It certainly won’t come as a big shock to find that people who lose weight, even successfully will struggle to keep it off in the long term. This is caused in part by our own body’s and their ability to fight back whenever we lose weight, trying to regain the level of fat reserves we had originally. Another factor that seriously impacts progress is our body’s own resistance to weight loss, given that fat cells send out hormonal signals indicating hunger whenever they begin to shrink. These two things can be a nightmare for people that try to lose weight and keep it off permanently. While it’s true that eventually our bodies to back to a more normal hunger level, research has shown this can take years to occur.

A recent study examined just this problem, finding that individuals who continue to engage in modified diet and exercise programs are more successful long term.  As a result, most physicians and clinicians have advised people to maintain a “new lifestyle” rather than just a temporary fix down the road.  If a person thinks about a change as something that will remain with them for “life” they are far less likely to fall into these patterns that typically lead to failure or going from “crash diet” to crash diet.

Yet, there was a lot of recent research seeing if this worked and how it worked. Though the original findings that this sort of behavior does lead to better outcomes. Though there’s tremendous emphasis on behavioral approaches to obesity control, motivational forces were found in studies to offer equally profound results.  Among dieters, though that also worked on motivational aspects of their weight loss lost considerably more than their counterparts.  A novel maintenance program for weight loss focuses on motivational factors that influence behavior.

How our Thoughts and Motivations Impact our Success

It probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to those of us familiar with career goals, educational goals or even personal goals that our motivation and our attitude has a huge impact on whether or not we’re successful. In a recent trial, it was tested whether a motivation-focused protocol could actually succeed. The desire to achieve positive future goals as well as the motivated desire to avoid the bad aspects of weight gain were tested in this study. It was fund out that, among those who have cyclically had issues maintaining weight loss after losing weight, they were able to achieve some excellent outcomes.

The results of this study were indeed quite promising.  Among participants, it was found that those with a motivational focus had just as good of long term results as those that were on a “skill-based” maintenance.  How is this possible? Well the researchers linked it to a positive reinforcement and continual self-awareness of a person’s situation. By considering the consequences as well as the benefits for a behavior, motivational factors impacted weight loss the same as those concentrating on maintaining a diet or new lifestyle.  This offers a tremendously useful outcome, particularly on patients who are resistive to this more common treatment of skill-based changes.

The goals of weight loss hinge upon a variety of factors, including motivational factors and also our ability to adapt to new routines or changes to diet/exercise. Yet this new strategy offers clinicians an alternative method, as not all patients are able to follow a more skill based approach. The fact that outcomes are similar offer a lot for people who struggle to lose weight and continually battle the ups and downs of weight loss year after year.