Did you break your diet?
It can be hard to keep a diet, especially when foods that tempt you to break it surround you.
You’ve got to have some wins sometime.
If you don’t, you can start to feel like a loser, like being at the weight you want to be at is impossible.
If you have some of these good habits, maybe you can call it a win.
If you don’t have these habits, maybe you can make them habits.
Each helps you keep weight off.
A good way to build a habit is to make sure to do it for an entire month. Set up some kind of reminder so you don’t forget.
Here are the top habits for maintaining a healthy body weight.
Sleep Enough
Who’d think that sleeping actually helps you lose weight?
You’re just laying there, right? Barely burning any calories beyond your base metabolic rate.
However, sleeping is really important to weight because getting enough sleep helps to stabilize your hormone levels.
Having good sleep hygiene helps make sure that you sleep enough.
People find that if they don’t sleep enough, they tend to eat a lot of useless calories.
Drink water
Water can act as a break on hunger. It also helps your system flush itself of metabolic byproducts and toxins. How much water you need to drink depends on your age, size, weight, and activity.
After meal walk
This is a way of getting fresh air and improving your digestion, not to mention burning calories. As a light exercise, an after-dinner walk can also promote sleep. It helps you digest your food which can also help you sleep well.
Stretching
This one really never seems to get talked about.
Stretching feels good.
Sitting a lot, or moving only in certain ways, causes one to stiffen at their joints and tendons. Stretching expands the range of motion, allowing (in many cases) pain-free movement.
If it hurts to move, you won’t want to do it.
Stretching, therefore, removes an obstacle to keeping weight off even if it doesn’t burn many calories in and of itself.
Eating slowly
This habit allows you to actually feel full.
If you rush when you eat, not even stopping to chew your food much if at all, you’ll blow past your hormonal tamper on your hunger.
Chewing and eating slowly also helps your digestion as your mouth is the start of your digestive system.
Having good digestion also helps you sleep.
Fidgeting
This habit might bug others, but it does surreptitiously burn calories.
And those calories really add up.
Maybe fidget away when you’re alone?
Remember this
These habits by themselves won’t guarantee that you’ll keep the weight off, of course. The biggest determinant of that is what you eat and how much of it. Each habit contributes, however, and each of them doesn’t seem to get talked about in the same way.
James Cobb, RN, MSN, is an emergency department nurse and the founder of the Dream Recovery System. His goal is to provide his readers with simple, actionable ways to improve their health and maximize their quality of life.
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