Maintaining your weight after a laser lipolysis procedure is the goal of just about everyone that has the procedure. However, many struggle with this goal, and many fail to achieve it. Here we will go over what is necessary to maintain your weight loss after laser lipolysis, how you can reach it, and how to make sure your weight loss is sustainable. We will include several tips on how to maintain your weight as well as what to avoid in order to make your changes everlasting.
What is Necessary to Maintain Weight Loss?
To put it simply, permanent behavioral change is necessary to maintain the weight loss from laser lipolysis. This is because your body gained the body fat that you lost through laser lipolysis for a reason, and if you keep living as you were living when you gained the body fat, you will inevitably gain it back again after the procedure.
It is necessary to change what made you gain the body fat in the first place in order to keep it off. Now, this is easier said than done, and many individuals struggle with making an enduring lifestyle change, which is why they tend to gain back the body fat that they lost.
However, there are certain strategies you can take to try to ensure that your behavioral changes, and therefore your weight loss, is perpetual. We will go over several factors that are necessary to maintain your newfound body after laser lipolysis, and we have condensed these factors into three basic tips we will go into below.
How Do I Maintain My New Weight?
As we said above, permanent behavioral change is required to make your weight loss long-lasting. However, you may be wondering what sort of long-lasting behavioral changes are required to do so. We will go over three main routes you can take to ensure that you maintain the fat loss achieved by your laser lipolysis procedure. With these tools in hand, it should be much easier for you to maintain your laser lipolysis fat loss.
Diet & Exercise
This is the absolute key to maintaining your new weight. Without solid dietary and exercise habits, your laser lipolysis will be a temporary fix. It is necessary to eat in line with your new weight and body fat level in order to maintain your weight, and exercise can assist in the energy balance that is required to do this. Your bodily energy balance is just how much energy, in calories (a calorie is a unit of energy), your body expends per day versus how much it takes in through food each day. If you have an even energy balance, meaning that you consume exactly as many calories as you expend, you will maintain your weight. This is the key to maintaining fat loss following laser lipolysis.
There are numerous free online calculators that will compute your daily maintenance calories for you using your height, weight, and activity level. Once you have this number, you simply have to conform your eating to that figure, and you will mostly effortlessly maintain your weight. Exercise can help with this by increasing the number of calories you expend, allowing you to eat more food. This is particularly useful if you struggle to conform to the calorie count level set for you, not to mention the numerous health benefits of exercise on the body. The American Heart Association recommends 150 minutes of moderate-intensity cardiovascular exercise a week or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity cardiovascular exercise for adults. This should confer notable benefits such as strengthening your heart, improving your mood, and warding off viral infection.
A combination of a prudent diet and exercise should make it a relatively simple matter to remain in a neutral energy balance and thereby maintain the weight loss afforded by your laser lipolysis procedure. You can estimate your daily calorie intake by researching the caloric content of the foods and quantities therein that you typically eat, although this can be difficult for most. The easiest way to make sure that you are eating at a neutral energy balance is to track your daily food intake.
Therapy
The reason many people gain weight in the first place is often psychological. This might be due to formal mental illnesses, such as binge eating disorder, or due to less severe mental factors. For example, many people have the unhealthy habit of rewarding themselves with food or alternatively eating to mitigate negative emotions such as sadness and boredom.
For these reasons, therapy can be of major benefit to those seeking to make their fat loss following laser lipolysis permanent. A trained therapist will help you identify the roots of your disordered or unhealthy eating and address them effectively. The reasons behind weight gain are oftentimes psychological, and consequently, psychological treatment is a natural way to address it.
Do not be dissuaded by the stigma against therapy, as therapy is not “just for crazy people.” It is an invaluable tool in your arsenal for the enduring behavioral change that is necessary to maintain any type of weight loss over a significant period of time. Consider whether seeing a therapist is right for you to help address your eating habits and how to improve them.
Even if you do not have particularly negative eating habits, therapy is a powerful tool for behavioral change, and you can use it to your advantage to make any sort of behavioral changes you want. Say you want to exercise more and make it a permanent habit to help you maintain your weight loss. A therapist can help you make this an unchanging behavioral adaptation.
GLP-1 Agonists
These are a type of medication that can cause increased satiety and fullness when eating. GLP-1 agonist medications imitate a hormone called incretin, which is responsible for the feeling of satiety, thereby increasing fullness and decreasing hunger. This can help you maintain your weight loss from laser lipolysis by indirectly helping you to maintain a neutral energy balance. GLP-1 agonists will help reduce the feelings of hunger and increase your feeling of satiety from a given amount of food, thereby making it easier to eat fewer calories. Individuals will be less hungry and remain full for longer while on this medication, though you will still have to adjust your eating habits in order to maintain your level of body fat.
Making an adjustment to your eating habits will be far easier on this type of medication, as your hunger level will be significantly decreased. You will be able to make changes to your dietary habits far easier with this medication. Unless you have an eating issue that is purely psychological, making dietary and behavioral changes will be far easier to do, as the cravings for food and general hunger will be significantly diminished.
Frequently Asked Questions About Laer Lipolysis and Maintaining its Results
Here, we will go over some of the questions you may have about maintaining your weight after laser lipolysis, as well as any questions you may have about our suggestions as to how you can maintain that weight.
I Don’t Want to Count Calories for the Rest of My Life. What Should I Do?
It is not necessary to count calories your entire life to maintain your weight loss. It is just necessary to make a perpetual behavioral change from the way you were eating and exercising when you weighed more before the laser lipolysis procedure. Counting calories is simply a straightforward way to do this. You can use any sort of diet or dietary protocol to maintain your weight as long as you are maintaining a neutral energy balance. This can mean counting calories, or it can mean eating the same as before but just exercising more. It can also mean conforming to a dietary strategy that incidentally results in your eating in a neutral energy balance.
What Are the Side Effects of GLP-1 Agonists?
Common side effects of GLP-1 agonists include nausea and other gastrointestinal symptoms. Sometimes headaches result, and in very rare cases, pancreatitis can result from the use of these medications. Having said that, these medications are generally very safe, and numerous GLP-1 agonists have FDA approval for use in weight control.
Can Therapy Really Help Me Maintain My Weight?
Yes, it absolutely can. Therapy is a potent way to change behavioral habits, and thereby through therapy, it is very possible to change your eating habits. This is particularly true if your body fat gain was the result of psychological distress, disordered eating, or mentally unhealthy eating habits. Your therapist will help you address the root cause of why you eat when sad or bored, as well as why you use food as a reward. They will also help you take concrete steps to change this behavior and emerge with the permanent behavioral changes necessary to maintain to weight loss that results from laser lipolysis treatment.
