There is no way around it. Losing weight and keeping it off for longer is going to take time. Too many people are in a hurry to lose weight. The fact is that it is this race to weight loss that prevents them from actually succeeding.
Most people want to lose weight as quickly as possible. However following this pattern almost always results in failure. People are always on the lookout for a quick fix that will enable them to shed the pounds and get the body that they want in a couple of months. This is just wishful thinking, if you don\’t believe me ask people who are overweight how many times they have failed to lose weight. The truth is that quick weight loss is a gimmick. If it wasn\’t why do so many people have so much trouble losing weight? People never learn and they will continue to jump from one quick fix to another, leading to one failure after another, until they just give up.
The problem is that we now live in a society where we want everything as soon as we possibly can. Patience is no longer considered a virtue. This is true in our working lives and in our own personal lives. When it comes to losing weight people are not interested in what they are going to look like 12 months down the road. They want to look good now; they don\’t want to waste time in reaching their goals. People are prepared to purchase anything as long as that product is appealing to them and doesn\’t seem to involve too much work.
There are many diets and weight loss products that claim you will be able to lose anything from 20-40 pounds in a month. People believe the hype and any logic just seems to evaporate. This happens because the products appeal to your emotional senses and when that happens, logic becomes irrelevant. Now on the face of it many of these claims will sound wonderful to you, but unfortunately your body will not share this joy. Any sudden and drastic changes to your lifestyle will lead your body to fight you every step of the way. This is why after a short initial period of weight loss, any results you may have been getting will slow down to a crawl or more than likely stop completely. This is such a common story amongst people who try to lose weight.
There are two things I want to mention. Fact number 1 is that 1 pound of weight roughly consists of 3500 calories. Fact number 2 is that if you wanted to lose 30 pounds of weight within a one month period, then you would have to find a way to remove and burn 26500 calories a week from your current diet. This equates to 3500 calories a day. No mean feat when you think that the average intake of calories for a woman is between 1800-2400 calories a day. It would mean a massive reduction in the food that you are eating and taking part in long periods of intensive exercise. Most people haven\’t the slightest idea of what the results of such changes would do to their well being?
The human body is a hugely complex entity. Not many people know that their bodies are actually large defence mechanisms. Its main role is to protect you and to keep you alive any way that it can. If it feels you need to be protected it will pull out all the stops, completely ignoring what you might want. Although your body is more than capable of change if done right, it likes continuity. If your life has been filled with no exercise and bad food for a long time, then this is the way that your body has got used to living.
When suddenly out of the blue you cut back heavily on the food that your body is used to receiving and impose a rigorous exercise program on it what do you think will happen? Your body will percieve these new changes as a threat, and will take action to counter this threat. It will go into starvation mode and this will lead it to hang onto all the calories it can. Because it is not getting the food it is used to, it will put your metabolism into starvation mode. This means it will do everything it can to hang onto any calories, simply because it thinks you must be starving.
Apart from this, because you jump into a new lifestyle so quickly, your mind will fight you on this because it hasn\’t come to terms with what you are trying to do. It will do this by sending you constant messages telling you that it is too hard, you cannot do this, let us go back to the way it was, and so on. This is why at some point you will have to give up. How can you succeed when both your mind and your body are fighting against you?
You must understand that your body will accept change more easily if that change comes in small steps. Your mind and body will not accept change if it is done overnight. As time goes on add more activity, but do it steps. Using this method allows the changes because it is in your body\’s abilities to do so.
So Time is the golden rule for weight loss, and remember that you are where you are today because of the choices that you have made. If you want to be in a different place then make different choices.
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