How To MAINTAIN Your Results | E25

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Welcome back to the pod. This is Train Like a Girl. My name is Abby, and I am your host for this podcast. But I'm also a health and fitness coach online. Um, and today I really want to talk about maintenance because gosh, I feel like I maybe should have done a podcast on maintaining weight loss and maintaining results before now because it truthfully is one of the trickiest parts of health and fitness and reaching goals and all the rest of it. So let's dive into it because I want to help you realize maybe why you have struggled to maintain your results in the past and crucially how to do it moving forwards. So let's start with why we're talking about this. So there is a strange, I guess, shift or a strange um realization in fat loss that most people only really appreciate once they've done it once or twice. So if you've if you're somebody that has lost weight on numerous occasions, but then find yourself back at square one, you'll know what I mean. The fat loss itself actually feels easier than the maintenance. The losing fat part, whilst not easy, it actually feels structured. It feels like you're on it. It so you it's it feels like solid, right? Whereas maintaining it, maintaining your fat loss results long term feels hard. It feels chaotic, it feels more blurry, it feels like we're having to live in the gray area, it's more difficult. And so for a lot of people, maintenance is where everything falls apart. And maintaining your result is actually, in my opinion, the harder part. Fat loss is can be relatively easy compared to maintaining because maintenance is a lifelong thing that we need to achieve. And if you have gone on a fat loss journey to begin with, that tells me that you were in a body before that you weren't satisfied with, you wanted to lose weight, but it means that you lived a life before the fat loss that maybe you lived for years and years and years, and over those years you will have built up a lifestyle, habits, you would have built up a way of life. And so when we go into a fat loss phase, post-fat loss phase, it's like, oh, well, what do I do now? Do I just go back to how I was before? And that's what most people do. So let's chat about it. When you are actively dieting and actively losing fat, your behavior is pretty constrained, isn't it? You've got rules, you've got targets, you might be using an app, you might be doing like the plate method where you're using structure. But regardless of the approach, it's quite clear. Every action is quite clear. It's like, I'm eating this much, I'm training this way, I walk this amount of steps, and then you get feedback if it's working. You get, well, you get feedback regardless, but if it's working, you get the scale moving down, measurements changing, clothes feeling better, progress feeling great, you know, photos starting to look awesome and all of that good stuff. And that feedback that you receive is incredibly incredibly psychologically powerful for sticking to the diet for adherence, because we as humans we like feedback and we are driven by feedback. It's a bit like when you start seeing results in the gym, it becomes addictive because we like physical feedback. We like to see that feedback. This is also small detour here, but um it's also why a lot of people prefer cardio to strength because with cardio you get instant gratification because you're sweaty and all of that stuff. Which whereas strength, I feel like it takes a lot longer to show up, that like the benefits of it. Um, but the point is we love feedback. So when we're dieting, it feels motivating, it feels when we're like in the flow, it feels great. But once the goal is reached, that structure, it just disappears overnight. It's like it's like, oh, what do I do now? That psychological shift is massive. It kind of goes from I'm actively trying to change my body and I'm dieting, and everyone around me knows it, and all my habits have fallen in line to to do that, to diet, uh, and it goes so it goes from that mindset to oh okay, I should just maintain this now then. But the problem is the world we live in tells us how to diet, it doesn't tell us how to maintain. So when we make that transition from end of diet back to real life, that for lots of people is where lots of problems arise. Because maintenance is not, should not be an absence of structure. We shouldn't just let go of all structure and go back to how we used to be, because if we return to our old habits, guess what? Hey presto, our bodies are a product of the habits and lifestyle choices over time. So if you go back to that, you're gonna quickly go back to the body that you had before. So we don't want to lose structure, we just want to adapt, we want to have a different kind of structure. So let's talk about that, shall we, and how we can how we can adapt after fat loss. So from like a physiological standpoint, when you lose fat, your body also begins to adapt. So I'll try and I'll try and be like as little science-y as possible here, but basically your metabolic rate might decrease as you lose weight. So when you're in a smaller body, you require a smaller number of calories to live. So if you started at, for example, 70 kgs and you lost 10 kgs and you went to 60 kgs, your 60 kg body requires less food, less energy than your 70 kg body did. So if you want to maintain the 60 kg body, that is gonna require a different number of calories, right? So if you return to the foods you were eating when you were at 70 kgs, your body weight will start to increase again. So not only do we have like that metabolic rate change, that's called metabolic adaptation, we also, super importantly, our appetite hormones also change. So there's a ton of research around this, and it shows that after weight loss, our levels of ghrelin, which is our hunger hormone, can remain elevated and at the same time, it gets worse, guys, at the same time, our leptin, which is our like satiety, our fullness signal, our fullness hormone remains suppressed for a period of time after dieting. So put simply, your body can biologically kind of send you signals to eat more because it's kind of saying, I want to regain the weight after I've lost it. Um, it seeks out food, your hunger spikes. This is why if you you may have experienced this yourself before. When you stop a diet, suddenly you want to eat everything in sight, even though during the diet you were like super on it. This is a biological response. This isn't