It’s depressing to know, but most dieters, even those who are initially successful in losing weight, will ultimately fail in their endeavors. To avoid falling into this category of people, dieters need to know what to do about the most common struggles with weight loss. These struggles are usually the result of unrealistic expectations, either of themselves or of the diet.
Choosing a diet that is right for you is very important. Traditional diets restrict people’s eating patterns to control caloric intake, and create a healthier balance of items in the diet. This is effective, but only if the people on the diet stick with it, and this can be difficult. The more restrictive the diet, the less likely most people are to be able to stay on it.
Diets with flexibility built in generally show better results than diets that are very strict. But this can vary, depending on the person. Some people find it easier to completely cut a given type of food out of their diet, rather than eat that food in moderation. Knowing what will work for you is a large part of finding an effective diet. Don’t expect that you can change yourself to fit a diet, rather, choose a diet that fits you.
Most of the struggles with diets come from a lack of motivation. It’s difficult to remember, in the face of temptation, or a lack of results, exactly why we are torturing ourselves this way. Motivation is the key to a diet, and understanding it will help your diet succeed.
Motivation can be lost just by the passage of time. Maintaining the kind of discipline that a diet requires can make the brain tired, and it might just not be able to handle it anymore. But far more common is a general lack of motivation related to not seeing results, or being faced with an extremely tempting food item. Both of these can be understood, and managed.
Not seeing the number on the scale go down is hard on all dieters. But this doesn’t mean that your diet isn’t working. A lot of dieters measure themselves far too often. Weight fluctuates regularly, even in normal-weight individuals, and therefore is not a reliable indicator of how much you have lost if you measure too often. Scales are also not the best overall indicator of diet success. How your clothes fit is often a better observation to make, because muscle is heavier than fat but also more compact.
Start measuring your food again if you have stopped doing so, or if you have never done this. The average person’s estimation of how much they are eating is wildly inaccurate. A lack of results while eating a good diet can often be caused by a lack of measurements of the food. If you are putting twice as much salad dressing on as you thought, which many people do, you could have just added 200 calories to your day. Imagine how this adds up over time. And use behavior to keep your diet in line. The willpower to not eat your absolute favorite food is harder to find than the willpower to avoid situations where you will be offered it.
The only way to fail at your diet is to give up. Remember that your excess pounds did not come to you overnight, and they are unlikely to disappear overnight. If you can’t stick with your diet once, you may, like many dieters, feel that you have failed. But you have only failed if you don’t return to your plan after this lapse. Keep up with your efforts, and make changes if the current plan isn’t working. But whatever you do, don’t give up.
Learn more about the struggles that dieters have to lose weight now in our overview of truly effective lose weight tips and the best weight loss review on the web.