Interestingly enough one’s health and perhaps weight loss goals seem to be always associated with diets today. Makes sense though, you’re 50lbs overweight and what you need is to get on a diet to lose it to feel better and improve your health.
NO!
What you need is not a diet, you need a lifestyle change so that you won’t get back the weight you lose while you were on that diet. Don’t get me wrong; diets do work, specially when you put your body through drastic nutritional changes that force you to lose weight. But most people dislike extremely the feeling of being on a diet physically and mentally, more importantly some of the diet’s out there are not good for you. Let’s define really briefly the difference between what’s healthy for you and what’s not. Just in case you didn’t think about it. Being healthy means taking care of your body, mind and to some spiritual side. For many being healthy just means that when you go to the doctor your blood work comes out perfectly or close to perfectly fine. Finally to some, healthy just means feeling good and being happy to with themselves. All three of the previously mentioned are good definitions of healthy. What’s not healthy is putting your body through a drastic change in your entire life (whether nutritional and or physical) with the only goal of dropping weight on a diet that would barely feed a teenager girl.
On so many occasions people who drop the weight fast re-gain is as fast as they lost it. Why? Because you didn’t’ change your habits for good, you only changed them for a period of time so that the scale would show you what you wanted. Detox teas, the HCG diet and so many other health risking diets have actually been shown on studies to be complete hoax. All they do is make you use the restroom more often, make you think you are losing weight by not eating and not feeding the body actually what it needs to sustain a healthy metabolism. On many occasions diets even promote users to create slowly eating disorders they aren’t aware of. This results in feelings of guilt, blame and failure which take a major toll on self esteem. This cycle can continue throughout a person’s lifetime and is a major risk factor in the development of an eating disorder.
So what’s a solution? Well, you must first do something that you might feel complicated and sometimes hard. Self analyze yourself. Think really well, what got me to this point where I need to lose “X” amount of weight and re-gain the power of your own health. After you’ve realized it; whether it is lack of exercise, bad eating decisions or both than you can have a real talk with yourself and start making small goals to start changing the current habits. Write down the things you know are not helping you. Put them in front of you daily and than start planning for small change.
When people want to make drastic change in their lives it doesn’t usually stick. You’re not going to magically erase something you’ve bee naturally doing for a long period of time and re-introduce something you have never done before. The key is small steps. For ex. If you drink 3 regular colas daily and you know that’s a problem for your weight and health, than write down next to your problem a simple solution to it. “Today I will only drink 1 cola and drink more water instead”. If you feel that even that is hard, than drink 1 cola and two sugar free colas. It’s a step in the right direction. See what’ I am doing here? Small steps will lead to large change if you find a solution and write it next to the problem. Do this with all your “problems” and re-enforce having this piece of paper with you anywhere you go. Remind yourself daily of what you want and what you need to change.
Creating sustainability will be the key element to your weight loss goals. Not diets that restrict you of things we all want to eat once in a while.