Losing weight and keeping it off isn’t about dieting. It’s not about deprivation and torture either. In fact, if you want to keep the weight off after you lose it, and then you’re not going to take drastic steps.
Instead, you’re going to create habits. Over the course of this report you’re going to read about 12 strategies to lose weight and keep it off for life.
Each strategy is a habit. Because there are twelve of them it makes sense to focus on developing one habit each month. Experts say that it takes three to four weeks to create and embrace a new habit. That’s perfect!
It’s recommended that you read through this report from beginning to end. Then, go back to the first strategy and create a plan to embrace that habit in your life. You don’t have to create the habits in the order they’re presented in this report.
There is one exception. The first habit to focus on should be mindset. The first strategy discussed in this report.
After that, choose the habits that make the most sense to you. You can absolutely go in order and they are designed to be approached systematically. However, you know your body, mind and lifestyle best. If it makes sense to you to change the order of the habits then by all means do so.
You’re in control here!
Ultimately the goal is the same. Your goal is lose weight and keep it off for life.
How do you feel about your body?
Close your mind for a few minutes and let your thoughts wander to how you feel about your body. Do you often say things like, “I hate my___”? Do you feel as if weight loss is a battle and you’re fighting your body?
This is common. Unfortunately, it’s also not productive. When you’re fighting your body and hating it, it creates resentment. Instead of embracing your body you’re rejecting it. Think about this, are you more likely to take care of something you love or something you hate?
So what’s the answer?
Love your body now. Appreciate all that it is and all that it does for you. If you dislike your body, hate your body or are fighting your body then losing weight and keeping it off is going to be difficult. It’ll be a long and painful process - a fight.
However if you love your body and are losing weight to take care of yourself then you’re going to have a much better time of it. You’ll enjoy the process, learn more along the way and you’ll be more successful at both losing weight and keeping it off.
When you love your body it’s much easier to make healthy decisions for it. It’s much easier to take care of it – because you want to take care of it.
Mindset will come in handy.
When you can embrace a positive and loving mindset, you’ll believe in yourself and you’ll have more willpower. You’ll be more motivated. And you’ll forgive yourself for the occasional mistakes.
Mindset is about more than just loving yourself. You’ll want to adopt a positive and motivated attitude too. Here are three tools you can use to embrace a positive mindset. We’re going to discuss them as they related to weight loss but you can use them for any goals and challenges in your life.
Affirmations
Affirmations are positive sayings that help you eliminate negative thoughts. For example, if you find that you’re often saying or thinking, “I hate my stomach” you can replace that thought with “I love my stomach. My body takes great care of me.”
Creating and using affirmations is a three step process.
Step One: Be Conscious Of Your Thoughts
In order to create affirmations that have great power you want them to support your biggest challenges. First, however, you need to recognize what these challenges are. This is accomplished by paying attention to your thoughts, your negative thoughts specifically. When you find yourself thinking something negative about your weight or your body write it down. You can then use this thought to create a powerful affirmation.
For example, “I’m so fat.” Negative thought
“I love my body. It nourishes me and keeps me safe.” Positive affirmation.
Step Two: Post Your Affirmation
Write your affirmation down and post it in obvious places. For example, write it on a sticky note and stick it to your bathroom mirror. Whenever you see your affirmation, repeat it aloud. Post it on your planner so that you’re reminded to repeat your affirmation every hour.
Make it part of your life. The more you repeat your affirmation, the more you’ll begin to believe it and embrace it.
Step Three: Be Conscious Of Your Thoughts
Yes, this is step one and you’ve come full circle. Now, whenever you think a negative thought about your body you can recognize it. Stop yourself from saying or thinking it and replace it with your positive affirmation.
Affirmations work wonders. Find one that fits you, your personality and your positive body image challenges and begin using it today.
Visualization
Visualization is a powerful tool and we use it often without realizing it. When you use visualization you’re essentially visualizing success. Athletes use visualization all the time to great ends. It helps us accomplish our goals. The great thing about visualization is that it can be used for both large and small goals.
