What to Do When You are Gaining Weight Back? 

First of all don’t panic when you are gaining weight back. It happens to every woman at some time and this can be very frustrating for you.

But I am here to help you sort this out, find out if you can lose weight, and when to seek more help.

Sometimes weight gain is just your body providing some feedback about how you have been eating. Other times it is a sign that something is wrong physically.

The following ideas can help you know you are doing the best you can. If nothing gets the weight to budge, you might want to check with your doctor about underlying physical issues.

I recommend you journal everything you are eating. This helps you see what you are eating and also will provide a record of what you have tried.

The first thing you want to focus on is stabilizing your weight. Instead of gaining, you want your weight to stay stable.

If you can do this, you will prevent yourself from gaining even more weight going forward and it is good practice for when you are at a comfortable weight.

Why Women Gain Their Weight Back

Before I go to deep into this post, many women over age 50 are now dealing with hormonal changes, health issues, and autoimmune diseases.  These can affect your efforts to lose weight.

Many times it isn’t your current eating that is the problem. However, improving your eating is always good for you whether you lose weight or not. No matter what is going on, good nutrition and eating habits are helpful.

The way you eat isn’t just about losing weight. Sometimes dieting itself causes the body stress. So, while I am in favor of modifying our diets to be more nutritional and better timed, I don’t advocate restrictive diets.

In a nutshell, we regain weight because of what we eat or how much we eat. I’m not an overeater so when I gain weight it’s always because of WHAT I am eating. 

That means in my case, I eat too many processed carbohydrates such as bread, pasta, chips, tortillas, and chocolate. None of those are usually a problem for me, but when I begin eating them daily then my weight begins to creep up.

The. other thing that can happen is eating too much. I’ve found for myself, that I can’t eat as much as I did when I was younger. When I go out to eat with my grown children, I am amazed at how much they can eat.

However, my brain still wants big portions even though a large portion will leave me overly full. As you’ll read in a bit, eating until you are overly full, will also lead to weight gain.

Why Did You Regain Your Weight?

Before you make any changes, it’s important to figure out what is going on with your own body. 

All my clients track what they eat. Our food intake on paper may look different than what we remember, if we even remember. 

Every day, jot down exactly what you ate or drank for a couple of weeks and when you ate it, so you can see your own patterns. 

Things that can contribute to weight gain are the following:

• Too many processed carbohydrates
• Eating too little at meals and snacking too much
• Eating good meals and snacking
• Skipping meals and using snacks or processed food to fill in the gap
• Eating at night or other times when you aren’t hungry
• Not eating enough vegetables, protein, or fats at meals
• Not eating enough fiber-rich foods
• Not drinking enough water

Before You Start

Weigh yourself

Before you get started, weigh yourself. When I am gaining weight, I hate getting on the scale. But the scale is just data and it gives you a starting place.

Then decide how often you are going to weigh yourself. I recommend once a week, same day and time.

Write it down. I have a calendar where I write down my exercise, walks, and workouts, and I just put my weight in once a week or so.

Adjust your mindset

Here are some mindset shifts that can help you stick to this. It’s normal to feel resentful or frustrated that you have to deal with this. I know! My clients feel this and at times I do too.

I know, in a perfect world, you could eat whatever you want, whenever you want. I can’t eat wheat. Most of the time I am okay with that. But other days, I resent that I can’t just enjoy bread like I used to.

It’s really difficult to stick to something good for you when you feel angry, frustrated, resentful, or sad about what you can or can’t eat.

Feel all that and also tell yourself that it’s going to be okay. It’s okay to grieve for what you give up. But you are going to also get so much more!

So, it’s normal to feel what you feel. However, how you think can make all the difference to your success.

• Losing weight is possible but it may require more intention than you really want to put into it.
• This isn’t a diet; this is figuring out how to eat for life.
• No foods are off-limits but some will cause you to gain weight more easily than others. 

