When Weight Sneaks Up On You

You may know that exercise and diet are important when you want to lose weight and maintain it; you may even eat the right foods in the right amounts and at the right times and work out regularly; but there are times in your life when you’re more susceptible to putting on weight and those excess pounds sneak up on you. Before you know it, your clothes are tighter than before and a rounder person is staring back at you from the mirror. However, if you’re aware of these times, it’s easier to exercise control and prevent your weight from ballooning upwards. In general, weight tends to sneak up on you when:

• You get married: It may not pertain to everyone, but most people find that they’ve gained more than a few pounds a few months into their marriage. There’s no real scientific explanation for this, just the fact that you tend to stop your regular exercise program and forget your diet on your honeymoon and for a few days or weeks after is enough to make your weight shoot up. Also, your newfound state of happiness creates a sense of lethargy and wellbeing and you don’t get back to your workout as soon as you should. All this adds up to the fact that you gain weight when you get married.

• You stop playing a sport: When you regularly play a sport, be it for entertainment or professional reasons, you focus on remaining fit and keeping your stamina up. So you follow a regular exercise schedule and watch what you eat. Once you stop playing for any reason – you may be injured or you may be looking to retire and ease off playing with the same amount of intensity as you used to – you tend to stop exercising and following a rigid diet too. Your metabolism undergoes a change and you find that you slowly start adding on the pounds.

• You become older: The problem with growing older is that your body does not obey you anymore – you want to lose weight, but you find it harder to do so because your metabolism slows down and you find that it’s not easy to stop those fatty deposits from clinging on to you. And because fat takes up more space than muscles pound for pound, you start to sag in places you don’t want to. And because you don’t realize that with the passing of years you tend to put on weight, you eat the same amount as before even as you decrease the intensity of exercise because your body is not what it used to be. This adds up to more calories and you become rounder and heavier.

To prevent weight from sneaking up on you, continue to exercise and diet no matter what because they must form a natural part of your life if you are to maintain your weight.

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This guest post is contributed by Paul Hench, he writes on the topic of master in public health programs. He welcomes your comments at his email: paul.23hench@gmail.com