If the battle to lose weight and stay on a diet seems filled with stumbling blocks, take heart! Support is out there, waiting to help you stay focused on your journey. Engage with someone who has similar goals, and offer each other support and discipline along the way. Together follow these three simple steps to avoid weight loss and diet plan failures.
Find Facts
Knowledge is power, particularly when it comes to weight loss and dieting. For example, do you know your body-mass index or how many calories you should eat each day to lose weight? Both are important pieces of information that can help you develop your diet plan. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends arming yourself with this type of knowledge. Use their "Adult Energy Needs and BMI Calculator" to find your unique numbers.
Weight loss involves both dieting and exercise. Do you know how many calories a relaxing activity, such as performing tai chi, burns? MayoClinic.com provides a list of activities and the related calories burned during an hour of that activity. For example, a person who weighs 200 lbs. can burn 364 calories doing an hour of tai chi, or 273 calories in an hour of bowling.
Set Incremental Goals
Whether you want to lose ten pounds or 100, it can be hard to stay focused on that final goal. Instead, break your weight loss objective down into measurable steps, and take them on one at a time. For example, the Weight-control Information Network recommends aiming to lose 1/2 to two lbs. per week through a combination of diet and exercise that causes you to burn more calories than you consume. Because many people like to relax their diets over the weekend, try weighing yourself on Friday, eating a balanced diet within your calorie goals, performing some exercise every day during the following week, and weighing again the following Friday. Using Friday as a deadline allows you to cheat a little over the weekend and focus on your diet again during the week.
Simple Changes
Shape Up America! says that making small changes in your eating habits can deliver big results. For example, the group calculated the benefits of changing the choice of meat that Americans eat to a lean cut such as turkey. This change reduces the overall fat and calories consumed compared to the same size serving of beef, lamb or pork. If turkey were substituted for other meats in one meal once each week, over the course of a year you would eat 6,408 fewer calories, saving you almost 2 lbs. in caloric intake; 1 lb. of fat equals about 3,500 calories. If you substituted turkey at every meal where you would normally choose to eat another type of meat, you can save 108 calories per day. If you eat meat at 15 of the 21 meals in a week, you could save 1,620 calories per week or 84,240 over a year simply by substituting a lean meat source in your diet. This equals 1/2 lb. of reduced caloric intake each week, or 24 lbs. over one year.
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