60 Minutes a DAY!

A few months ago, I was awake in the middle of the night. I was either taking care of my new baby or just awake because for some reason my brain likes to wake me up in the 'wee small hours of the morning'. When I'm awake in the middle of the night I will sometimes try to find something interesting on TV and on this night I found a an interesting recording of a BYU Education Week session about weight loss and maintenance. I think the person who was speaking was a nutritionist and she spoke about several different studies but what stuck out to me then, and what I still remember was  specifically about people who are successful at maintaining their weight loss. She explained that while the majority of people do cut calories in order to lose weight, not everyone maintains a low calorie diet after they've lost weight BUT that something like 90% of people who successfully maintain their weight exercise for 60 minutes per day at least 5 days per week. I found that to be really interesting and I felt kind of grateful to have heard it because it gave me an idea of what I would need to do to maintain my weight once I reached my goal weight.

I decided to see if I could find more information about the studies that speaker had spoken about and so today I did an Internet search  for "Study about maintaining weight loss" and the first result was for the National Weight Control Registry. I was pretty sure this was one of the groups/studies that she had sited and the section titled National Weight Control Registry findings pretty much confirmed that for me.

I wanted to share this because it gave me hope. I hear a lot, from lots of different sources, that it's really hard to maintain weight loss, but the people who are part of this registry have done it! And if they can do it, so can I, I just have to do what they've done. I'm currently working out 5-6 days per week and 5 of those days easily hit 50-60 minutes each. I really enjoy it and I'm figuring if I can just continue to do some form of exercise that I enjoy then I can totally keep the 60 minutes per day, 5-6 days a week, for the rest of my life. I can do this! And so can you.