changing your lifestyle

How valuable is change to you? How confident are you that you can achieve the changes you are after? The personal benefits of losing weight or greater healthier are high but unfortunately to some, the ‘costs’ of achieving change can also be high.

So on one hand it may be really important to have a lower weight but on the other you also want to eat your favourite food or chocolate bar whenever you feel like it. It’s a conflict between competing desires and the accompanying frustration will often lead you to seek out solutions that falsely promise both - lose weight and eat what you want. Snake oils. I was prey to those deceptive messages myself for many years. Unfortunately. It isn’t that easy. There is no miracle cure, quick fix or gimmick. Don’t be fooled by the hype!

Train hard. Eat clean. Stay consistent and focused. Repeat. That’s how you create shipshape health.
So in considering that, what holds you back? It depends how much you really want the weight loss - how motivated you are. No matter how positive you are, how many goals you set or how much you visualise your success - if your reason for wanting to change does not inspire or motivate you strongly enough, it will more than likely be a short lived pursuit. This is the reason many people do not achieve their long term goals or successfully make long term changes to their lifestyles. So what are some perceived advantages and disadvantages for weight loss?

Changing my lifestyle
Advantages:
• more energy
• day to day tasks are easier to perform
• reduced risk of heart disease
• reduced risk of diabetes
• wider range of clothes to choose from
Disadvantages:
• increasing physical activity will be hard
• going without favourite foods is uncomfortable
• pressure from other people
• eating less than others in social situations
• frustration of constantly having to think about what to eat

NOT Changing my lifestyle
Disadvantages:
• weight will continue to go up
• increased lethargy
• greater risk to health
• more difficulty buying clothes that you want
• difficulty doing daily activities
Advantages:
• eat what I like
• no need to exercise
• don’t have to prepare special meals
• won’t be given a hard time by others
• don’t have to think about food all the time

Only you can determine how much you really want to create any changes in your life and how strong these points (and your own) are.  How important is losing weight/becoming healthier to you?

A great strategy to keep in mind is to aim for constant and neverending improvement rather than perfection. There is actually no such thing as perfection because in life there is always room for improvement. In addition, the pressure associated with striving for perfection usually leads to procrastination (meaning that you may never even get started), or fear of failure (which means you will most likely stop before you begin to see results). To ensure you are on the track it’s important to acknowledge what you have done well on a daily or weekly basis. You also need to think about what you could have done better and then what you will do to improve.

So what do you want in your life? Go and make it happen. Ann