Naturally thin people do not understand why overweight people struggle so much with weight management. After all, it seems pretty straightforward. If you eat too many calories your body will store what you do not use as fat. If you want to lose weight, just make sure that you are burning more calories than you eat. To stay at the same weight, eat and burn the same number of calories. If “how to lose weight fast” was that simple, nobody would be fat.
Obesity Epidemic
We have all heard the statistics that one-third of adults, 72 million people, are obese. We have probably also heard that 16% of children are obese, that more and more kids are getting lifestyle diseases like diabetes II, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol at younger and younger ages. It has been said that today’s youth will be the first generation not to outlive their parents in more than a hundred years.
Smacking Ourselves Into Line
People basically understand that being overweight is bad for their health. Carrying around all of that extra fat is hard on your body. Death could come early, sickness is a real possibility. In an effort to keep fat burning under control, some people have resorted to equally unhealthy practices, such as laxative abuse or bulimia. If we know that being overweight is bad for our health, why do we have such a hard time with weight management?
Just Give It Up
Should we all resign ourselves to being fat, live as long as we can and enjoy it or should we keep up the struggle to be thin? The answer is somewhere in the middle. Before we go on one more diet program with expectations that we will be perfectly able to follow the diet 100%, stop. We are already setting ourselves up for failure and we have not even begun yet. Nobody does anything to the level of perfectly for 100% of the time. Would you expect your best friend to do that? No? Then why do you expect it of yourself?
Re-framing Expectations
What would happen if we adjusted our expectations of ourselves before we even ate that last piece of chocolate cake before we start our diet? We know that berating ourselves does not work. Re-thinking the issue and looking at it from another point of view is what we need to do. Do you think that you could eat healthy meals 50% of all of your meals in a day or a week? Could you do it for 60%, 70% or 90% of all of your meals? At what point does the thought of not having unfettered access to your favorite foods start to cause anxiety in you? Start right at that point. If you start getting anxious at eating healthy 60% of meals, begin eating healthy for that percentage of meals. You make it okay to eat less healthy foods and so you do not feel deprived. Over a few weeks, work your way up the percentage ladder until you are eating 90% of your meals based on healthy foods and 10% whatever you want to eat.
Now do the same thing with exercise. Could you exercise for five minutes, 10 minutes, an entire half hour one or two days a week? Find what works for you without provoking a huge anxiety response and build from there until you are working out 30 minutes for at least five days per week.
Paying Attention To Your Feelings
We probably would not chew out a friend who made poor food choices, someone who clearly doesn’t recognize how to lose weight fast. It is highly likely that this fearful part of you will decrease and your fat loss program will be much more successful and easier to live.