Commit to Staying Fit: Tips for Maintaining Your Active Lifestyle

It’ll be a red-letter day when you reach your weight goal! “Now,” you think, “I can relax and take it easy.” Actually, that statement couldn’t be further from the truth.

This Active Living article:

• Congratulates you on your diabetes control success
• Gives you the straight scoop on maintaining your weight loss and control of your diabetes
• Offers practical tips for keeping your physical activity program on track for the rest of your life

“Quit” Is a Four-Letter Word

Being physically active provides you with piles of benefits (see your Week 3 Active Living article).

• The bad news is that the moment you stop, you start to lose these benefits. Experts call this the reversibility concept.
• The sad news is that fitness level drops quickly during the first 12 to 21 days of inactivity.
• The worst news is that the fitness benefits of regular physical activity are nearly completely lost after two to three months of inactivity.

Now, here’s the good news. Studies show that staying fit and maintaining weight gets easier over time.

Stay Out of the “I Quit Pit”

Diabetes control includes control of your glucose levels and your diet. It often includes losing weight. You’ve done that! Weight control or management means maintaining your healthy weight.

One myth about weight loss is that regaining lost weight is inevitable. It’s not. Experts recommend that you focus on the first six months after reaching your goal weight. After that, you’ll have formed an activity that’s nearly impossible to break. You’ll think that “a day without activity is like a day without sunshine.”

Scientific studies have exploded these common myths:

• People who lose weight always regain. Not true! You can maintain weight loss by continuing with your healthy eating and physical activity programs.
• Weight loss makes your body become more efficient, burning fewer calories than before you lost weight. Not true! Scientists measured resting energy expenditures (the number of calories people burn just to stay alive — the energy needed for essential functions such as breathing, heart and kidney functioning, and so forth, and found that it doesn’t change much.
• Weight loss is a lifelong struggle. Not necessarily. Actually, over time, less effort is needed to continue habits that support weight loss. The habits have become second nature, like tying one’s shoes or brushing one’s teeth.

Staying Off the Couch

Here are some tactics that successful losers use to help themselves prevent couch potato relapse. Check the ones you think are most likely to work for you.

• Do activities you like. If you love the feel of the wind at your back during a brisk walk, then walk! If the only sensations you get from swimming are cold and wet, choose something else.
• Try out new types of physical activity occasionally to keep yourself from getting bored. Investigate yoga, Pilates, tai chi, or ballroom, Latin, or swing dancing.
• Get an exercise buddy. Humans, dogs, and pedometers make wonderful exercise buddies.
• Schedule your physical activity session into your daily calendar, just as you would a meeting with your boss, a doctor’s appointment, or picking up the kids from school. All of these are top-priority events.
• Keep a log. Seeing the minutes of physical activity time add up is motivating!
• Reward yourself at important milestones, or when you’ve reached one of your goals.

Summary

• We now know that:
  • People who lose weight don’t always regain it and more.
  • A person’s body doesn’t become “more efficient” and burn fewer calories as one loses weight.
  • Diabetes control, which includes weight control, is not necessarily an unpleasant struggle.