Don’t Go On A Diet – Change Your Lifestyle

What’s your decision, to go on a diet or change your lifestyle? Are you consistently exasperated by your weight loss efforts? Are you tired of the number of times you have started a new diet and exercise programme, only to fall of the wagon a short time later?

How many times has a new diet come out on the market putting forward unbelievable, and basically deceitful guarantees of how much weight you are going to lose, and how quickly you will lose it.

So reading all these enticing promises, you are taken in by the belief that you will attain extremely quick weight loss in time for some fast approaching event like a holiday or a wedding. You are convinced by their wonderfully written advertising that soon you will be back into your sexiest outfit or that tight fitted t-shirt and looking great in no time. And all you have to do is to get started on their quick weight loss plan, and you’ll see the weight drop off in weeks, and never have to worry about weight loss again.

But alas you never end up getting to achieve the results you set out to get. In fact you go from diet to diet, and never seem to be able to get it right. You follow the experts’ advice on exercise: cardio, weight lifting, interval training, circuit training, power walking…and still get nowhere.

You have also tried many of the best known diets: Atkins diet, Weight Watchers, Slimming World and the like, you tried the soup diet, the Grapefruit diet, probably if I name one, you’ve tried it. Yet you still haven’t achieved the results you wanted. The weight just won’t budge sufficiently, or stay off.

Discouraged, you move from one diet plan to another, but never have any joy.  The joys of yo-yo dieting. Weight loss seems to be a lifetime struggle for you. Different diets are tried time after time with the same poor results and it seems that you are always on a diet depriving yourself, putting restrictions up and then all of a sudden going back to eating the way you were before you started dieting. As a desperate measure you even try “fat-burning” supplements or diet pills…only find that your weight still doesn’t fall off.

Sorry but this is a crazy way to live. The diet market is thriving because there is an enormous demand from people who want to lose weight. Yet, diets rarely work. Fact: Only 2-3% of people who embark on a diet manage to keep the weight off permanently.

Let me be honest … diets don’t work. Only lifestyle changes do. Diets often work while you rigidly stick with them. But most just can’t follow them for a lifetime, and that’s where they break down. You need to build a lifestyle where you lose your excess weight, maintain the right weight, and can stay with the things you’ve had to do to achieve it for ever more.

But be warned, losing weight in a healthy way is not a fast process. If you can be committed to a lifestyle change – and take the necessary actions to bring such change into place, you will achieve long term results. We must say bye-bye to the concepts of the quick fix diet. If you are looking for lasting improvement in your life, you need to manifest true and lasting change, It is as simple as that. The only strategy for long term weight loss is to combine healthy eating, exercise and the right mindset.

So yes what I’m saying is don’t diet. Change your lifestyle. I don’t want you struggling with your weight any longer through your life, and being forced to try all these different diets.

The mistake most people make is that they diet, lose weight, and end up gaining it all back. The key to weight loss and better health is to incorporate lifestyle changes.

Of course the mistake others will make is to eat huge portions of everything from take away pizza’s and kebabs, pies and chips, chocolate and cakes and all those unhealthy and fattening foods that you know do you no good.

They consume a mind-boggling number of calories on a daily basis. Yet others eat so little that they hardly provide their bodies enough energy to get out of bed let alone work a full day. Both types are getting it all wrong for both their health and body.

You’re probably saying to yourself, so if diets don’t work what do I do now? Well, making a temporary change, which is what a diet is, is not going to give you the long-term, lasting results you are looking for, but you can’t make drastic changes in your habits overnight.

You can lose weight on a diet short-term, but most diets restrict something in order to lose weight, which is not a good long- term strategy. The bottom line is, if you go on a diet, eventually you have to come off that diet and if you go back to the food you were eating before, you will eventually gain the weight back, after all, the food you were eating could have been one of the causes of the weight gain in the first place.

This year, I challenge you to do something different. Don’t go on a diet…instead change your lifestyle. Adopt a healthy sustainable lifestyle… for life.

A lifestyle change is all about you. It’s about lining up your eating and physical activity with your real goals and desires. Success is defined in terms of how these changes make you feel about yourself.

The lifestyle approach assumes that being overweight is usually the result of other problems, not the cause. Addressing these problems directly is the best way to solve both the problems themselves and your weight issues. This means focusing on many things, not just the numbers on the scale. Numbers only tell a small part of the story, and “bad” numbers often provide good clues into areas that need attention.

Making a lifestyle change involves an internal and permanent change in your relationship with food, eating, and physical activity. You recognize that the primary problem isn’t what you eat, or even how much you eat, but how and why you eat. Eating mindlessly and impulsively and using food to manage your emotions and distract yourself from unpleasant thoughts—this is what really needs to change. Learning to take good care of yourself emotionally, physically, and spiritually,so that you don’t want to use eating to solve problems, it really can’t, is a lifelong learning process that is constantly changing as your needs and circumstances change.

A good place to start on changing your lifestyle is the gi diet plan, it is one of the rare diet plans that incorporates healthy lifestyle living.

We will be writing a series of articles on changing your lifestyle. Starting with the psychology behind being overweight.

This is Larry Lewis.

Score Your Way To Good Health - With Our Healthy Lifestyle Plan

Score your way to good health with our healthy lifestyle plan and it's unique 70 point weekly scorecard!

Click here to find out more