It’s Friday evening and time to relax for the weekend! That means putting your feet up and indulging on your favourite food to unwind from the previous week. Sure, you’re wanting to lose weight, but that can wait for next week, because right now you just need to de-stress! Monday is going to be the day that you begin your weight loss endeavours.
Does this mentality sound familiar at all? I have certainly had similar thought patterns to this in the past before I became passionate about health and fitness. Plus, I have heard many variations to the “I’ll start the diet next week” rationale from friends, family and clients.
Considering this approach to dieting, you are probably already aware that this is almost going to guarantee failure. After all, why start next week – why not the week after, or the month after that? If you have been telling yourself that “you’ll start the diet next week” – for how many weeks have you actually been telling yourself this?
Let’s be honest, a “diet” is an awful word. Dieting requires restriction, starvation and even unpleasant exercise to compliment the changed eating habits. Losing weight on a “diet” certainly isn’t enjoyable – it’s a chore! If you can last a month on a “diet”, you’re doing pretty well!
But – this is exactly where the problem lies. Yes, almost any “diet” will help you to lose weight – but almost all “diet’s” are not sustainable because they just cannot be enjoyed. So the problem actually revolves around your perception of the changes that must take place in order to facilitate weight loss.
If you are putting off weight loss, then you are going about it the completely wrong way. As humans, we will consciously either move toward pleasure or move away from pain. By embarking upon a “diet”, you are doing neither – you are introducing pain into your life with an un-enjoyable approach to exercise and nutrition, while moving away from any pleasurable activities such as relaxation or your favourite junk food. Sure, losing weight may bring about pleasure (after all, we naturally associate being in shape with being happier) – but the primary problem is that:
We naturally associate things we have to do in order to lose weight as more painful than the pleasure this weight loss would bring!
Putting yourself through the diet from hell is not going to make your life any easier.
So, ditch the diet!
So the very first step you must take when seeking to lose weight is to change your perception of the pain associated with weight loss. Until you do this, you will never lose weight and sustain it – you will always be fighting an up-hill battle.
Easier said that done right? Well I concede that making changes in your lifestyle is necessarily not an easy task – after all, I mean not to trivialise the serious struggles that the vast majority of people face when seeking to lose weight. For many people, finding that right lifestyle balance can be very difficult, so this requires an intelligent and persistent approach until you find what is just right for you.
The key is to develop a new lifestyle that is conductive of weight loss. This will require changes to your eating and exercise habits – but not to the same degree as a “diet”. Rather, you must make the changes to your lifestyle that you are comfortable with and that you can enjoy for the rest of your life. Weight loss should therefore be approached with a long-term mindset – approaching weight loss with a “lose as much weight as possible in the shortest period of time” is dieting mentality and you will likely be setting yourself up for failure.
So ask yourself, what can you do TODAY to change your lifestyle permanently? A lifestyle change can commence immediately – it doesn’t have to wait until next week. Are you going to lessen the amount of alcohol you consume? Are you going to go for a walk? Will you hire a personal trainer to get you motivated? Reduce your portion size for dinner tonight? Will you decide to reduce the amount of fast-food that you order? Whatever you are going to do, take a step (any step – even a really small one!) and start right now. The sooner you make a permanent change, the sooner you will be happier with yourself and really begin to enjoy living within your body.
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