YOU HAVE A COMMENDABLE GOAL! HERE'S HELP FOR STICKING TO IT
So you've decided to lose some weight and get fitter! Great stuff! That is a commendable decision, but do you know how many people a year, a day, even a minute give up on that decision? Well I don't have the statistics but it is a lot. So I have listed here some of the main reasons people like yourself fall by the wayside of the road to a better, healthier, fitter body.
1. UNREALISTIC TARGETS AND TOO MANY CHANGES TOO SOON
Often people decide they're going to lose weight and get fitter and immediately slash their calorie intake, embark on a tough work out programme, give up drinking, give up smoking, cut out sweets and join a running club, all at once then wonder why they feel like hell! A little time passes then something happens and it all falls apart and they return to their old habits. They saw the article about the man who lost 100 pounds in six weeks and now looks like Adonis and thought they would achieve the same but then got disheartened when they couldn't lose the weight quickly enough and gave up.
We none of us live in a bubble unaffected by our surroundings, friends, family, work and circumstances and all these affect our resolve to see a goal through. If we could just cut ourselves off from everything else that is happening around us it would be much easier to stick to the decisions we make and goals we set, but all too often something outside of our control happens which upsets us and we revert to a default where we feel more comfortable.
We didn't get to where we are now, physically or mentally, in a few days or weeks or even months, for most of us it took years. So how do you expect to make such a big change in a fraction of that time? It can be done yes, but it is rare, usually triggered by something drastic happening, some kind of a wake up call like a heart attack or severe warning from a doctor, but if that hasn't happened, then if you try to do things too quickly the inner you will not accept the change and will look for an excuse to pull you back to your default that you have relied on for so long. It could be anything from some harsh criticism from someone close, to a catastrophe that affects you or your family, what ever it is it will seem like the perfect reason or excuse to discontinue your quest for a better healthier body. The thing is your body always wants to maintain the status quo, you have survived this long by doing what you've always done, sudden change for the unknown could be dangerous because it is unknown!
So one step at a time. One pound at a time. Set targets that you know are achievable at least until you get the ball rolling and show yourself that you CAN make a change also that your friends and family can accept. It is easier for you to turn down a fourth drink on your regular night out with your buddies than it is to resist their mocking when you say you're only going to drink orange juice!
Unless you have a will of iron, sooner or later you will give in to peer pressure or cravings. It's far better to reduce but still have the moments when you do indulge to look forward to. Then reduce some more and so on.
2. THE INEVITABLE PLATEAU
Many people have great success in losing a few pounds up to a couple of stone but then it all seems to a stop, usually after about two and a half to three and a half months. Then it seems that they stop losing weight and all the tricks and techniques they've been using don't seem to be working anymore. So they do one or both of two things. Start to think that their efforts are wasted and give in to their default desires or try even harder by eating less and or exercising more.
Don't! This is a crucial point both physically and psychologically. If you get it wrong now it will be a whole lot harder to get back to this weight again, what ever weight you have achieved or how ever much or little you have lost.
Physically your body is readjusting it's self. It's taking stock, thinking "Am I in danger here? My systems are telling me I'm losing my reserves and I'm changing shape, is that a good thing or not?" Your body needs to reassure it's self that what you're doing is good and that there is no need to panic and keep storing reserves.
If you try harder and exercise more and eat less your body's alarm bells will begin to ring resulting in a slowing of your metabolism and a cannibalising of muscle tissue leaving you soft and deflated! If you give in and go back to your old ways your body will revert very quickly to what it was and probably add some more poundage for good measure ready for a future emergency.
So what should you do? Well these two approaches may help.
Psychologically, own the new you! Look how far you have come, congratulate your self on what you have achieved. Even if you were to never lose another ounce or half inch (which is not going to be the case) you are so much better off than you were and wouldn't you rather be where you are now than where you were then? So enjoy it, live it, own it, brag about it and notice how good you feel.
Physically. Don't change anything for now. Just carry on doing what you have been doing. Maybe change your work out programme a little but no more than you normally would on a monthly basis, for now take some time out from measuring and monitoring yourself and just enjoy where you've got to.. Let your body get used to the new regime and let it know that all is ok and what you're doing is good. Enjoy the new way of eating that has brought you here. Enjoy the new physical activities you have involved yourself in, enjoy them because they are working but what ever you do, don't stop your programme or you may never get back into it again.
