powerful, urgent motivation, highly restrictive diets likely won’t work for you.
• Do you like to cook? If you hate cooking, diets that require a lot of meal prep may not last long for you.
• How big is your budget? Some diets can get pretty expensive.
• Do you have favorite foods you absolutely can’t give up?

An alternative to following an established diet is to develop your own.  In this blog post I share four principles to follow if you prefer to design your own diet  The 98-page report covers this in more detail, too.

Manage Your Macronutrients

“Macros” is short for macronutrients. It’s the stuff you eat the most of:

• Protein
• Carbohydrates
• Fats

Finding your “sweet spot” with macro intake can improve your bloodwork, ease disease symptoms, help you feel full longer, and make it easier to lose weight and keep it off. Nutritionists and dieticians recommend that you get 60% of your daily calories from carbohydrates, 25% from protein, and 15% from fat. With a low-fat diet, 10% or fewer daily calories come from fat.  A low-carb diet is 10% or fewer calories from carbohydrates.

Whether you plan to follow an established diet or design your own, you will improve your chances of success by finding the combination of macronutrients that works best for you.  It’s worth doing some experimenting.

Find Your Satisfaction Nutrient(s)

Researchers use the term “satiety” to describe how well your food makes you feel full. The best “satisfaction foods” for you are the ones that keep you satisfied for hours. Three Nutrients are most likely to help you stay satisfied longer:

• Fiber
• Fat
• Protein

Generally, starches don’t help much with long-term satiety.

I discovered that fat is my #1 Satisfaction Nutrient.  However, my 26-year-old daughter’s #1 satisfaction nutrient is protein.  Everybody will be different.  For some, all 3 satisfaction nutrients may do equally well at keeping those hunger pangs at bay. If you feel full longer, you will eat less throughout the day. Discovering your satisfaction nutrient may also affect how you manage your macros. For example, if protein is your best satisfaction nutrient, you may want to add more of it to your diet.

Choose One or More Supporting Strategies

It’s clear that diet and exercise alone do a poor job of helping you lose weight and keep it off. But research has discovered other strategies you can add to your base diet to improve your chances of success.  You don’t have to choose just one supporting strategy. I use three of these strategies to keep me on track with a healthy diet.

It works like this; let’s say you started a diet and found that some requirements will be difficult to maintain over the long-term. You keep the aspects of the diet you can live with and add one or more additional strategies to keep your weight loss journey on track.

Here are five supporting strategies that can help you keep your weight loss on track if you have to adapt your base diet. These strategies can also amplify the effectiveness of your diet even if you don’t have to change it.

Intermittent Fasting 

A type of intermittent fasting, known as Time Restricted Eating (TRE) has been shown to help people consume fewer calories during the day even if they make no other changes to their diet.  You can start by limiting all your daily food intake into a 12-hour window.  That means you will fast for 12 hours a day.  This is called 12/12 fasting. Once you adjust to that, try to limit all your food intake to a 10-hour window or maybe even an 8-hour window.

Support Network

WW (formerly Weight Watchers), Optavia, Jenny Craig, and Noom all place emphasis on a support network to help you through your weight loss journey.  I have read a lot of studies that prove this strategy to be a game changer. If you don’t want to join a paid program for this kind of support, try looking at social media or forming your own network with others you know who are trying to lose weight. Just be sure that the group is positive, encouraging, and solution oriented.  Avoid groups with trolls and toxic participants.

Cheating

Although there are exceptions such as the Keto Diet, most diets have room for some cheating.  We humans are omnivores.  There is a lot of stuff we can eat and metabolize. Just because something may not be the healthiest food choice doesn’t mean we have to abstain from it completely. Below are 3 different cheating strategies you may want to try out. I go into more detail on cheating in this article.

• Cheat Day
• 90/10 Diet
• 80/20 Diet

Mindful/Intuitive Eating

Mindful and Intuitive eating have been shown to be effective in people with eating disorders. While research doesn’t indicate they have a significant impact on weight loss alone, they are worth considering as a supplemental strategy.

Mindful eating is based on Zen Buddhism. It is living with a deep awareness of one’s own physical and emotional state as well as the immediate environment.  It focuses on employing all your senses on the experience of eating with the intention of helping you slow down and eat less.

While similar to mindful eating, Intuitive eating takes a more applied approach of listening to your body. Only eat when you are truly hungry. Eat slowly. Be aware of when you feel satisfied and stop. You can learn more about Intuitive Eating HERE.

Combining Diets to Lose Weight and Keep It Off

A 2013 study looked at alternating diets as a means to keep weight off. Subjects ate 3 variations of the Mediterranean Diet with different levels of macronutrients.

• Ketogenic [most calories from fat. 10% or fewer calories from carbs]
• Low-carb, non-ketogenic [LCNK]
• Balanced Mediterranean Diet [BMD]

Subjects rotated between the diets as follows:

• 20 days of keto
• 20 days of LCNK
• 4 months of BMD
• 20 days of Keto
• 6 months of BMD

A whopping 88.25% of the subjects lost an average of 16.11 kg (35.44 lbs.) without regaining the weight during the last 6-month stabilization phase.

You can experiment with what diets you choose and how long you follow each phase. 

Get Moving

Weight loss is 80% nutrition and 20% exercise. That’s a rule-of-thumb, but just know that most of your weight loss will be based on what you do (or don’t) eat.  Eventually you will want some combination of strength training, aerobic exercise, and High Intensity Interval Training to achieve the best results for your health and weight loss.  Check in with DoSomething4Health.com for our current and future articles on exercise.

I had never been able to stick with exercise.  Then I figured out this strategy for starting an exercise program that is at the heart of DoSomething4Health.com.  Are you already exercising but have a hard time sticking with it?  Look for some tips to help you overcome that problem here.

Get Creative to Lose Weight and Keep It Off

It is worth taking the time to experiment with supplemental strategies. They can offset the aspects of a diet you won’t be able to maintain over the long run.

Be sure to sign up for your free report to get more details on how to implement this approach.