How To Stick To A Weight Loss Diet – Special Report
Most people can stick to a weight loss diet for a week, even two weeks, but after that it gets difficult. The pain we have to go through to stick to the diet is a lot more immediate, and in our minds, then the benefits we will eventually gain by losing the weight.
Everyone who goes on a diet knows all about the benefits, better health, lower risk of loads of diseases, and simply looking better! But that’s all in the future, sometimes it seems years away. However the pain is now. Constantly turning down nice things to eat, like cakes and biscuits. Having to eat things we really don’t want to, like salads and breakfast cereal that tastes like cardboard.
There are a lot of things that make weight-loss diets difficult to stick to, and make the results a lot less than permanent.
- Diets are hard, you have to use willpower every day.
- Day to day life, and things like entertaining or going out to dinner are real challenges.
- Diets often make you feel hungry, and deprive you of foods you want to eat.
- A small slip on a diet can make you feel like a complete failure and cause you to take the abandon it.
- Most diet plans don’t address the emotional aspects of why we over eat, or eat things that we know are bad for us.
- Diet is often seen as a temporary changing eating, rather than a long-term change in habits.
- For real long-term weight loss we usually need to change things that don’t seem related to just food, such as the amount of times we eat out or have take-away’s.
So now we’ve had a look at all the things that can go wrong, let’s have a look at what you can do to make it all go right!
Contents
- Don’t – Change Everything At Once
- Do – Set Goals and Make A Plan to Achieve Them
- Do – Exercise Properly
- Don’t – Focus on What You are Taking Out, Rather Than What You are Putting In
- Do – Find a Support Team
- Do – Keep a Weight Loss Journal or Diary
- Resources
- Closing Comments
Don’t – Change Everything At Once
A common process for people seeking to lose weight and begin a healthy lifestyle is to change everything at once. Please try to resist!
The typical person will make their mind up that their new healthy lifestyles starts on Monday. On Monday they will give up smoking, join a gym and work out five days a week, eat healthy food, and lose loads of weight. By Friday, they are back on the cigarettes, eating chocolate cream cakes, and after one visit to the gym and they’ve given up.
Don’t let this typical person you. Do things gradually. Concentrate on one major area at a time. If you are currently a smoker give that up first. Then worry about your weight on your fitness. Choose whether to begin a diet or start an exercise programme. And do it gradually. As an example, if you don’t really exercise at the moment than a good place to start is with a simple 10 minute walk in the morning, next week extend that to a 15 minute walk. When you’ve built up your exercises, so that you have some basic fitness, and the time, then join a gym.
Trying to do too much at once needs too much willpower. It is too much of a shock to your system, and usually totally fails to fit in with your lifestyle. This radical approach usually results in something failing very quickly, which leads to you abandoning the whole system.
So look at your lifestyle, and what you want to change, and remember that you didn’t put on the weight, or get unfit overnight. So losing weight and getting fit also won’t happen overnight. So look at habits you’ve made that need changing, or new habits you need to develop.
When applied to weight loss, each week start doing something new here are a few suggestions to get you going:
- Drink 2 L of water each day
- Eat fruit for your desert
- Have a salad as a starter for your main meal
- Replace your midmorning sugary snack with a healthy snack
- Replace the juices and sodas you drink with water
There are also a range of other habits that you will want to look at that will help you with your weight loss goals, especially things like getting takeouts and eating in restaurants rather than preparing and eating your own food.
I’m sure if you think about it then when you examine your diet you’ll be able to find plenty of things you can change. Just don’t do it all at once.
Then when you have a basically healthy diet, you can look into a specific diet programme to help get rid of that fat without it being such a shock to the system.
When you are ready to start a diet program I recomend Strip The Fat
Do – Set Goals and Make A Plan to Achieve Them
One of the best ways to achieve weight loss success is to set a series of small weight loss goals. These small goals will build on each other leading to a larger goal. Regularly achieving these goals, and being successful will keep you motivated and focused.
So let’s look at some quick tips for good weight loss goals:
- Make your goals realistic. Aim to lose about two pounds a week. Trying to lose more is not real fat loss, its water loss, and not sustainable. Two pounds each week is realistic.
