Medically reviewed by
Bronte Vallance, BNutrSc
Written by
HealthMatch staff
What is weight management?
Keeping a healthy weight can be a struggle at the best of times, with confusing diet advice and intimidating exercise fads only adding to the struggle.
However, reaching a healthy weight can be extremely beneficial to both your mental and physical health.
Weight management is all about either losing or gaining weight to reach a healthy goal weight, or to maintain a healthy weight. Most of us want to lose a couple of pounds here or there and weight management is the process of getting rid of those extra pounds.
Having a healthy approach to weight management often includes overall lifestyle changes. When we lose weight we often want it to be gone quickly, but this typically isn’t a healthy or achievable approach.
Weight management is about more than just weight loss
While losing weight is an important first step in weight management, it isn’t the only step. Proper and healthy weight management involves keeping weight off long term and maintaining a healthy weight. Losing weight can be a battle, but keeping the weight off can often be just as hard.
Crash diets and exercise fads can help you to lose weight in the short term, but they’re often not sustainable. When they inevitably become too hard to maintain, we tend to go back to our previous lifestyle habits – the very ones that played a part in weight gain.
Healthy weight management is about implementing lifestyle changes that you can maintain on a long-term basis so that you can lose weight, but also keep it off. Reasonable diet changes and a maintainable exercise regime will leave you reaping the health benefits of weight loss.
Losing weight is only half the challenge – you also want to be able to keep it off in the long term. Through changes to exercise and eating habits, you can safely and effectively achieve steady long-term weight loss.
Read on . . .