If you have previously tried to lose weight and failed why was that? Was it perhaps that you didn’t really feel motivated enough and your initial enthusiasm began to wane after a couple of weeks when it seemed you had achieved only a disappointingly small amount of weight loss? Was it perhaps that you found your chosen diet too difficult or too time consuming to follow?
You don’t have to keep making promises to yourself that you fail to keep. If you know you need to lose weight,
and you know that you will look and feel better, then now is a good time to do something about it. All you need is a plan. If you keep it simple you can follow it through. Here’s how to go about it:
1. Write down your goal
Set yourself a realistic achievable target for weight loss, remembering that it’s no good trying to lose a lot of weight in a short time – you either won’t manage it or you will make yourself ill. Your aim should be to lose small amounts of weight per week over a period of months. If you were to set yourself a target weight loss of 7 pounds within 6 months then that should be achievable and you would notice the difference.
2. Get help from friends and family
Don’t try and go it alone. If the people you live with know that you want to lose weight they can give you support by keeping temptation out of your way. It is not fair on you if every time you open the kitchen cupboard there is an array of biscuits to hand.
The chances are that one or more of your family or friends want to lose weight too. If you can make a promise of weight loss together, you can help each other along the way. You have a weight loss buddy to compare notes with or maybe get into competition with. It’s easier to be motivated to go jogging or pop to the gym if you have someone to share it with.
3. Choose a straightforward and not a “fad” diet
If your diet is too restrictive you won’t be able to keep it up for long so forget the cabbage soup diet, or even Atkins, as these type of diets can prevent you from ever enjoying some of your favourite foods, and can you honestly live with that? A diet also needs to be relatively straightforward and easy to apply, as you don’t want to have to be constantly counting calories before you have a meal.
A straightforward way of approaching dieting is to simply reduce your daily calorie input by a few hundred, cutting out the most highly calorific and unhealthy foods. An average adult male needs between 2000-2500 calories per day depending on whether he is doing a sedentary job or a physical job. If you work in an office then it’s a fairly sedentary lifestyle, and you should make up for this by doing some exercise when you can, at least three times per week.
You should work out roughly what your normal daily calorie input is (there are charts online), and then reduce this amount by 2-300 calories per day to give your new daily calorie input target.
You should find that you can easily achieve this without hardship by cutting out unnecessary high carbohydrate foods, particularly refined carbohydrate foods. This will also enable you to cut back on saturated fats somewhat as these are often combined in these foods.
The foods we are talking about are processed foods such as cakes, biscuits, crisps, ready prepared meals, white bread and ordinary pasta. You can substitute wholemeal bread and pasta for the white as these are more complex carbohydrates that take longer to digest and don’t put such a strain on the blood glucose/insulin system.
4. Do exercise you enjoy
If you hate going to the gym or pounding the streets in shorts and vest then find some exercise that you can really enjoy. In the summer months there is tennis, cycling, hiking, and golf. In the winter you can still do swimming, dancing, or just walking to work.
At work you should try to take the stairs rather than the lift, and make yourself gradually improve your fitness by speeding up the time it takes to climb the stairs or taking in another floor. It is important to increase your daily or weekly exercise levels over what you had been used to before. This will boost your metabolism, helping you to lose weight and feel fitter.
A combination of reducing daily calorie input and increasing exercise, if sustained, will see to it that you are able to lose a few pounds within a few months and keep them off. The danger is that, by slipping back into old ways you may lose the advantage you have gained. The small adjustments you have made need to be upheld, or maybe you want to go even further. That is up to you.
