When and how quickly do you gain weight again after a diet?

Following a diet is indeed important for people who want to have a healthy life with an ideal body weight. However, you can not live this diet in half. Once you get the weight you want, it is important to keep that weight in order. If you let your guard down and come back with a bad diet, it's no wonder that you gain weight again, even more so than before starting the diet.

How fast will you gain weight again after a successful diet?

Losing weight is difficult, but it is even harder to maintain an ideal body weight. At first, your intention and enthusiasm to go on a diet is quite high. However, many let their guard down when they reached their target body weight.

You may find that your stomach becomes more deflated, your body is fresher, and of course your scale numbers will be more ideal. Not only you, but also the people around you are aware of the changes in your body during your diet and begin to praise you.

However, Kathryn Ross, a public health expert from the University of Florida, explains to WebMD that weight lost during a diet can come back very quickly due to a variety of factors. That is why dieting is not just about learning to lose weight, but also to maintain weight. People who have been successful diets must change their focus from how to lose weight to how to maintain an ideal body weight.

A study of 70 obese adults completed a 12-week diet program. The participants, on average, lost about 0.5 kg a week. However, after the diet period ended, they gained back about 0.06 kg per week in the first 11 weeks. About 32 weeks from the start of the study, weight gained again, although not as fast as the initial weeks.

How quickly you gain weight after a diet depends on changes to your diet and your own habits. Metabolic processes in the body also affect weight gain after a diet. When you go on a diet by reducing food portions, your body will actually encourage you to eat more later. Therefore, Samantha Heller, a nutritionist from NYU Langone Health in New York argues that taking a diet is better slowly. This helps adjust the metabolism in the body to the needs of the calories consumed.

Why do you gain weight again even though you are on a diet?

Hearing compliments from people around you about the success of the diet you get might make you careless about your diet. The pattern of life during the diet began to be abandoned and old unhealthy habits were reintroduced. Yes, these mistakes will make you gain weight again even though you have been successful on a diet before. Exactly what mistakes should you avoid? Check it out below.

1. Not actively moving

Having an ideal body weight does not mean you no longer need to do physical activity. You may slowly reduce the intensity or time of exercise that you usually do.

If you continue, your laziness to exercise will be even greater.

2. No breakfast

After waking up, the body needs water and food to normalize metabolism and maintain blood sugar balance.

If you skip breakfast, it can double your hunger and eventually cause you to eat more than you should. If you do this every day, of course your diet will become messy again so that you gain weight.

3. Not monitoring diet-destroying habits

Not focusing when eating makes your portions out of control. Eating while watching television or playing cellphones, for example, can make you ignore the satiety signal provided by the stomach so that you continue to eat even though your body has received sufficient nutrition and calories.

4. Diet mess again

Dieting can indeed make you avoid some unhealthy foods. However, once you get the weight you want, you may return to your old diet. For example, eating irregularly, consuming too many calories, not being observant when choosing nutritional intake, and so on. So don't be surprised if you finally gain weight again.