- Focus on what you’re doing. Try to make your goals more focused on what you’re actually doing rather than on something not completely within your control like an actual weight loss target. For example focus on taking a 20 minute walk each day, or only eating fruit for dessert for the week.
- Have little and large goals. You might want a longer term goal, for example lose 50 pounds. But that goal can be quite big and distant, says that some smaller goals that you can reach in a shorter period of time. These smaller goals when added together will give you your larger goal.
- Set some dates. It is important to have a date to achieve each goal. Goals without a date are simply wishes. When you’re setting your dates you must remember to allow for various events in your life. For example on your birthday will probably want a slice of birthday cake! And over a big holiday like Christmas or Thanksgiving you may want to put weight loss on hold and simply focus on taking some exercise.
- Put it on paper. When setting your goals it’s very a helpful to write them down. It is also helpful to make a plan. For example if you want to lose 50 pounds, then you can do that at the rate of two pounds a week. Which means it will take 25 weeks to reach your goal. You can then plan for intermediate goals, such as losing five pounds. You can also plan rewards for yourself, such as home pamper session, including a long relaxing back and beauty treatments.
- Check and reset your goals. If you’re doing really well you may want to set yourself some more ambitious targets, or set them slightly lower if you’re not doing so well! Regularly checking your goals also helps to keep you focused on them and motivated to achieve them.
Do – Exercise Properly
Exercise is an important aspect in weight loss. Some of the reasons for this are:
- Exercise burns calories!
- Exercise makes you feel better (once you get into it!)
- Exercise keeps your heart healthy
- Your body won’t use your muscles to provide fuel if you are working your muscles
- Turning your muscles makes you look better and shows off your weight loss
- Achieving exercise goals will improve your self-esteem
All of these things are great, but for the best results you need to do the best exercises.
When most people think of exercising for weight loss they imagine long boring hours on a treadmill, or equally long and boring hours spent jogging round the neighbourhood. Whilst it is certainly important to include a certain amount of cardiovascular exercise, that’s not the best exercise for weight loss.
The best exercise to help you achieve your weight loss goals is resistance training, using the weight machines at the gym, or best of all using free weights. Please note you do not have to join a gym for this. You can buy an inexpensive set of weights for home. There are also plenty of household tasks and household items that can also work your muscles.
There are a lot of myths floating around about this, chief amongst them is that lifting weights will turn you into a musclebound person. Firstly this is very unlikely unless you have the right genetic structure (and most of us don’t) and secondly if you see unwelcome changes in the mirror don’t you think you’ll stop?
Doing exercises which work your muscles, to build them and telling them will have a number of benefits. Your body won’t be able to use your muscles as an energy source if you demonstrate your body that you need your muscles. Doing this type of exercise all work out will also make you look great, and isn’t that why most of us want to lose weight?
I think the best exercise for weight loss program is Truth About Abs
Don’t – Focus on What You are Taking Out, Rather Than What You are Putting In
A big mistake people who are trying to lose weight often make is that they focus on things they are missing out on. Thinking about giving up cakes and sweets. Focusing on the things that you will deprive yourself of. All of which can be very depressing.
Instead think about the things that you are gaining.
- You are gaining a meditation break each day. A 20 minute walk around your neighbourhood will give you a chance to meditate, or simply get away from the telephone and screaming kids.
- You can add a lot of tasty fruits and vegetables to your diet.
- You can add the chance to try out a lot of new recipes.
- You can add a lot of water to your day. (Which is also great for the skin!)
- You are adding a chance to achieve goals, and improve your self-confidence and self-esteem
With all of these additions you will be able to edge out things that you don’t want in your diet. For example if you add drinking a lot of plain water, you will edge out drinking juices and sodas. If you add a lot of vegetables to your plate, you will edge out sticky deserts (because you’ll be follow-up from the vegetables).
It may seem like a trick, but it’s a trick that works. Just think about what you’re able to add, rather than what you are taking away or missing out on.
