4 Rules For Diets That Work

11. Mar, 2010 0 Comments

Have you ever tried to start a healthy diet or a new exercise routine and then get frustrated after a few days or a few weeks and stop? Does it seem like diets that work for most people, just don’t work for you?

Why do you think you stop?

Is it too hard to get motivated?
Do you feel like you just don’t have time?
The results don’t come quickly and you get discouraged?
…”I just have to face facts-I’ll always be overweight!”

Look, diets that work for other people may not work for you. You just have to define what you mean by “work”. You’ve seen the really fat people on t.v. with the before and after photos…”I just lost 115 pounds in 6 months by eating these cookies!” “I went from a size 12 to a size 8 in four weeks simply by drinking this nasty green crap three times a day…”

There most certainly are people that jump on to the latest diet bandwagon that lose a lot of weight with pills, cookies, shakes and drinks. I mean there are people that hit the lottery and there are people that win $10,000 in Vegas in one night too right?

The problem with most of these “lose weight quick” schemes is that you may lose weight but you will almost always gain it back and end up jumping on and off that seesaw forever.

In my experience, all diets that work long term have four fundamental things in common

They are easy to follow
They involve gradual changes in lifestyle-not just exercise or just eating
They improve your overall health while helping you lose weight
They involve a combination of changes to your diet and your physical routine.

Easy to Follow-Counting carbs, counting calories, reading food labels and keeping charts are all sound practices, but aren’t these the things you do AFTER you have found some ways to begin a gradual progression from sedentary to active or from gluttonous to pudgy? I mean don’t complicate things right out of the gate. Change things gradually and see some slow progress and THEN kick it up. Otherwise it’s too hard.

It’s a Lifestyle-Think of all the things that you are really good at, the things you take for granted. Are you a good writer, do you sing well, can you play the piano or the guitar? Maybe you can cook anything without using a recipe or you always win at scrabble. Were you always good at this thing? Of course not! But as you think about it now, it’s like second nature-no big deal. At some point you did it for the first time, then you practiced, then you got good at it and now it’s like breathing-you just do it. Why would effective dieting be any different?

Improve Overall Health-Diets that work also help you experience all the other symptoms of renewed vigor and well being too. In other words, you should be feeling more energetic, you should be sleeping better, you should feel less stressed. Your skin and overall color should be more vibrant and you should be more regular. If you are not getting these other benefits, then it’s either a short term weight loss “fad” or it’s just not healthy, or both.

Involve Exercise and Diet-You can lose weight by simply changing what you eat and/or the way you eat. You can also lose weight by exercising more and/or differently. But doesn’t it just make sense that the diets that work the best involve both? I mean if you modify your caloric intake, your fat intake or both AND you speed up your metabolism (the efficiency with which your body burns fat and calories), your weight loss results will increase dramatically

So anyway, this may seem pretty obvious to some of you, but I find that most people don’t factor this into the process when they are looking for diets that work and often lose sight of these guidelines over the long haul

There is a FREE E-Book on my sidebar that might help you get started and here is a really good recipe and overall eating suggestion book from my friend Mike Geary. I will get compensated if you choose to buy Mike’s book, but my E-book is on the house.