How Much Exercise Do You Need to Prevent Weight Regain After Weight Loss?

You’ve lost 20 pounds, and you’re finally down to your ideal body weight. Hooray! It feels good to have reached your weight loss goal. Now comes the hard part – maintaining your new body. The statistics aren’t encouraging. Eight out of every 10 people who lose a significant amount of weight gain it all back or more. But don’t let that discourage you. There’s a way to get the upper hand in maintaining your new physique – through the power of exercise. You can lose weight through diet alone, but exercise gives you an edge when it comes to keeping those unwanted pounds from making their reappearance.

Exercise for Weight Maintenance: Why Is It So Important?

Based on a study carried out in animals, researchers found that animals that exercised after losing weight re-gained less weight than animals that were less active after they returned to a normal diet. They believe this is because the active animals preferentially burned fat as fuel rather than carbohydrates. Thus, less fat ended up being stored as fat tissue.

The sedentary animals also had a more voracious appetite, possibly because they were burning more carbohydrates as fuel and storing more fat. As they used up their stores of carbohydrates, their appetite increased along with their bellies.

In rats, exercise after weight loss was linked in a study with the formation of fewer new fat cells. Any increase in the number of fat cells makes it easier for the body to store fat. This is an interesting finding that merits more research since experts have previously thought that fat cell numbers don’t increase during adulthood, and weight gain comes from an increase in the size of fat cells already present. At least in rats, the number of fat cells increase in number during weight regain. This raises the possibility that this happens in humans too. This could partially explain why it’s so challenging to maintain weight loss.

There’s another theory to explain weight regain after weight loss. After weight loss, your body tries to return you to your genetically predetermined set-point. This is the weight that your body wants to maintain. When you deviate too far from it by gaining or losing weight your body makes adjustments to try to bring you back to it. Exercise may help here too, by re-setting your set point.

How Much Exercise Do You Need to Prevent Weight Regain?

According to research published in the National Weight Control Registry, people who successfully lost 30 or more pounds of weight and kept it off for 12 months or more burned an average of 2,800 calories weekly through exercise. The best way to meet your exercise prescription is to combine aerobic exercise with strength training. Strength training has the benefit of building lean body muscle, which gives your metabolism a boost. Aerobics is a good calorie burner.

Other Ways to Prevent Weight Regain After Weight Loss

People who are able to maintain their weight after losing it have other characteristics in common. They step on the scale at least once a week. By doing this, they can monitor for changes in body weight and alter their diet accordingly. Successful long-term losers are also more likely to eat breakfast and avoid cheating too much on the weekend. It’s okay to have a cheat meal once a week, but too many cheat treats can quickly add up to extra weight.

The Bottom Line?

Even if you were able to lose weight without exercising, you need a regular exercise program for maintenance. It’s too easy for those extra pounds to reappear as your body tries to take you back to your set-point weight. Exercise can help to alter your set-point and boost fat-burning. That works in your favor when it comes to keeping those extra pounds at bay.

References:

University of Colorado Denver Newsroom. “Exercise Minimizes Weight Regain”
Weight Watchers. “Exercise and Preventing Weight Regain”
Fitness Prescription. February 2011. page 32.
New England Journal of Medicine. 363. 2102-2113. 2010.

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