First Step: Stop the Weight Regain

Okay, what gets most of you into this pickle is that you didn’t learn to maintain your weight loss in the first place.

It’s a high when we’re losing weight and staying a stable weight is kind of boring. You still have to eat like you did to get to this weight but you don’t have the pleasure hit of seeing a lower number on the scale.

So, the first thing to do is STOP gaining weight back! 

The lifestyle changes required to maintain your weight are fairly easy and will provide some emotional relief. It’s kind of scary to be gaining and not know why.

I’ve written an extensive post on how to maintain your weight here. The short version is to do the following three things.

• Eat all your food at two or three meals
• No eating at night or between meals
• Pay attention to your hunger and feeling full. Eat when hungry, stop when full.

This is actually the foundation to losing weight too and will help you improve your metabolism and settle your weight fluctuation down. 

However, you don’t have to be super strict at this point. I love teaching clients to maintain their weight.

It’s super helpful for times such as vacations and holidays where you want to eat a little freer but not gain weight.

Most women dread the part of vacations or holidays where they feel like they are going to over eat and gain weight.

With the tools you learn maintaining, you can easily enjoy holidays and vacations and not regain weight, while not feeling deprived.

Do You Need to Count Calories?

I don’t and I don’t have my clients count calories. Calorie restricted diets alone do not have long-term success in most cases and can cause problems with your metabolism.

Instead we pay attention to hormones such as insulin, leptin and ghrelin. I didn’t know what these were 10 years ago but they are key to managing your weight.

Instead of thinking low-calorie, I want you to focus more on nutrients and whole foods and the timing of when you eat.

And the third important thing to do is pay attention to your hunger, appetite, and feeling full. 

You’ll probably end up eating fewer calories, but you won’t be deprived or overly hungry. Understanding the role of hunger is going to be really important. 

So you may end up eating fewer calories but it will not be an arbitrary number, it will be based on your body’s unique needs.

How to Lose the Weight You Regained

Okay, if you’ve been tracking your food intake, you probably have a good idea why you regained your weight back. 

I’m going to focus on

• Meals
• No snacking
• Pay attention to your appetite
• What to eat and what to limit

Meals

The thing that has surprised me the most over the years is how little women eat at meals. More times than not, I see that the women I work with need to eat MORE at their meals.

In addition to eating more, they often need more whole food, less processed food, more fats, more protein, and more vegetables.

I’m not kidding, most of you are getting so few vegetables, healthy fats, or enough protein. Your protein bars don’t count! Those are just for emergencies. 

Most of you are used to thinking like dieters and skimping on your meals. No, my friend, you need to eat an actual meal that tastes good and makes you feel good. 

This will mean adding meal planning, meal preparation, and actually sitting down to eat to your day. If you don’t have time to do this–that is its own issue. In my opinion, nourishing yourself should be a priority, not an afterthought. 

This one change is the one that most of my clients call a “game changer.” All other food changes are so much easier when you are eating actual meals. 

No Snacking

No snacking goes from impossible to easily doable once you are eating good meals. According to the National Institute of Health snacking increases the overall amount of calories you eat in a day.

“In today’s society, snacking contributes close to one-third of daily energy intake, with many snacks consisting of energy-dense and nutrient-poor foods.”

I’ve even seen it estimated to increase our daily calorie intake by double!

Snacking occurs for more reasons than being hungry. But hunger could be one reason, so eat enough at your meals so hunger isn’t why you eat snacks.

We also snack because of stress, boredom, or even not thinking about it such as when we watch TV. 

But snacking adds up!

Also, when you snack a lot, you can’t really tell when you are hungry or not. And as you’ll read next, working with your appetite is key to managing your weight.

The primary reason to not snack is to give your body a chance to use up the energy from the food you eat and then draw on fat stores. If we eat around the clock, our body never has a chance to do that.

