Have you ever been on a diet? I’m willing to bet you have, and I also have a slight hunch that at some point you terminated that diet. Any mention of the word diet to most people brings up all sorts of awful memories: restrictive, boring, painful, and stale are a couple of common terms representative of a diet.
Why is that? Simply put, diets don’t work; they’re a flawed approach. They’re all temporary and short-sighted, and temporary means just that, temporary.
Let’s think about this for a second. In order for you to gain weight, you have to live a lifestyle that caters to gaining weight – whether that be from excessive eating or lack of physical activity. The weight doesn’t just jump onto you overnight. It may take years of poor habits to get to your current level. If it took you 10 years to accumulate the excess weight, it’s not going to come off in 1 month or even 6 months in some crash diet.
There lies the answer, if it took a certain lifestyle to gain weight, it’s going to take a different lifestyle to take it off. It’s a change in lifestyle, not a quick fix diet. Being in shape should be the result of how you live every day.
If you fix the habits or actions that have caused the weight gain, you can cause the weight to come off automatically. Cleaning up some daily habits will often do the trick. For example if you drink 1 can of soda every day with your lunch – exchange that for water. Just that one simple change added up over 1 year will result in a 16 pound difference. Add 30 minutes of physical activity 3-4 times a week and there’s at least another 12 pounds each year.
Maybe it’s the glazed donut at work 3 times a week – 12 months later there’s another 11 pounds. These are simple conscious actions that you take throughout each day to make a difference in the long term. A great habit is to just drink water all day long – not only will you get the benefit of hydration you’ll also skip the extra calories from soda, fruit juices and coffee mocha delights.
How about switching to skim milk instead of 2%, while that may not be for everyone, it’s just an idea of how simple taking away a few calories here and there can be.
Take 1 year, and week by week, improve upon your current habits with nutrition or physical activity. By the end of the year you will have seen significant results, all from those very slight changes. Losing weight doesn’t have to be restrictive or obsessive in any sense of the word.
It all comes back to what your lifestyle is like, that’s what will ultimately determine what your weight will be. You’ve probably heard of someone getting liposuction or another form of weight reduction surgery. Often times they just gain every bit of the weight back, they got their quick fix, but in the end their lifestyle just puts the weight back on.
Lottery winners get their “get rich quick” scheme, but in the end, many of them are just as poor as they were before they had won their money. They’re original lifestyle catered to that style of living. Although they got a lucky break with the winnings, their habits of spending, attitudes toward money and no savings ultimately put them right back at where they started.
So if you are looking for that “get thin quick” scheme, I urge you to reconsider your perception on how you view weight loss. Weight loss is a process and not a one time event – as I’m sure you would like to maintain your ideal body weight once you reach it.
The word diet alone implies that you will at some point quit the behavior and quite possibly gain all the weight back. This continues in a cyclical fashion, just like a yo-yo, going up and down and up and down. Weight loss is more than just a temporary fix, it’s a lifestyle change. Be like a rock, when a rock is dropped it just drops, and stays down.