For example, you can visualize what your life is like when you’ve achieved your weight loss goal. You can also visualize yourself exercising or saying no to a huge piece of cake and feeling proud.
Visualization helps you not only feel success in your mind and body, it can help motivate you. Use visualization each morning when you wake. Visualize yourself at the weight you want to be. You’ll begin to think of yourself at that weight and the pounds will fall off.
Use visualization when you’re facing a particularly difficult challenge. For example, if you’ve had a difficult day at work. You may be considering a drive thru dinner or happy hour with the gang. Visualize yourself driving past the fast food restaurant and feeling good about it.
Visualize yourself at the happy hour drinking sparkling water and eating a healthy menu item. You can make good decisions for yourself when you take time to remember and visualize what you want.
Gratitude
Finally, the other element that can help you embrace and love your body is gratitude. Gratitude completely changes your perspective about life. The practice of gratitude will help you think of your body in a positive manner. Use gratitude in two ways.
#1 Develop a gratitude habit. When you get up in the morning or at night before you go to bed, write down the things you’re grateful for. For example, I’m grateful for:
Lungs that help me breathe and provide oxygen to my brain – boy did I need my brain for that argument at work today!
A heart pumps around the clock and keeps the blood coursing through my veins
My beautiful neck and shoulders – I love the way they look in v-neck shirts.
Sometimes you may have to really dig deep to find something to be grateful for. Don’t stop until you do – there’s always something.
#2 Use gratitude when you’re being challenged. During particularly difficult times gratitude can help you move through them. When you’re having a bad day or a bad moment, instead of focusing on the negative, take a few minutes to consider what you have to be grateful for.
Affirmations, gratitude and visualization will all help you develop a positive mindset. When you can embrace your body with love and appreciation taking care of it becomes second nature. It’ll be much easier to adopt the remaining eleven habits into your lifestyle with grace and ease.
Before you move onto the next strategy, spend some time thinking about how you feel about your body. What negative thoughts can you replace with positive ones? How can you embrace your body and love it exactly the way it is right now?
One of the biggest reasons people don’t succeed with their weight loss goals is because they’ve set the wrong goals. They’ve taken the wrong approach to goal setting and weight loss.
The key to proper goal setting is twofold:
#1 Create an ideal goal. For example, “I want to lose fifty pounds.”
#2 Create smaller, achievable goals, to support that ideal goal. For example, I want to lose one pound a week. By the end of the year I will have lost 50 pound.
Now, losing one pound a week is much easier to manage and control. You can easily make changes to your lifestyle that support this smaller goal. Additionally, there’s a little wiggle room with this goal because there are 52 weeks in a year. That means there are two weeks where you don’t have to lose anything. And the weeks where you lose more than one pound will be bonus weeks.
The key to proper goal setting is to create smaller goals that you know you can achieve. This accomplishes several important things:
It makes your goal more manageable
It helps you plan ahead
It helps you create a pattern of success.
If you lose one pound a week for five weeks you’re going to be feeling pretty awesome. You’re going to feel motivated and successful. This will help you stay motivated. It’s a powerful feeling.
Lifestyle Goals
The weight loss goal is an easy goal. It’s a common one and it’s what most people think of when they’re creating a goal. However, as you move through the other habits/strategies in this report you’re going to want to set other goals.
For example, when you’re looking at your dietary habits you may want to stop drinking your calories. So your goal may be to eliminate soda from your diet. You can go cold turkey and quit drinking soda. However, many people find that the cravings and the habit is too engrained and the elimination is difficult.
Instead, you could create smaller goals to support success. For example, your ideal goal would be to stop drinking soda completely in four weeks. If you normally drink three sodas a day you might first cut back to drinking one soda a day for the first week. The second week you drink half a soda a day. The third week you drink half a soda every other day. The fourth week you drink half a soda a week. By the end of the fourth week you’re done with soda and the process was relatively painless.
You can also create goals to support exercise. For example, if you want to exercise for an hour a day five days a week. The first week you may exercise for ten minutes a day five days a week. The second week you may double that and workout for twenty minutes a day and so on.
