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Ten habits of people who lose weight and keep it off

Most people who diet will regain 50 per cent of the lost weight in the first year after losing it. Much of the rest will regain it in the following three years.

Most people inherently know that keeping a healthy weight boils down to three things: eating healthy, eating less, and being active. But actually doing that can be tough.

We know what to do to lose weight, we just need to form new habits.

We know what to do to lose weight, we just need to form new habits.

We make more than 200 food decisions a day, and most of these appear to be automatic or habitual, which means we unconsciously eat without reflection, deliberation or any sense of awareness of what or how much food we select and consume. So often habitual behaviours override our best intentions.

A new study has found the key to staying a healthy weight is to reinforce healthy habits.

New research has found weight-loss interventions that are founded on habit-change, (forming new habits or breaking old habits) may be effective at helping people lose weight and keep it off.

We recruited 75 volunteers from the community (aged 18-75) with excess weight or obesity and randomised them into three groups. One program promoted breaking old habits, one promoted forming new habits, and one group was a control (no intervention).

The habit-breaking group was sent a text message with a different task to perform every day. These tasks were focused on breaking usual routines and included things such as “drive a different way to work today”, “listen to a new genre of music” or “write a short story”.

Habit-based interventions have the potential to change how we think about weight management and, importantly, how we behave.

These habits were developed by Weight Concern (a UK charity) were:

This article originally appeared on The Conversation. For the full article, go here.

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