The First Rule Of Losing Weight
The road to weight loss is littered with one failed attempt after another.Sadly this doesn\'t stop people from doing the same things again and again.Of course this results in the same outcome again and again,no weight loss.
Most people want to lose weight as quickly as possible. However following this pattern almost always results in failure. People are always on the lookout for a quick fix that will enable them to shed the pounds and get the body that they want in a couple of months. This is just wishful thinking,if you don\'t believe me ask people who are overweight how many times they have failed to lose weight. The truth is that quick weight loss is a gimmick. If this is not the case why are more and more people becoming overweight? People never learn and they will continue to jump from one quick fix to another, leading to one failure after another, until they just give up.
Unfortunately we live in a \'I want it now\' society. Patience is no longer considered a virtue. This is true in our working lives and in our own personal lives. When it comes to losing weight people are not interested in what they are going to look like 12 months down the road. They want to look good now; they don\'t want to waste time in reaching their goals. This is why people spend their hard earned money on anything that promises them what they want to hear.
Too many products offer a dream scanario where people can lose all the weight they want by very little effort,completely ignoring the science behind weight loss. People see these claims and common sense just flies out of the window. This happens because the products appeal to your emotional senses and when that happens, logic becomes irrelevant. Now on the face of it many of these claims will sound wonderful to you, but unfortunately your body will not share this joy. Any sudden and drastic changes to your lifestyle will lead your body to fight you every step of the way. This is why after a short initial period of weight loss, any results you may have been getting will slow down to a crawl or more than likely stop completely. This is such a common story amongst people who try to lose weight.
Let us look at a couple of facts. Fact number 1 is that 1 pound of weight roughly consists of 3500 calories. Fact number 2 is that if you wanted to lose 30 pounds of weight within a one month period, then you would have to find a way to remove and burn 26500 calories a week from your current diet. This comes down to a loss of 35000 calories a day. No mean feat when you think that the average intake of calories for a woman is between 1800-2400 calories a day. It would mean a massive reduction in the food that you are eating and taking part in long periods of intensive exercise. Most people haven\'t the slightest idea of what the results of such changes would do to their well being?
The human body is a hugely complex entity. Many people are not aware of the fact that the human body is one large defence system. Its main role is to protect you and to keep you alive any way that it can. If it feels you need to be protected it will pull out all the stops,completely ignoring what you might want. Your body while very adaptive is also a creature of habit. If your life has been filled with no exercise and bad food for a long time,then this is the way that your body has got used to living.
When suddenly out of the blue you cut back heavily on the food that your body is used to receiving and impose a rigorous exercise program on it what do you think will happen? Your body will think that it is under some sort of threat, and it will try to defend against this attack. It will go into starvation mode and this will lead it to hang onto all the calories it can. Because it is getting a lot less calories than it normally gets,it feels threatened and goes into starvation mode. This means it will do everything it can to hang onto any calories, simply because it thinks you must be starving.
On top of this as this new regime comes so suddenly, your mind will also try to prevent you from continuing what you are doing. It will do this by sending you constant messages telling you that it is too hard, you cannot do this, let us go back to the way it was, and so on. This is why at some point you will have to give up. How can you succeed when both your mind and your body are fighting against you?
People must come to grips with the fact that a quick fix is no fix at all your body and your mind needs time to adjust to any changes that you make to your lifestyle, and it will adapt more easily if you do things slowly and in stages, instead of rushing headfirst into it. As time goes on add more activity, but do it steps. Using this method allows the changes because it is in your body\'s abilities to do so.
So Time is the golden rule for weight loss, and remember that you are where you are today because of the choices that you have made. If you really want to lose weight then you have to change the methods that you have tried in the past.