We asked a professional fitness coach in Dubai for their advice and tips on maintaining a healthy weight with different types of exercise and diet.

Q: At some point in their lives many men and women in Dubai will have tried dieting as a way to lose weight. For those that have succeeded with a combination of diet and exercise the next step is to ‘maintain’ a healthy weight. This can often be achieved with lifestyle changes to their diet and of course regular exercise.

As a professional PT in Dubai what are your top 10 tips for clients who have reach their weight loss goals but want to maintain their healthier weight?

Get your mindset right.

Maintenance is not as strict as weight loss, but healthy food and exercise should remain a part of your lifestyle always. It’s tough to know that you will never be able to return to your old lifestyle if you want to maintain your new physique, but you’re tougher! And noting tastes as good as healthy feels, right? 😉

Stick with your new eating patterns

When you’re maintaining your healthy weight you can have a bit more freedom and variation in your diet, but the basics of your eating habits, meal frequency and meal timings, should probably remain the same as during weight loss in Dubai.

If you’ve found that it works great for you to have certain eating habits ie. intermittent fasting, always eat breakfast, not snack between meals, have 6 meals per day or whatever works for you – stick with it!

Stick with your exercise routine!

“Fitness is not bought, it’s rented. And rent is due every day!” Training for 3 months and getting in great shape is amazing, but if you go from 3 x week to zero after reaching your weight loss goal, you’ll find yourself back where you started sooner than you think!

You can cut it down to twice per week or you can decrease the amount of cardio you do, but you should still keep working on your fitness. Ideally, use a personal trainer in Dubai to help you create a ‘long term’ weight management plan.

Pay attention to hidden calories in “healthy foods”

When maintaining you don’t have to completely avoid calorie-dense “healthy foods” such as nuts, dried fruits, avocados, protein bars, juices and smoothie. But, pay attention to the calories they contain and be mindful of your portion sizes.

Eat lots of protein

You’ve heard this during your weight loss training in Dubai and it’s still beneficial when you’re trying to maintain!

A high protein diet makes your body a calorie burning furnace and increases satiety.

Set new training and exercise goals!

Goals motivate us to keep up with our healthy diet and exercise habits.

If you’ve reached your weight loss goal, it can be very demotivating not to have a reason to eat healthy or go to the gym anymore.

So set new ones! Do you want to get stronger in your squats? Run a 5K? Work on your flexibility? There’s always new things to focus on!

Try a new training form!

You’ve become fit, you’ve become confident and you’ve mastered something that so many struggle and fail with!

You’ve achieved your weight loss goal! Mashallah!

Not it’s time to challenge yourself with trying something new. How about trying to learn the basics of boxing, paddle boarding, Olympic weightlifting, yoga, pilates, horse riding, belly dancing or fencing…

Just pick something you’ve always wanted to try and give it a go! It’ll keep you active and improve your fitness even more!

If you feel like you’re going too far off track, pull yourself right back!

If you see the pounds creeping back on your body, quickly jump back to your old diet and exercise routine as stay there for a week or 2, until your weight is back to normal.

As a fitness trainer in Dubai, I usually recommended to my client that staying within 2 kg. +/- of your ideal weight and jumping back to a weight loss phase for 1-2 weeks (or until your back to your maintenance weight) if you exceed this. (unless you’re trying to build a lot of learn muscle, temporary weight gain due to period related water fluctuations etc.)

Weight yourself only once every 2-4 weeks

In maintenance we don’t want to be stressing, so stick to weighing yourself only once in a while, just to keep track.

Or skip the scale altogether at do progress pictures or measurements instead! 🙂

Be prepared for set backs

It happens. Maintenance is for THE REST OF YOUR LIFE and life happens and sometimes we need to focus on other things. It’s not the end of the world, just get back on track as soon as you can.

When you’re ready to tackle the setback, refer to points 1-9 of this list and use it as a checklist for where you might be going wrong, and try to adjust!