3. WRONG SELF IMAGE
This is very important. Ok so you are over weight! By how much will obviously vary from person to person but none the less, one thing that will be the same is the way you see yourself. You look in the mirror and you see the little belly or the spare tyre, the larger than you would like them thighs, the rolls of fat, or how ever your over weight state is distributed around your particular body. You see the way you currently are.
Now here's the thing. The more you look at yourself the way you are, the more you notice the fat and feel the fat and most important of all, the more you dislike it and feel bad about it, the more you are psychologically locking yourself into that body and the harder you are making it for yourself to change.
"But surely I can only see myself the way I am?" I here you say. Ah, there's the trick you see and it's quite a subtle one. You need to have in your mind's eye the picture of you that you want to achieve not the picture of how you are. We've all done it from time to time, stood in front of the mirror, sucked in our tummy, stretched our bodies up a bit too appear taller and slimmer and thought that's how I want to look. Great that's it, that's the trick, but then what do we do? We drop it all and look at ourselves and say "I don't want to look like this" then turn around and go and eat a packet of crisps or a desert to try and feel better while that last image of ourselves is imprinted indelibly on our mind.
Well you were part way there, but what you should have done is kept that posture THEN turned away from the mirror with that picture in your head and continued saying "Yes! That's how I want to look because it feels great". Hold onto that feeling of how much better you look and most importantly how much better it makes you FEEL seeing that new look.
This sets up a new process in your brain and your body of adjusting your status quo to accept a new "Normal". A new "Safe". A new "Default". If every time you look in the mirror you do this and make yourself feel good about the you, you see, the stronger the effect will be.
There are other things you can do too that have the same effect. Get a picture of a person whom has the body shape you desire to achieve, cut it out of a fitness magazine or something, and pin it up somewhere that you will see it often, on the fridge is a good place. Better still, if you can also get the same scale picture of yourself and swap the head of the other picture for your own so that it looks like a picture of you with that body.
Look at this picture often and imagine how it would feel to have that body. It's what you feel and think when you look at the picture that really matters. You must not look at the picture and think, "I really want to look like that but how the hell am I going to achieve it, look at me now I am far from looking like that and it feels awful". No! This will not work! All you are doing here is confirming how hard it is to achieve what you want and that you can never look like the picture!
What you need to do is look at the picture and smile, yes actually smile physically, then as you smile physically, which will already trigger some endorphins which make you feel better, say to your self "Wow! It will be amazing when I get to look like that, I can feel what it would be like right now, I feel fantastic, I feel younger, healthier, lighter and everyone will admire me for my great body and physique". That sort of thing, what ever feels good. Believe me this is powerful stuff and will make a huge difference to your success.
4. POOR NUTRITION
If you were trying to tune a Ferrari you wouldn't consider putting poor quality fuel in drained out of a breaker would you? So why would you try to tune your body and give it poor quality fuel? Nutrition is a big part of gaining a slimmer fitter body and it's not as difficult as you might think. You don't need to calculate everything by weighing it and counting each calorie etc. Most of it is common sense, trim all visible fat, don't eat deserts everyday, make sure you eat plenty of vegetables, salads and fruit along with lean protein and eat small meals four or five times a day. You can get more sophisticated and technical as you go along but for now this will be fine as a starting point, just use your common sense.
The flip side is to make sure you eat enough! It's no good just going on a starvation diet for this will give your body all the wrong messages similar to doing too much cardio as covered below. If you starve your body it will go into panic mode and simply try to store everything you eat and scavenge what it needs from unnecessary reserves such as muscle. So again, four or five small meals a day, maybe breakfast, lunch and dinner being a little larger meals with snacks between making up the other meals. But make sure the snacks are proper food like a wholemeal sandwich or a tasty salad with nuts, not a burger with fries or three candy bars and a soda!