Your Appetite

Your body has an amazing mechanism to tell you when to eat, not eat, and when to stop eating. It’s your appetite or hunger.

We’ve been taught to literally fear our appetites and most women by midlife, do not have a good relationship with their hunger. They fear it. 

Yet, your hunger is your best friend in meeting your weight-loss goals. Here’s why.

When you eat enough at a meal, you will feel satisfied at the end. You’ll feel the sensation of being full. Then you go about your day. Later in the day, you will start to feel a little hunger and it will be hours later. That’s your signal  that it is getting close to time to eat. 

Your hunger will come on gradually, slowly building up. That’s your signal, it is time to prepare your meal and eat. 

Hormones are important!

This kind of hunger feels good. It’s how your body is supposed to work. Ghrelin is the hormone that lets you know your stomach is empty and it’s time to eat.

Leptin is the hormone that lets you know when you are full and have had enough to eat.

For many women, we have lost touch with our bodies and our body’s natural signals. Eating around the clock makes it impossible for your body to send the right signals since you are always a little full and a little hungry.

When you are used to eating all the time, you don’t have access to your most important tool for managing your weight.

It may take a little time to regulate your hormones so that you begin feeling hungry and full again. Once that happens, you’ll begin to get excited and welcome your hunger instead of fearing it.

What to Eat and What to limit

When it comes to weight loss, the biggest problem I see is too many overall carbohydrates. 

To be clear, carbohydrates are a macro nutrient and we need them and they help us feel better. 

However, for most of us, after years of overeating breads, sweets, pastas, and junk food, our bodies can no longer successfully process that much energy. 

Insulin is the master hormone that regulates that and many of us have some degree of insulin resistance. Our bodies store more fat than we use for energy.

The only way to correct and reverse that without medication is to eat fewer carbs. 

My body is so sensitive to bread and pasta that I can only eat a little bit of that kind of stuff each week.

However, I do like to eat potatoes, carrots, beets, winter squash, and fruit to get carbohydrates along with their nutrition and fiber.

Some people tolerate whole grains such as rice, oats, or corn fairly well. 

Track your food and you’ll figure out what carbohydrates work best for you. But in general, try to get most of them from a variety of vegetables and fruits and some of them from grain-based food. 

My last tip about what to eat is about having treats. If you enjoy sweet treats, my advice is to only eat them at the end of a meal. Save a little room. Have your treat.

This way, you will be less likely to overeat sweet treats. You’ll feel more in control knowing that you can have a treat but you won’t be so hungry that you overdo. 

How to Begin Losing Weight After You’ve Regained it Back

Now that you’ve built your foundation by tracking what you eat, eating only at meals, and no snacking, you may already be losing weight.

This is often enough not just to maintain your weight but can also start the weight loss process. 

Now you can clean up your meals so they are nutritious and fuel your body. You’ll begin to notice which foods make you feel good and which ones make you feel bad.

Old favorites may not even taste as good. After a few weeks of intentional eating, you may decide to have your favorite treat. You may be surprised that it doesn’t taste as good and you don’t like how it feels in your body.

That’s good news!

Once you can actually feel how food affects you, you lose the desire to eat too much of that kind of food naturally. 

An example would be where it used to take half a pizza to satisfy you, now it will just take a couple of pieces.

Because your body gets regular and filling meals, your cravings go down because you know that you can eat whatever you really want.

Keep in mind that diet beliefs and diet actions usually lead to gaining weight eventually. This is how you can train your brain and body to eat for the rest of your life.

You won’t be eating to follow an arbitrary plan–you’re learning to eat in partnership with your body, mind, and spirit.

Small fluctuations are normal and are no reason to panic. You’ll be less reactive to emotional eating. Food will be a normal and happy part of your life if you’re willing to be brave enough to trust your body.

If you can’t stop gaining, even with these tips, then check with your doctor and see if there are underlying issues such as your thyroid, autoimmune, or insulin resistance.