Or you may workout for fifteen minutes one day and then add two minutes to your workout until you reach an hour.
Smaller, achievable goals help you create a pattern of success!
Before you move onto the next strategy think about your ideal goal. How can you break that goal apart into smaller, manageable goals you know you can achieve?
This habit and strategy is easy to embrace. You’re going to look at ways to make your life more fun.
Why?
Because if you’re out and enjoying your life, having fun, you’re going to be:
Active – this supports weight loss
Not thinking about food
The plain truth is that if something isn’t fun or pleasurable then you’re not likely to do it, at least not consistently. And we’ll take a look at “fun” when we discuss exercise and also dietary habits. But this month the focus is simple. Have more fun.
What’s fun?
Make a list of things that are fun to you or might be fun. Do you like dancing? Do you enjoy shopping or hanging out with friends? Do you enjoy football or photography?
Try to come up with ten to twenty things that you think are fun. Once you have your list, take a look at it. How can you make each fun thing healthy?
For example, if you love photography then you could take a weekly photography walk. If it’s nature photography you’re interested then take a nature walk. If you enjoy photographing urban elements then walk through the city with your camera. You’re taking something that’s fun and making it part of your healthy lifestyle.
If you love shopping then go shopping once a week. Hit your favorite shopping mall or city center and walk for thirty minutes before you enter a store.
If you love baking then bake for charity or for someone you love. Give away your baked goods. Giving is fun!
Why Focus on Fun?
In order to make your weight loss goals a success and in order to keep the weight off you’re going to want to be doing things and eating things you enjoy. If you hate it and it’s painful you’re not going to stick with it.
Now, it should be noted that if you’re cutting back on sugar you’re going to need to give your taste buds time to adapt.
Additionally if you’re going to start running, the first few runs are going to be painful. You may chant 100 times over the course of that first mile that you hate this and you’re not going to do it anymore.
This is where mindset comes in handy. You’ve learned skills to focus on the positive aspects. To appreciate the good things and to shift your thoughts from negative, “I hate this.” To “I am so happy I’m doing this for my body.”
When you’re having fun you won’t even think about what you’re missing.
Chances are there are thousands of foods you’ve never tasted. One of the keys to overall health and longevity is to eat a wide variety of foods. Unfortunately, one of the reasons many people are overweight is because they eat a very limited selection of food. And those foods aren’t necessarily good for them.
Your habit/strategy this month is to introduce yourself to new foods. Broaden your food horizons. This will help you change your diet to include not only variety but more healthy choices.
For example, if you try a new vegetable each week you can try different preparations. Bok Choy is a vegetable that’s common in many Asian recipes. You can eat it steamed, sautéed, and raw. If you’ve never had Bok Choy, pick a few up at the super market and try a few recipes that use Bok Choy as primary ingredient.
Note: It takes 3-7 tastes before most people can decide if they like a flavor. Give your taste buds a chance to adapt. If you’ve been eating processed, sugary and fatty foods then it may take some time to adapt to a new and healthy flavor. Give your taste buds a chance.
Other food groups to consider:
Try a new vegetable each week. For example, beets, zucchini, jicima, eggplant, arugula, and brussel sprouts
Try a new fruit each week. For example, star fruit, kiwi, and mango.
Try a new grain each week. For example, quinoa, barley, steel cut oats.
Try a new protein each week. For example lentils, soy, buffalo, and egg whites.
Here’s a little secret that we’re going to share and it may affect your weight loss plans and goals significantly.
The truth about losing weight is simple. You don’t have to exercise to lose weight. As long as you consume fewer calories than you burn you’ll lose weight.
Let’s take a look at the math.
A pound is 3500 calories.
If you reduce your caloric intake by 500 calories a day you’ll lose a pound a week.
That sounds pretty good, right? It shouldn’t be too hard to reduce your caloric intake.
Unfortunately, most people:
Like food and enjoy eating
Don’t really know how much they consume in calories each day which makes cutting back pretty darn tricky. If you like food and want to eat more than celery sticks and egg whites then you’re going to want to add exercise into your life.