5. TOO MUCH TIME IN THE GYM
Your work out should be no more than an hour if you're doing it twice to three times a week and the more often you go, the less muscle groups or even less muscles you should be working, though more intensely so the shorter your work out should be. If you're going everyday, then you should be working a different muscle or two each day for only about 20 to 30 minutes.
You MUST also have days off for recovery. These may be between work outs or at the end of the week. If you're working out daily then you must have two whole days off a week and three or four days once a month or so. If you don't get enough recovery time then you will be over training and your muscles will not have enough time to repair themselves and grow and all your efforts will be wasted. SEEMPLES!
6. NOT MAKING IT A LIFE CHANGE
Too many people see the methods of losing weight as temporary fix's which once they achieve their desired weight they will discard, returning to their former life style. This is absurd! The lifestyle you are living, the food you are eating, the lack of exercise you have got used to, is all how you arrived at this place of not being happy with your weight, so to think that once you have achieved your goal you can go back to all of that and maintain what you have worked so hard for is madness!
A healthier, fitter and slimmer body requires a change in the way you live your life, FOR LIFE! Not for a few weeks or months or even a year but FOR LIFE! That is why you need to make the changes slowly, one step at a time, so that you can own them, make them part of the way you live, not just some inconvenient thing you'll have to put up with for a while until you get what you want then relax back into your old habits.
If you suddenly found a great job you could walk right into that paid you a lot more money than you're getting now and would mean you could pay off all your debts or live a lifestyle you really enjoy, you wouldn't do it for a couple of months or until you'd paid your debts or enjoyed the lifestyle for a while then go back to your old job would you? So why do the same with your health?
7. THAT JOGGING THING!
Too much cardio
Many people think that the only way to really lose weight is through ours of cardio, on the treadmill or exercise bike or similar static stationary training machine or even by going out jogging.
Well yes hours spent doing cardio will burn calories and shed the pounds... BUT. Your body metabolism will actually decrease and it will try to hold onto fat and decrease your muscle mass. Why? Because it will think there is something wrong, that there is some kind of emergency or famine and because muscles use energy even at rest your body will decide that it is more important to use unnecessary muscle as fuel to feed what it detects as the necessary muscles. So if you do loads of running or cycling it will keep mainly keep your leg muscles going but will start to utilize resources from other muscles such as chest and arms for fuel whilst at the same time trying to preserve reserves such as the fat around your waste for use later.
Of course in time you will use this fat but as soon as you eat anything, especially when you give in to cravings, your body will store it straight away as fat. So you need a balance of cardio and weight training coupled with good nutrition at regular intervals. This way you trigger fat burning with your cardio work outs which kicks in at about 15 to 20 minutes, start to burn more calories at rest as your muscles grow and you metabolic rate increases from weight training and you educate your body that it doesn't need to store fat because there is plenty of food available by eating small meals four to five times a day.
8. OBSESSION WITH THE SCALES
This is one of my favourites and the most difficult to get across. The scales do lie! Ok, if you're very over weight and are shedding a lot of fat you will see your weight reducing on the scales but sooner or later there is going to come a time when what the scales are telling you has nothing to do with losing fat and when that moment comes, if you don't understand what is happening you're going to get very de-motivated and upset that your weight losing has stopped.
So what's going on? Ok, depending on how much fat you have to lose and how much muscle you already have this will vary from person to person but if you start out with very little muscle mass and a lot of surface fat, there comes a point when the muscle you are growing starts to out weigh or offset the fat you are losing, so though the scales may say you have stopped losing weight or slowed down, it isn't necessarily the case because you may have lost a pound of fat but gained half a pound over all in muscle.
The same goes for measuring. Yes you should see a decreasing in your stomach area but in arms for instance you may well see an increase even though they are not looking more muscular. This is because before you start to lose the fat, as muscle grows it will start to push up the fat, a bit like inflating a balloon under a thick blanket or Duvet, you can't see the shape of the balloon but the blanket or duvet lifts. Then as the muscles establish themselves they will add to your metabolic rate and then you will see the fat decrease revealing the muscle shape.
I sincerely hope this helps you to stay on track and keep motivated toward your goal of a better, fitter and healthier body. For more information on how to get the body you want why not go have a look at http://www.howdoigetfitter.com where I can help you further. All the best, Mike James
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