If your endeavours to lose weight have hit a brick wall just check your not being too hard on yourself. Diets fail for a number of reasons; the key is to perserve and have realistic goals.
- Don’t be impatient and expect instant results you have to be able to maintain whatever changes you make for the long term. It is very easy to set yourself up to fail, try and take a long term view.
- Allow yourself mistakes, the all or nothing approach doesn’t work, remember the weight loss in some respects is the easy bit keeping it off is when the hard work really starts. It is important to overcome setbacks and move on.
- Try and get to the root cause of the weigh gain and address it, for instance was it stress that caused increases in appetite or comfort eating.
- Make sure you add in plenty of rewards to encourage compliance.
- Avoid weighing yourself daily your weight will fluctuate and an unexpected reading can really set you up for a bad day. You have no control over what the scales say but you have control over your food focus on that.
- Avoid going for long times eating very little and feeling hungry all you do is slow down your metabolism so weight loss becomes even harder.
- A diet that focuses solely on calories counting and doesn’t consider the quality of the food can leave you nutritionally deficient tired, hungry and depressed, all three of which make it unsustainable in the long term.
- Losing weight is around 80% diet and 20% exercise whilst adding in some exercise will help don’t be fooled into thinking weight loss will come without changes to your diet.
- Find a source of personal motivation and refer to it often. Remind yourself why you want to lose weight.
- Only a true lifestyle change can make weight loss sustainable and it can take time to change a lifetime of habits, however everyone can do it.
A diet that encourages weight loss over time will inevitably help you to form better habits and become the beginning of a lifetime of healthy eating.