like a willpower problem or anything like that, this is just science. It's and this is referred to as metabolic adaptation, or some people call it adaptive adaptive thermogenesis. So you've done your diet, you've lost weight, you've been in a structured system in order to do so, but you finish the diet, and now you're in a situation where you're you've got less structure, your psychology literally is less focused, and your biology might be pushing your appetite upwards. And all of those three things combined is why maintenance feels so much harder than fat loss itself. How can we how can we get around this? So during fat loss, most people adopt a little bit of an I am dieting mentality, right? Like they're like, I'm on a diet. It becomes like an identity thing for however long the diet lasts, two, three, four months, whatever. And the identity comes with rules and boundaries, but when the goal is reached, that identity disappears. And with it disappears all of the habits and structure and everything that came with the diet. And I'm not saying the solution is to stay in a dieting mindset forever. That would be completely unrealistic. But the solution is to transition your identity whilst dieting. So instead of I am dieting, the more kind of useful uh identity would be looking at the habits-based, looking at what it actually takes you to get to get to that body. So it's about honing in on, okay, rather than being like, I'm somebody that is dieting right now, it's I'm somebody that trains, I'm somebody that eats with awareness, I'm somebody that prioritizes protein. And I know that sounds really like woo-woo and a bit subtle, but if you can tap into that whilst dieting, you you t you change your identity essentially. So it's an identity shift whilst you're dieting rather than I am just dieting for a period of time until it ends. If you've put like an eight-week cap on it and you're like, okay, I'm gonna lose the weight, and then by the end of the eight weeks I'm done, that doesn't give you the space to change identity. You need to become someone that goes to the gym, you need to become someone that um whose steps are increased. It's not just like for a period of time, and that's not me saying you need to be on your lowest calories forever, but it certainly might look like, okay, my habits around food change. So instead of reaching for highly palatable foods in the afternoon as my snack, maybe I now I'm somebody that eats fruit in the afternoons. So it's about taking the learnings from the diet and applying it to your the rest of your life in order that you can maintain that physique, that new physique. So again, it sounds subtle, but it changes behavior massively. And it's the people that change their identity that keep their results long term. Because now that you've finished the diet, you're no longer just temporarily restricting yourself. You're literally practicing how you live. You in fact, during the diet, you're practicing a new way of life. So, maintenance then, when we finish the diet, becomes a lot easier because you realize it's not just, oh, going backwards and going back to how I used to be, it's a transition into a potentially your calories might bump up a little bit, but you've still adopted all of those habits and learned all of those habits to take into your whole life. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depends how you look at this, you need those habit changes to become part of your identity, not just for a small period of time if you are if you are you know committed to keeping your physique for the long run. And it, you know, maintenance is it simply is basically a higher calorie version of the system that you went through for the fat loss. So it might look something like your protein stays consistent and you keep that habit long term. Resistance training stays consistent, um, so that you're, you know, you've got more metabolically active tissue in your body. You know, building muscle long term is good for so many things. We won't get into that today, but your daily movement stays consistent. So your calories might come up, but all of the rest of these habits remain. And what increases off the back of that is flexibility, if we allow it, because we've changed identity. We've not just done one thing for eight weeks and then, you know, stopped. It's about remaining flexible and being like, okay, this is who I am now. And that I think is where most people go wrong. They try to move from structure to complete and total freedom. And that's not me saying you can't live a free life with maintenance, but we need to, if we do want to keep the results long term, we need to adopt new habits. So, yes, you can still have freedom, but if you're going from complete structure, like all or nothing, to complete freedom, you you can sort of go off the rails and you're you're you won't maintain your fat loss result. What we actually want is a bit of both. We want a bit of structured freedom. That I think is like the gray area, and that is a good baseline for us to live by. We need to create, um, you know, as I said, like a baseline of habits that remain stable with a little bit of flexibility layered on top because we need to live our life as well, right? So it's about taking the learnings from your fat loss and applying that long term. And I think this is where coaching, one-to-one coaching plays such a massive role because that transition is very rarely done by accident. It isn't it. I don't think I've ever known someone to keep the results long term without actively working on that period from moving from a diet into maintenance. It requires, you know, recalibrating your calories for one, but also rebuilding and, you know, continuing that routine and learning how to live in maintenance without slipping back into old patterns. So it's not about, you know, when you've reached this point, it's not about losing fat anymore, but it's also not about needing to restart every few months. So if you want help with this, if you want help with your fat loss phase or moving from fat loss to maintenance or both, this is what I do with my clients on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis. And this is what my successful clients are doing. So if you want details about coaching, I will pop some details in the show notes. You can also reach me on Instagram at Coach Abbey Thomas, and I am happy to answer any questions you've got. So, yeah, I'll speak to you soon. Next week's EP will be coming to you on Tuesday, and I look forward to that.