If you have already lost a significant amount of belly fat, then you have probably made great strides in overhauling your nutrition habits. You’ve probably been buying more fruits and vegetables, working hard to ignore cookies and ice cream and making more home cooked meals. Good job, but can you keep it up?
One of the main reasons that so many people regain weight (and belly fat!) is that they put themselves on restrictive diets that cannot be maintained over a long period of time. The world is full of weight loss and diet advice, but what do you do when the weight is off and you want to keep it that way?
Diversity
To keep yourself on track, develop a taste for diversity. Bring home new fruits and vegetables from the grocery store and discover new and healthy recipe to try. Many people fall back into old, unhealthy eating habits once they have achieved their weight loss goals. Old habits are comforting and new diets can be restrictive and dull if you do not open your palate to new foods.
Make it a habit to try something new every week and to gather a colorful bouquet of food in your cart on each shopping trip. Just make sure you are trying out healthy recipes that incorporate foods that will help you maintain your weight.
Portion Control
Dieters quickly get used to cutting their portions, but portions often creep back up to large sizes when a goal weight has been reached. Unfortunately, as portion sizes expand, so do waistlines. Portion control is not a dieting trick – it is a lifetime eating habit that needs to become ingrained into your eating psyche.
Get used to taking small portions of food and going back for more if you are still hungry. Do not eat out of large boxes or bags. Instead, put a small amount of food onto a little plate and close up the box or bag. If your body is still hungry, you can always have more, but defining food portions will help avoid mindless overeating or snacking.
Keep Count
Just because you can fit into your skinny jeans again doesn’t mean you can eat whatever you want with reckless abandon. Your body still operates on the basic principle of energy in vs. energy out. It is incredibly easy to start eating more and more calories throughout the day if you aren’t keeping track.
Always be aware of the amount of food you are putting into your body. Keep an eye out for calorie counts and grams of fat (especially saturated fat). Eating out can be especially precarious, but more and more restaurants are putting calorie counts on the menu and/or offering low calorie meal options. Take advantage of the calorie counts on menus and on the food labels of the things you eat most often.
Figure out approximately how many calories you need a day to maintain your weight. Make sure you stick as close as you can to that number each day, otherwise those skinny jeans are going to start getting tight fast.
Following these simple rules will help you eat right and keep off the belly fat.
