How To Achieve Lasting Weight Loss
If you are still trying to lose the same 10, 20, or 30 pounds you were striving to lose last year, here are 7 simple actionable steps to follow to insure results and predict your permanent success.
1. Be Honest and Realistic with Yourself
If you are reading this, chances are you are less than satisfied with your current weight loss efforts. Acknowledge that the weight loss plan you are following is not working. Your intentions are good, but you are using the wrong vehicle to drive yourself closer to your goals. Reflect on past efforts and determine what has worked, what hasn’t and what needs to be included-or discarded- from a plan for it to be manageable for you. This is how you set yourself up for success from the start.
2. Remove the Word "Diet" from Your Vocabulary
I stopped using the word 10 years ago and I lost 65 lbs. Now “diet” refers only to what I eat each day, instead of something I do on some days. If you can go on a diet, you can just as easily be off a diet. Instead, view your new definition of dieting and the new strategy you eat as an ongoing effort to improve upon the choices you make daily.
3. Create a Daily Food Plan to Follow
Commit to a standing list of several smart breakfast, lunch, and dinner meals that match well with the way you live and include the foods that you enjoy. Meals should include a healthy balance of protein, carbohydrates, and fats.
Do not accept boring, cardboard-like food that leave you hungry and unsatisfied. Committing to foods that you either do not like or do not fit into your lifestyle will not be sustainable and will prevent lasting, permanent weight loss.
4. Stay Accountable
Track your meals in a food journal to keep yourself organized and to develop the habit of balancing your food daily. Choose whether you will weigh yourself each morning or once a week. Track your weight loss consistently in your food journal.You are no longer allowed to beat yourself up when the day’s food plan does not go as planned.
Accept that the challenges of holidays, birthday cake, and the unwelcome doughnuts that show up suddenly at a business meeting, are typical events and not the exceptions. Accept these challenges exist and be prepared to handle them with confidence and certainty.
5. No, Thank You
Practice the most important 3 words you will need to know to handle challenging situations. Practice it again and again until you say it with command and certainty. Add a firm confident smile for extra assurance to convey you really mean it.Do not allow yourself to feel overwhelmed by the larger task ahead of losing what seems like an impossible amount of weight.
If you follow the above steps, you have asked yourself some important questions. Your honest and reflective answers have created the framework for a plan that will work specifically for you because it is based on who you are and the way you live. Tackle one day at time. And if the day does not go as smoothly as planned, you get to wake up tomorrow to a new day, and with that, a chance to do it again, and maybe even better.
