subject: Don't Let These Three Mistakes Ruin Your Diet Plan! [print this page] Although is a lot of excellent information available regarding weight loss these days, more and more people seem to make the same three very basic errors in their approach to losing weight. And these three are not small mistakes that will only hold you back a little! Unfortunately these are big errors that will ultimately threaten your entire weight loss plan! Making these mistakes creates a situation where you are mostly likely to lose some weight temporarily, but you will soon gain it all back and add more. You could very well be worse off than if you had never started a diet plan!
The first error is thinking about your diet plan as though it is all or nothing. A person Starting with this idea probably has failed at dieting before and is now determined to achieve their weight goal by sheer will power and no matter what gets in their way. These people are so fed up with the lack of success in their previous efforts that they are now going to do everything they can to finally by successful. Most often they also select a fairly complex and challenging diet plan that will prove to be very difficult to maintain. Sometimes they will even remove all the food not on the diet from the house! Unfortunately they are still very likely to fail again.
At the start these plans often seem successful but inevitably something happens that interrupts the plan. Many things could cause this, but often is is their work forcing them to be away from home where they can't prepare their planned meal. Often they find that their body just can not take any more and cravings take over, causing them to make a quick trip to the grocery store to find some food they are used to eating. Either way, this throws them off their carefully laid out Plan and they end up feeling like complete failures. Ironically, this feeling of failure is often the last straw and they end up never going back to the plan, gaining back all of their lost weight and more.
If this error sounds familiar then you need to ask a couple hard questions. First, do you truly want to lose weight permanently, or are you really looking for a magic diet that will let you go on eating the foods you love after the diet is over? The down and up cycle of weight loss and regaining is usually worse for your health than being overweight, so you need to address this problem. The only way you will achieve lasting success is to understand that you need to make gradual changes and changes that become permanent parts of your lifestyle, not temporary fixes.
Another common error for those attempting to lose weight is the think about the weight loss plan as a time of sacrificing. Dieters with this attitude plan on temporarily changing their eating habits only until they reach the goal weight. Typically, the dieter believes that all the foods they enjoy must be given up in order to reach their goal. Often dieters with this misconception will actually reach their goal and it may look like they are successful in solving their weight problem. However, they inevitably go back to their "normal" food patterns and within the next few months or years they gain back all the pounds they lost.
Unfortunately, the sacrifice dieter does think about the fact that their "normal" eating and exercise habits are what cause them to consume too much for their level of exercise and the size of their body. Instead of a period of sacrifice they really need to permanently alter the amount of exercise they get and what and how much they eat. People do not gain 20 or 30 pounds in a week or a month. Becoming overweight comes from having a lifestyle that causes the person to not get enough exercise or eat too much or the wrong foods and these things can produces weight gains of a few ounces each week. This may not sound like much but, Over time, it ends up being a weight gain of several pounds. The dieter needs to realize that they need to lose the weight using the same process, only in reverse. The only way is to create permanent changes to ones lifestyle that will allow us to lose a little weight each week, without feeling we are sacrificing all the foods we love!
A third dieting error is to start with goals that are unrealistic. Important to the success of any diet plan is the setting of several realistically achievable goals. Unfortunately, many dieters have just a single goal when they start: their final target weight. This does not provide much motivation if the ideal weight is far from their present weight. In this case, when they lose a couple pounds they may feel that their loss is not significant compared to the overall target, and they may start to feel that their plan is a failure, even though they may be making good progress.
An example of a plan that is much more likely to succeed is a plan that has a weekly goal of losing two pounds for the first five weeks then 1 pound per week after that. This method allows you to have an opportunity for success every week. Even if you miss a goal one week, you can continue to work on losing the two pounds the next week. By breaking the plan down into weekly goals like this and putting the goals in writing, the objectives of the plan are clear and realistic and much more likely to be achieved. Furthermore, if the weight loss is tracked on a graph it will soon become obvious that ups and downs are natural but the overall trend is towards the major goal.
If these errors sound familiar, you should not worry that you will never lose weight. Often, the most important thing to do is just to make adjustments to your plan and then continue with a positive attitude. You will find that you learn not only from your successes, but also from your failures, so failing to achieve a goal is no reason to give up. Make a lifetime commitment to become a healthier person with smaller habit changes that are permanent. Once you learn to moderate your food intake and increase your activity level, you will find that you will consistently lose weight and be on your way to your overall goal.
by: Alan Webb.
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