Choosing The Right Weight Loss Program

Why Diets Don't Work

Diets don't work for a lot of reasons, physical and mental, but I don't have enough space here to cover all of them.The main reason a diet will not work is that your body has some really effective self-regulating mechanisms. If you deprive it of it's expected calorie intake over a period of time, it will adjust itself to need less calories. Although you will be eating less (and definitely not enjoying it), your body will settle into a new pattern and your weight will level off with only a small weight loss. Even worse, when you stop dieting, as you know you will, the body will keep its new level of calorie need while you return to your old eating habits. This brings us to another point.

Everybody's body works to it's own rhythm and needs, but they all follow the same law. If you take in more calories than your body needs, it will store the excess as fat. Bottom line. Fact. End of discussion...almost. Using the information in the paragraph above, you can see that when you quit your diet and go back to eating the old way after your body has adjusted its needs downward, you now have MORE EXCESS CALORIES TO BE STORED AS FAT! This is why people often GAIN WEIGHT after a diet...or series of diets.

What's the Best Weight Loss Program

As you can see, you are back at the beginning of this discussion, but with a little more information. We can still say that the best weight loss program is the one you will stick with, and now you know a little more about why. Since we are all different, the obvious fact should be that what you need to find is not THE best weight loss program, but YOUR best weight loss program...the one YOU will stick with. The biq question in your mind is...

There are a lot of things you can do to improve your health, your life, and your personal weight situation, such as drink more water, get plenty of sleep, do things that you enjoy, for example. These can all contribute to weight loss, but let's just look at two things for now.

1. Become more active: Notice, I avoided saying, "exercise". Whoops! I said it. Look, exercise equals activity. If you want to do Richard Simmons' tapes and "Sweat to the Oldies", more power to you. If you choose to buy a Bowflex and in a few months look like the grandmother in their TV commercials, that's great! Odds are however, you just need to make some lifestyle adjustments and become more aware of the opportunities that exist to "exercise" in daily life. Oh sure, a planned and scheduled exercise program is great, but so is a walk, or gardening, or swimming, or cleaning house, or...well, you get the idea. The only need is to make it regular,at least 4 or 5 times a week, and to make it challenging.

Only you can assess what is challenging. What is challenging today may simply be walking out to the mailbox and back. One lady started her "exercise program" with that simple step (no pun intended). Another gentleman started his program by walking to the end of his block. That first day, he thought he wouldn't even be able to get back to his house. A few weeks later, he was walking over a mile. At one point in my life, I regularly ran over 6 miles at a time. However, the first time I ever tried to run, I didn't make it half a block. The key is to get started, do it regularly, and challenge yourself.

People drop out of "exercise programs" for a lot of reasons. For your purposes, do the activity as it fits in your schedule, pick the activity that pleases you, and vary the activity...if you cleaned house yesterday, take a walk today. By the way, if I told you to exercise, to take a walk, you might begin that avoidance process that makes people drop out of formal, planned exercise programs. Why don't you take the grandkids to the zoo instead? If that isn't a workout, I don't know what is. Be creative. It's your "exercise program", make it what you want it to be.

2. Eat sensibly: You know how you SHOULD be eating, right! Back to basics. Lots of vegetables, cut down on portion sizes, have an apple instead of pie or a candy bar. Take the sugar out of your life. There are all kinds of diet tips running around. Not a single one of them is worth a hill of beans...but a bunch of them add up to a lot more than a hill of beans. Changing only one thing is probably not going to make a big difference, but...IT DOES MAKE A DIFFERENCE! changing seventeen things might make quite a difference, but there's a secret...

Don't try to make all seventeen, or twelve, or thirty changes all at once. Start with one change, and once it is part of your life, make the next one. You might want to learn a little bit about Kaizen. Small steps in the nutrition area will help get you where you want to go eventually, just as taking that small walk out to the mailbox may someday lead to walking one or two miles at a time.

How Long Do You Have to Stay On the Weight Loss Program?

Well, for the rest of your life. That's why it is important to choose activities you enjoy and learn to make better nutrition choices while still enjoying the pleasure of eating. Also, many people have weight loss problems because they have personal issues with life. Your personal weight loss program, regular activity plus nutritional common sense, equals a sense of control over a situation that produces many negative affects in your life. A sense of control over that situation allows you to remove many of those negative affects and move on to rearrange other parts of your life that may need attention.

One last point. I have kept this as simple as possible, but it is based on a large body of information. If you truly want to create the most effective weight loss program for you, you will have to learn a lot more than you probably know now. The public library is a good place to start, as is the internet.

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