Article By Margaret Marshall – The Healthy Living Expert
The #1 New Year’s resolution is to lose weight. The amount of weight you’d like to lose will dictate how many changes need to be made. If it’s a few pounds, you probably already have healthy habits and will just need to make some adjustments, but if you have a large amount of weight to lose, it will take more change than you might realize. Either way, sustained weight loss takes knowledge, patience, and practice. Get ready to “Achieve your dream in 2017!”
Knowledge:
If you have dieted before you have learned that it takes a special way of eating to lose weight. But where your knowledge may fall short is how food groups work together to nourish you, give you stamina, and keeps you healthy. You may have tried many diet plans and picked what you like most from each to form your own plan. What you’ve done is delete the balance in the original plan and take away its original formula for success.
Study current reports about healthy weight loss and stay away from marketers, friends, and co-workers touting the latest fads. Ignore the gimmicks and false advertising from the diet industry. Use common sense to decipher what is true and what is myth. Treat your body with respect. Eat food that will nourish you. Poor food choices will deprive you of your ideal body weight and good health. They will also cause you to eat too much because you are never properly nourished. Be sensible about a healthy weight and consider achieving a realistic clothing size rather than a number on the scale.
Patience:
People lose patience fast and the weight loss cycle is slow. The length of time it takes you to lose weight is a learning period and will be instrumental to maintaining your new body. Often success goes beyond which food you choose to eat, and is tied to how you face challenges and change behaviors. Turn off the stopwatch and take the time to learn everything you can about how you think, act, and feel towards food.
When you do something that makes you feel good, repeat it and continue repeating it. When you do something that makes you feel like you’ve failed, learn from it and move on. Ignore comments from others, for they don’t know what is in your heart and mind. Celebrate and build on your victories along the way. There are many!
Practice:
The minute you think you are “cured” of being overweight is the very moment you begin to gain weight. The skills and strategies you use to achieve a weight loss have to be practiced for a lifetime. Think of them as a muscle that needs to be exercised for maximum strength and endurance. When you find a strategy that works, use it often. When you practice strategies during easy challenges, you can simply draw on them during more difficult times. With practice your strategies become skills.
Practice positive self-talk. By being positive you will be able to destroy negative thoughts. When you feel especially strong, practice being near food that challenges you; in time, you will be stronger than any food item. Practice being in social situations where your concern is how you eat; rather than what others do and think. What others eat and drink, or how they think, is irrelevant to you. Repeat as necessary. Be healthy today in your thinking, your body, and your actions.
A healthy diet is, eating food that is enjoyable to you in the quantity that is good for you. Aside from your doctor, stop listening to what others think you should do. You know your body better than anyone else. Be healthy, be realistic, and don’t be obsessive or extreme with food. You want to make changes that you can embrace and enjoy. The two main ingredients to a sustained weight loss are a healthy diet and regular exercise.
Exercise is an appreciation of the incredible body that sustains your life
I suggest you start small with an activity you enjoy. Add five minutes of exercise into your daily routine and then build on it. The main idea is to make exercise habitual. Do what feels good to you. Pick something that you can do throughout the years that will not cause injury, but be willing to change your routine when necessary. Exercise does not have to be formal; it just has to be a continuous movement where you realize the benefits. Too many people think exercise is a chore, but it’s really a prescription to prevent unnecessary illness.
