If you’ve been working on losing weight, or have recently lost some weight, you’re likely wondering how to maintain a lower weight once you’ve gotten there. After all, studies show that many people who lose significant amounts of weight experience what is called the ‘yoyo effect,’ or an experience in which they eventually regain the weight that they had lost.
This yoyoing between weight extremes can have adverse effects on your health. So, if you’re trying to lose weight, you need to make sure you are doing it in a way that is sustainable and will bring you your desired long-term benefits.
Resources like the Rose Wellness Center can provide help with weight issues by utilizing a holistic approach, such as acupuncture, functional medicine, and nutritional therapy. In this way, you’ll be able to set your mind and your heart into weight loss for a continuously healthy lifestyle.
Here are some natural approaches which may help promote sustainable weight loss:
Table of Contents
1. Acupuncture
Acupuncture benefits are numerous. It’s mainly known for helping from pain relief, immunity boost, stress relief, anxiety, depression, digestive issues, and more. While the benefits can be near endless, acupuncture may be a great way to help you lose weight, too.
Acupuncture may assist weight loss by possibly helping to increase your metabolism, reducing appetite, reducing stress, and affecting the part of the brain that registers hunger. As is often the case in weight loss, this works best if you accompany it with proper diet and exercise, and you’ll probably need several treatments a week for six to eight weeks for it to have full effect.
2. Positive Message
When you’re trying to lose some weight, you probably have had the thought of thinking that food is your enemy. As tempting as it may be to punish yourself and your body with these thoughts, it’s not really helpful at all since you’re adding a layer of shame and stigma around eating, which is something everyone must do to survive and that you should still be allowed to enjoy, and you’re making your attempts at weight loss into a masochistic effort. You’re instilling in your mind that this whole process is a punishment for your weight gain.
What you can do is try to turn it into a positive note. Instead of saying, “I shouldn’t eat more, I’ll look more awful!”, you should say “I can control my eating.” Along with a positive mindset, you should also improve your relationship with food by eliminating the idea that they’re the enemy. You can tell yourself that “I am proud that I am responsible for my eating” and “I am happy that I am healthy”.
3. Psychotherapy
If you have any form of disordered eating, whether it is deprivation or bingeing, you may benefit from visiting a therapist who specializes in treating disordered eating. Oftentimes, these habits are tied into other stressors in your life, and a therapist can help you both form a healthier relationship with food and your body and help you determine what may have cause you to engage in disordered eating.
The method used for this process is Cognitive-Behavior Therapy (CBT) wherein it’ll help to change your behavior and achieve your specific goal. With CBT, you’ll be able to manifest the routines and habits that will be best for you in the long term.
4. Exercise
Of course, in order to lose weight, you need to incorporate regular exercise into your routine. When you exercise, your body uses up energy stored in the body, which is often in the form of fat, which will, if you balance it with your food intake, can result in losing weight.
Now, engaging in exercise doesn’t necessarily mean you need to use the kind of equipment you would find in your local gym. Even just regularly walking can contribute to your goals as you are getting your body active and moving. Depending on your stamina, your physical ability, and your resources, you can then incorporate strength building exercises to help build muscle in your body and, eventually, allow you to building up to more and more kinds of exercises as desired. This, in combination with other practices, may result in weight loss.
5. Visualization
While this does not directly cause your body to shed weight, visualization practices can help you be more motivated to lose some weight.
It’s always a great idea to keep on pushing and motivating yourself through visualization. It can be a good reminder of why you’re doing it in the first place and remind you of your goals during periods where your motivation is low because you’re not seeing results as quickly as you had hoped or because you’ve suffered a setback of some sort, like an injury.
Conclusion
Having to lose extra weight takes time, effort, and lots and lots of patience. It doesn’t—and can’t—happen overnight just because you did one work out. Aside from conducting a balanced diet and regular exercise, there are a lot of things that you can do to help you be in the right mindset to help you reach your goals.
There’s often a lot of external pressure to lose weight, and it’s often tied to aesthetic value. You may want to lose weight to look a certain way or to fit a certain size of clothing, but ultimately you should be making this choice not to appeal others, or appeal to others, but rather so that you can feel as healthy and comfortable in your body as you can. This may mean losing weight, this may mean building muscle, this may mean improving flexibility and joint mobility.
In the case of losing weight, you just have to do your best to approach the process as holistically as possible. For many people, focusing just on exercise and diet will not allow them to achieve the goals they were aiming for, or won’t allow them to keep those accomplishments moving forward. By considering some of the approaches in this article, you can create the approach and routine that is most effective for you.