Additionally, exercise adds a ton of benefits to both your overall health and to your weight loss goals.
Exercising helps you burn calories. When you burn calories you have more wiggle room to eat more. You can also lose weight more quickly. In fact, exercise often boosts your metabolism and balances your blood sugar. This means you won’t have those diet busting cravings and losing weight will be easier.
Again, let’s just look at some basic math.
The average sedentary person burns around 2000 calories a day just by being alive. If you want to lose a modest pound a week then the calories need to be cut back to 1500 a day. That means three meals of 500 calories. A simple turkey burger with a bun and ketchup is around 400 calories. Add a salad to that with dressing and you’re at 500 calories. Not too bad, right? So three healthy meals a day, no snacks, drinks with calories or desserts, and you can maintain a 1500 calorie diet.
However, what if you want cream in your coffee? What if you want a snack? What if you want to have a piece of pie?
Without adding exercise to your lifestyle, you can’t.
However, if you add thirty minutes of walking to your day you now have 150 extra calories to work with. Walking for thirty minutes burns 150 calories. You can now consider that cream in your coffee or that cookie for a snack.
And if you want to lose more than a pound a week, you’re most certainly going to want to add exercise to your day.
There are some important benefits of exercise to consider besides simply burning more calories…
Exercise improves your mood. It releases endorphins – feel good hormones. It can even boost your confidence and help prevent depression.
Exercise combats chronic diseases – regular exercise improves blood flow, boosts organ efficiency and helps your body optimize all processes for better health.
Exercise boosts your energy level - Physical activity delivers oxygen and nutrients to your tissues. When your heart and lungs work more efficiently, you'll have more energy to do the things you enjoy. You’ll also sleep better and that means more energy too!
Exercise boosts your immunity. You’ll get sick less often.
Exercise improves your skin. Exercise improves circulation. This means your body is better able to get rid of toxins. Fewer toxins, better skin and hair. Exercise also boosts the production of collagen which improves skin and it increases blood flow for a bright, healthy complexion.
Exercise helps your body manage stress. It reduces the amount of stress hormone in your body. It also helps your body better manage stress so when it does enter your life you don’t notice stress as much.
Exercise makes you smarter. Increased blood flow and oxygen to the brain helps your brain work more effectively and efficiently.
Okay, so you know the benefits of exercise and you’re convinced. But maybe you’re still not 100% on board. After all, exercise hurts, right? It’s uncomfortable. It’s a chore.
Only if you make it that way!
Exercise really can be fun. Remember when we mentioned that it’s important to make weight loss fun and you took a look at things you enjoy doing? It’s time to embrace that attitude again. Hopefully, you’ve begun to be more active and you’re doing things that are fun. Now it’s time to use that same approach to a regular exercise program. Ideally, you will do some type of aerobic exercise at least three times a week.
Possibilities include but are not limited to:
Tennis
Dancing
Jump rope
Swimming
Jogging/running
Walking
Roller skating/blading
Cross country skiing
Rowing
Bicycling
It’s important to remember that you can exercise indoors and outdoors – whichever is more fun, convenient and whichever you’re more likely to do. If you enjoy going to the gym and watching your favorite show while you’re on the elliptical, then have fun! If you enjoy walking with friends every morning then have fun!
Choose aerobic activities that you enjoy.
Note: Some activities aren’t instantly enjoyable. They may be uncomfortable or difficult to learn. For example, if you decide that you’re going to start running. Please give yourself time to embrace the new activity. Ease into it slowly. Rotate walking and running when you go out until you’re comfortable running the full time. Listen to music to help make the outing more fun. Run with friends.
Before you move onto the next step, create an ideal aerobic fitness goal and smaller goals to support your success. Embrace aerobic exercise this month and have fun doing it!
Okay, we’ve talked about aerobic exercise. There are two other forms of exercise to adapt into your lifestyle. The first is weight bearing exercise and the second is flexibility.
