Fitness Tips For Life

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The biggest factor in weight loss is your motivation.

It’s more important than which diet you choose. It’s also the biggest reason why diets often fail. Since it’s so important, let’s find out how to make it work for you, not against you.

Most weight loss programs work if you stick with them. The trouble may be that you don’t. Why are programs so hard to stick to? Because you often feel bad when you are trying to follow them – you get hungry, the wrong hormones are coursing through your body, you may be missing a source of comfort, and you may have emotional links to your weight issues.

You can knock over these blocks to your success one by one. The hunger problem: You need to find foods that fill you up without adding lots of calories. Less calories doesn’t mean less food, it means different foods. Switch to a high vegetable diet, with some fruits, moderate amounts of lean meat or fish, and easy on the fats and carbohydrates. Avoid high-starch veggies like potatoes that raise your blood sugar. No sweets, and no high-salt and high-fat foods like snacks or fast foods. You can make your high-vegetable meals taste good in other ways. They will also help you get all the nutrition you need, and soon you’ll feel just fine because you’re getting what your body really needs.

When you try to cut back on calories, you may also be triggering the wrong hormones, making things harder for yourself. Eating the wrong foods at the wrong times makes your insulin level go up, for instance, making your cells store more fat. There is a complex dance of hormones in fat burning and storage – including insulin, serotonin, leptin, testosterone, and estrogen.

Some foods that encourage fat-burning instead of fat-storage are asparagus, brussels sprouts, celery, cabbage, and onions. Notice how they are all vegetables? Once your hormones are working with you, not against you, you’ll see results much faster and start to feel more enthusiasm for your weight loss plan.

Of course, hormones are not the only things affecting your motivation. Certain foods make you feel better when you eat them – pastry, chips, and the like. That good feeling doesn’t last, though, especially when you see the food turning into pounds. If you had a buddy who told you to do things that were bad for you, how long would you listen to them? Well, those foods are promising you that you will feel better and everything will be okay – but those promises never come true, do they? So why keep believing them? One promise that does come true is that when you get healthier and stronger, you really do feel better. That’s something you can believe.

Finally, emotional hangups about food. You have to deal with these indirectly by removing what they feed on. Make a list of things you’ll be able to do after you lose the weight. Decide to accept yourself as you are. Practice focusing on what you can do and what you can be thankful for, and setting aside what you can’t do or don’t like. And set up a series of goals, each one a little more challenging, and with the first one within your reach. That will give you quick success and lets you keep on having successes as you reach each goal, one by one.

Now that you know some of the secrets of motivation, you can start to take some steps toward what you want. Don’t worry if it seems like a lot to keep track of – when you first tried to drive a car, that probably seemed the same way. As you get used to it, motivating yourself will become second nature. Then you’ll really be on your way.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 6:15 am and is filed under Eating Tips.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.