How to Succeed at Weight Loss & Fitness Pursuits

The wrong method

The reason most people fail when they set weight loss, or any fitness goal, typically comes down to one thing. They treat the diet or exercise plan as a means-to-an-end. For example, someone will decide they want to lose 20 lbs. They will then typically, go on a diet and join the gym. (Sound familiar?)

Once they begin their journey, they will begin to weigh themselves about 10 times per day. (Also familiar?) This is why they fail. They are 100% focused on their goal. It is good to be focused on your goal, but if all you care about is reaching this goal, and all you think about is how far you have yet to go, then every second of your journey is about what you haven’t achieved.

During this process, everything is negative. Everything seems so hard and your goal seems to somehow be moving farther away from you. You become impatient. The process seems awful and you quit. It happens all the time.

The right method

The right method, the one that works (for me anyway) is to make this process a lifestyle. Let’s take the scenario above and apply it here. You want to lose 20 lbs. You go on a diet and you join the gym. Good. Now, instead of working toward you goal of losing 20 lbs. lets focus on creating a new healthy lifestyle.

Diet

Rather than worrying about the scale and working on your weight, begin to slowly, but consistently add healthier foods to your diet. Rather than abandoning all of your favorite foods at once, add good foods first. Learn some new and interesting recipes. You will notice that as you begin to add the good foods, you will begin using these foods to replace the unhealthy foods.

As your diet gets better, you can consciously begin eliminating the foods you know to be a problem. Here’s a good trick that can help you to stay on your healthier diet. Allow yourself 2 cheats per week. Have one thing you like, which is not on your diet, on Wednesday and one at some point on the weekend. This will help you stay on track. You will always be close to having a goodie soon!

Exercise

Threat your workouts the same way. Schedule them into your life. Ease into them. Don’t expect so much from your workouts, or yourself, right away. Make sure you create a habit of going to the gym at the same time each weekday, and stay for one hour, no matter what. Your training will become an automatic habit. You won’t think about it. You won’t expect it to bring magic results instantly. What you will find, is that you WILL indeed get real results.

This method works very well. You don’t need to constantly step on the scale. There is no hurry. There is no rush. Consistency will always win. Think of it like gardening. You plant the seeds, and you water them. The seeds need nourishment, water and time. You can’t force the plants to grow faster by watering them more. Does this make sense?

Last image: The tortoise and the hare. Got it?

You can do this.