If you’re considering weight loss, chances are that you’re after fast weight loss and the ability to maintain your new physique in the long-term. When presented in such a simplified manner, taking an approach to lose weight quickly seems viable. Yet in practice, fast weight loss more often than not has detrimental long-term effects.
Although we specialise with 12 week transformations, something that I repeat numerous times is that the initial 12 weeks of training is the time in which you develop new long-term habits for sustainable weight loss. 12 weeks is not a period where the typical sedentary person you should go “all-out” and try to lose all excess weight as quickly as possible.
There is an important point to be raised here, which is essential to anyone seeking to transform their physique in the long-term. If you want to achieve long-term success, you need to get away from an “all-or-nothing” mentality. If you approach weight loss with such a mindset, you may obtain GREAT weight loss results initially, but as you (inevitably and understandably) slip up, you will feel that your efforts have been completely compromised.
This discouragement as a consequence of your mistake (as minor as it may be) can be highly detrimental to your progress and result in all that weight piling back on.
In theory, this sounds trivial. In practice, this mindset can very easily cause you to fall into a psychological pit of guilt that does significantly more harm than good.
This is precisely why people who undertake fad diets gain more weight than they lose. It’s not because the diet isn’t conductive of weight loss, quite the opposite actually. The diet is such a contrast to the persons normal (and typically unhealthy) lifestyle habits that they lose weight REALLY quickly. Cravings kick in and eventually a binge results from self-deprivation of loved foods. This is not to mention most other food groups that are typically forbidden by fad diets.
Always remember that you are human and you will make mistakes. It is not plausible to expect yourself to adhere to a strict diet, lose weight quickly and then be able to maintain this result. In fact, once you come off the “diet”, how are you going to maintain that weight? Are you:
a. Going to stay on the diet indefinitely (Chances are you will be malnourished)
b. Revert back to your old eating habits (You will gain all the weight back)
c. Establish new and healthier lifestyle habits (Why don’t you skip the diet and just follow this option in the first place? If your revised lifestyle habits are conductive of maintaining a lighter bodyweight, then they will also result in weight loss at your heavier bodyweight.)
Ultimately, you need to focus on a “balance” mentality. Factor in cheat meals and slip ups. It is my belief that if you eat 80% well, you will lose weight. No, you won’t lose as much weight as eating 100% well in the short term, but you WILL lose more weight than eating 100% well in the long-term. It sounds counter-intuitive, but for the vast majority of people, eating 100% well results in a “falling off the wagon” scenario weeks into their weight loss endeavours. Hence why it is not a viable long-term approach.
This mindset of “lose weight quickly” is very, very common. For this reason, we have a whole truckload of articles on Amino Z that deal with this very topic. Here are a few of interest:
How to Lose Weight
Tony Ferguson Weight Loss Program Review…A Fad Diet?
Fad Diet, Fad Result
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