Kae’s Basic Steps For Successful Weight Loss

 

Kae’s Basic Steps For Successful Weight Loss

                    

Make Exercise A Standing Appointment on Your Schedule. Treat your exercise activity just as if it were a fixed appointment on your schedule.  Block off the time and don’t allow people or things to circumvent that appointment.  Many people want to see the quick weight loss without any work on their parts.  Exercise helps build muscle, kicks up your metabolism, and does wonders for the mind.  Exercise comes in so many different forms – from working in the yard, to playing with your kids, to spending 25 minutes on the elliptical machine.  

Never Allow Someone Else to Set Your Weight Loss Expectations. When you decide to go on a diet, it is critical that the expectations you set are yours and yours alone.  When you allow others to define what your optimal body image is or how much weight you should lose, you will always fail to meet their expectations. It’s a personal decision and you have to be happy with your image when you look in the mirror.

Be Realistic With Your Desired Weight Loss. If you’re really trying to lose weight at a healthy rate, sources say that you should lose no more than 1 to 3 pounds per week (depending on your starting weight).  Any weight loss that is faster than that almost always ends up being recouped after you go off the diet….and then some.

Focus On Healthy Living – Not Quick Weight Loss. Losing weight is a lifestyle change.  That means that you have to begin eating healthier foods.  You cannot go through the process eating only fruits and veggies to lose weight…only to eat a slab of bacon after you’ve lost 20 lbs.  That almost always causes people to revert back to their old unhealthy way of eating.  You have to focus on healthy living – and you have to eat to live…don’t live to eat.

Drink At Least Eight Glasses of Water Per Day. Water is probably one of the most accessible hidden weapons for successful weight loss.  Water not only clears up your skin, but it flushes out the impurities from our body that slow up our weight loss progress.  Believe it or not, our muscles can suffer from dehydration and fatigue when we don’t drink enough liquids.  As a result, our muscle tone suffers and our bodies just don’t perform to its optimal capacity. Eight glasses per day is the recommended limit for water consumption.  More water may be needed in extreme heat situations and if you are well above your recommended weight level. 

Don’t Allow Eating Out to “Bust Up” Your Diet Plans. Eating out should not translate into our inability to monitor calories or uncontrollable weight gain.  Most of the times, you have no idea that you are consuming as much as you do when you go out because there is no nutrition information on the menu.  For instance, many people have NO idea that when you consume a Ruby Tuesday veggie burger, you also consume 1,007 calories and 53 grams of fat…just in that one burger. Request nutrition information from the servers, choose restaurants that provide healthier dining choices, ask the chef to modify standing menu items (i.e., no cheese on the side salad, remove the top bun from the sandwich, request the sauce or dressing on the side, look at restaurant menus online before leaving and pick your entrée in advance, limit alcohol intake, drink a glass of water before you eat dinner, etc.).

Have Goals And Look At Them Everyday. The most successful weight loss stories that I’ve seen involved people who set goals, wrote them down, kept journals of eating habits, and documented their progress, setbacks and triumphs.  Placing your exercise goals on a piece of paper…or on a computer screen encourages you to stay disciplined and not get off course.  When you fail to plan with your weight management, you might as well plan to fail at managing your weight.

Don’t Beat Up Yourself When You Have A Minor (Or Major) Setback.  One of the realities of the world is that we are bound to have setbacks…but we are also fighters and can bounce back and get right back on track if we don’t stay in a slump and beat ourselves up over that brownie that we ate that was not apart of the diet plan.  Setbacks should serve as lessons on your weight management journey…not as discouragement.  As a famous singer Aaliyah said in a popular song, “If at first you don’t succeed, dust yourself off and try again.”

Always Monitor Your Progress. At the end of the week when you weigh yourself, spend some time assessing how you did for the week, what you could have done differently, how you will do better the next week, and what your weaknesses are.  If you don’t monitor your progress, you never know how to raise the bar for yourself on our weight management journey.

 

*kae*