Your New Year’s Resolution to Lose Weight
Introduction
Congratulations on making it through another year of your life. You’ve promised yourself and everyone around you next year will be different. Next year will be the year that you finally drop those unwanted pounds.
How are you going to do it? Sure, you’ve see the commercials for those weight loss supplements. You’ve also heard people at the office talk about that new class at the gym that is an intense workout. You’ve even heard about that group of people in your neighborhood who are only eating grass to lose weight.
Why the Resolution to Lose Weight?
Before you decide to eat grass, join an intense class or take supplements, you should determine what your goal is. Do you want to lose weight to be more attractive? Are you concerned about your long-term health?
Maybe you want to lose weight to feel as if you fit in with others. Whatever the reason, having an understanding of your motivation will help you lose the weight you desire. Knowing your motivation can help you set your weight loss targets and plan to reach them.
OK, I figured out my motivation. Now what?
Good work on making it this far in the article! Now that you understand what your motivation is, it’s time to establish some measurements for your goal. Maybe you’ve decided you want to lose 40 pounds this year?
If 40 pounds is what you desire, you’ll never get there unless you change your goal to be a monthly one. Your new goal should be to lose between 3 and 4 pounds every month. If you meet your monthly goals, you will have met or exceeded your 40 pound target by the end of the year.
Slow and Steady Versus Fast
At this point you might be asking yourself, why can’t I lose as much weight as quickly as possible? If I know I want to lose 40 pounds, why shouldn’t I go on an aggressive diet and exercise frequently? There are a couple of very important reasons why this approach is not recommended.
The first reason for avoiding this approach is simple maintenance. If you lose 40 pounds in three months eating nothing but energy bars it will be easy to fall to old habits. You can’t go from pizza every night for five years to none at all.
The second reason for avoiding this approach is the dangers to your health. Rapid weight loss could put your body at risk for loss of important nutrients to survive. You might think one meal a day is enough, but it isn’t with three hours of exercise to go with it.
Diet, Diet, Diet
There’s a basic concept that some people struggle with when trying to lose weight. People think they have to “go on a diet” to lose the weight they want. The only way you can lose weight and keep it off is to create a lifestyle change with your eating habits.
A short-term diet change rarely works because you go back to eating what caused the weight gain in the first place. The best approach is to change your diet to lower calorie, high fiber foods. However, you should never stop eating the foods you enjoy, even the fattening ones.
The important thing to keep in mind is that these fattening foods should be eaten in moderation. Choose one day per week where you allow yourself to eat whatever you want. This will help keep you away from gorging on bad foods and give you a taste of feeling good about your trimmer body.
Conclusion
In addition to a good diet, a regular exercise routine is absolutely necessary for losing weight. Once you’ve lost a few pounds with your diet and exercise routine, you’ll start feeling much better about yourself. This good feeling builds on itself, as all you can think of is being healthy and in good physical shape.
Establish goals, develop and stick to a disciplined diet, begin an exercise routine and you will lose weight. Without the weight you will have the confidence to do what you felt held back from before. Do yourself a favor and don’t have the same resolution next New Year’s!
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