Do – Find a Support Team
Studies have repeatedly shown that people who have some form of support group with them when they are trying to lose weight on much more successful. Support group will encourage and motivate you to lose the weight. A support group will also provide a system of accountability, if you don’t lose the weight you’ll need to explain why!
A few of the things a support group can do for you:
- Provide praise and congratulations when you’ve achieved a goal.
- Encourage you to keep going when you’ve missed a goal.
- Provide motivation and encouragement when you’re feeling down.
- People to swap tips and ideas with.
- People you can talk to who understand how you feel
- Someone else to be accountable to, to motivate you to achieve your goals.
There are two main types of support group. The first is people who are also trying to lose weight. For example if you join a regular meeting group, then you meet with people who are making the same journey as yourself every week. This stops you feeling that you are alone, and the only person struggling with these issues.
The second type of support group is friends and family, especially your spouse, who your cheering section. They may not be on the journey with you, but you can report your progress to them, except their prey is when you succeed, and their encouragement when you fail. This is especially true of a spouse. Involving your spouse in your desire to lose weight and become more healthily will stop them from becoming insecure. And it’s a really nice boost to receive the compliments, and the flowers!
Do – Keep a Weight Loss Journal or Diary
Keeping the weight loss journal or a weight loss diary, can be very useful in your weight loss journey. People have often found that it is easier to resist food when they know they’re going to have to write down that they’ve eaten it! For maximum benefit from your journal it is good to include a number of things.
- The foods you eat
- When you eat them
- How you are feeling when you eat
- What exercise you take
- When you take the exercise
- How you’re feeling when you start exercising and when you finish
- New weight
- Your body measurements
- Anything significant happening during the day that affects your food, your diet or your exercise
Writing down all of this information and comparing it to your goals will definitely help to motivate you. Reviewing this information will also show you what is working and what is not. And of course when you know what’s working you can do more of it!
Keeping these records also allows you to see your progress day by day, and week by week. When you are having a bad day, you can go back and read about when you are having a good day. This journal will provide lots of useful information and motivation for your weight loss journey.
The best way of keeping track of your weight loss diary and great graphs to show your progress is Weight-By-Date
Essential Resources
You can find more articles about weight loss here; Weight Loss Articles
And articles about exercise here: Fitness Articles
Look around this website for lots of useful information!
Strip That Fat Diet Program
When you’re ready to start an actual war weight loss diet programme this is the one I recommend.
This book isn’t full of temporary tricks that will help you lose a few pounds but won’t help you in the long term.
Some of the reasons I like this:
- Education about why most diets don’t work
- Information on what to eat when you’re dining out
- This book teaches you about portion control
- This book also teaches you how to burn more calories
- And Lots more . . .
Please take a look for yourself and examine the strip the fat website.
The Truth About Abs Exercise Program
Although this book is primarily focused on teaching people how to achieve “sixpack abs”, it is packed full of information for people who want to learn the best exercises for losing fat.
Once you start losing weight and getting fit you may well want to develop your abs, and the exercises here will not only help you do that, they will also help strengthen and tone all your muscles.
This is a great program that doesn’t just apply a list of exercises, but actually shows you programs that you can tailor to your own self and needs to strengthen and tone your body.
There is a great 60 day guarantee, and tons of happy customers! Please check it out for yourself.
Download the Truth About Abs here
Weight-By-Date Pro: Diet and Fitness Software for Windows and Handheld PDAs
I love this software! It makes keeping a diary fun. And it’s more than just a diary.
The software allows you to analyse what you’re eating, to make sure you’re getting the right nutrients.
The software also gives you graphs showing your progress, great for motivation.
There is also a journal section, allowing you to enter things like your thoughts and feelings on what else is going on each day.
And the best bit is that there is a free trial available!
Visit the website today, read all about it, and get the free trial.
Download Weight By Date Software Here
Closing Comments
I hope this has all been of some help to you. Keep watching the website as I regularly add articles and information about weight loss and fitness. I also welcome your comments and questions, please let me know with the contact form below. Thank you for reading, and I hope to be back soon.
Allison
