Shed a few pounds recently? Congrats. But don't celebrate just yet. Keeping yourself at a healthy weight is more of a marathon effort than a sprint, and many people drop out of the race early.

That's why Rena Wing, professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown Medical School in Providence, R.I., led a study to see if people who weighed themselves daily and acted quickly to ward off more weight gain were better at staying lean.

Turns out they were. In the study, published in October in the New England Journal of Medicine, people who weighed themselves did not regain as much weight during the 18-monthlong program than those who didn't step on the scale.

Say you're trying to maintain at 150, and you weigh in within 2 pounds. That's normal fluctuation, so consider yourself doing great. If it's up 3 or 4 pounds, that's beyond the normal daily fluctuation. Use a traffic-light approach: 2 pounds is the green zone, and 3 to 4 is the yellow zone, which means be cautious and think about what's going on. If you have gained 5 pounds, that's the red light. Time to take action and get your weight back down.

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