Weight bearing exercise makes your bones stronger. It also builds muscle and in case you haven’t heard, muscle burns calories faster than fat. The more muscle you build the faster your metabolism will be – the more calories you’ll burn all day long.
Add two days of weight bearing exercise to your lifestyle. You can incorporate strength training and aerobic training into a single workout if you prefer to have off days. However, it may be easier to create a habit of exercising every day than exercising just three or four days a week.
Again, strength training and weight bearing exercise should be fun. Here are some possibilities to consider:
Rock climbing
Yoga
Lifting weights
Stair steppers
Hiking
Push-ups/pull-ups
Low impact dancing, walking or jogging are also weight bearing exercises.
You can do a number of weight bearing exercises right in your home. You can grab an exercise ball and do squats, lunges and pushups. Create a routine that you can do in the morning, at your desk, at the gym or at home in the evenings. Make weight bearing fitness a part of your life.
Another important element of fitness is flexibility. When you take time to stretch before and after a workout you’re improving your body’s overall health and ability to perform.
Okay, we’ve now come to the “diet” part of your weight loss program. Only instead of dieting which brings to mind restriction, cravings, and deprivation you’re going to focus on eating healthy meals and moderation.
It goes right back to creating smaller goals to support your larger goal. You are hopefully eating more new vegetables, grains, fruits and proteins. It’s now time to take a look at each meal
you eat.
It’s also time to eat more frequently.
Yep, instead of three square meals a day you’re going to eat five or six smaller meals each day. This approach will eliminate any cravings. It’ll also help balance your blood sugar for more energy all day long.
Each meal/snack should contain:
Whole grains
Lean protein
Vegetables and/or fruit
Take a look at what you normally eat each day. In fact, consider simply tracking what you eat for a week. Then take a look at how you can modify your diet to achieve your weight loss goals.
For example, if you normally don’t eat breakfast and have a muffin and coffee around ten o’clock then you’re setting yourself up for disaster. It’s a high calorie, high blood sugar approach and the end result will be sugar cravings and an energy plummet.
Instead, you might have a smoothie for breakfast with fruit and low fat yogurt.
Then for a snack you could have nuts or a protein bar.
Calorie Content
We’ve already mentioned that a pound is 3500 calories and in order to lose weight you have to burn more than you eat. That means tracking how many calories you eat and planning accordingly.
If you’re on an 1800 calorie diet (that’s 1500 calories and 300 calories from exercise) then you know you can eat 6 meals/snacks of 300 calories each. A handful of nuts for a snack are approximately 100 calories. An egg white omelet with piece of whole grain toast is approximately 200 calories.
At this point you’re not being asked to track everything but to simply be aware of what you’re eating and to start planning how you eat each day. It’s about creating an awareness of the food you put into your body.
It’s about modifying your eating habits to support health and weight loss.
Start reducing and eliminating the items in your diet and lifestyle that don’t support your success. We’re talking about:
Sugary foods
Starchy foods
Foods that are high in saturated fat and calories
Sugary drinks/high calorie drinks
Don’t – Eliminate your favorite foods from your life. Restriction and deprivation create resistance, anger and frustration.
Do – Reduce your intake of your favorite foods and find new favorite foods that are healthy for you. For example, do you love chocolate? Great. Instead of eating a candy bar each day reward yourself at the end of the day with a dark chocolate covered strawberry or two.
Weight loss for life is about creating new habits. It’s about finding new foods to love, loving your body and changing how you look at food. When you choose foods that support your health you’re choosing to love your body and to treat it with respect and gratitude. You’re also choosing to lose weight and keep it off for life.
When your environment supports you to succeed, you’ll have a much easier time adopting these new healthy lifestyle habits. The transition may actually seem almost effortless.
There are two elements to a supportive environment. There is the environment you create for yourself and there are the people around you.
The Environment You Create for Yourself
It’s very easy to inadvertently make things harder for yourself. For example, if you’re trying to reduce sugary snacks from your diet the last thing you want to do is have them in your pantry. Yet that’s exactly what many people do.
You’re going to want to take a look around your home, office and even your car and elimi