Many times when you are trying to find weight loss tips online, you come across a lot of fad diets. These are the diets which tell you how much weight you can lose by eating only cabbage soup, or maple syrup and lemonade or some other noxious kind of food that nobody who really likes themselves would ever try to eat.
As a matter of fact these diets are among the most highly looked for topics on the entire web. They are very popular for one specific reason – they bring you almost instant results in dropping a few pounds. They do work to get some weight off immediately, within a week for many of them.
However, guess what happens? The weight all returns with a vengeance and sometimes those pounds you lost bring their friends back to stay with you and you wind up weighing even more than you did when you started the crash diet.
This sort of weight loss program does not keep you healthy and does not result in keeping the weight off permanently. You end up bouncing up and down in weight and your entire metabolism suffers. And when your metabolism suffers it always does so in the same way – it slows down and puts a stop to burning calories.
That is why you will get the weight back.
Here are a couple of things you can do to help obtain a more long lasting weight reduction.
Stop eating so much – but do not stop all at once
People love to punish themselves for dietary transgressions. But punishing does not help much. If you simply stop feeding your body, it will not know what to do and just slows your metabolism to a crawl. Much better if you reduce your calorie consumption gradually. Start eating less a bit at a time, so your body gets accustomed to running on the calories it already has stashed away.
Progressive weight loss with a diet change that is not a crash type of diet is much more productive for many more people than any of those fad diets. Do you really want to be eating cabbage soup three times a day for the remainder of your life?
Another essential tip is very simple, and works very successfully.
Give yourself a reward for losing weight.
Now this doesn’t mean that when you lose one pound that you hop in the car and run right over to Cheesecake Factory and stuff yourself. A reward should really be a nice thing you do for yourself, not something which is virtually certain to make you feel bad all over again. That’s not what you need.
Instead you can give yourself a pleasant treat like a spa day, or a trip to the shopping center with no kids or anything else you enjoy. And if you like, you can have a food treat. In a normal sized portion. A square of chocolate – not a 5 pound box. Split a piece of cheesecake with your friend – don’t order two for yourself.
Rewards are excellent things to do for yourself. Just don’t overdo the reward system or you will turn out punishing yourself all over again.
Losing weight does not have to be rough or painful. But you do have to make a couple of adjustments in how you think and behave. Forget about punishing yourself, that didn’t work before and it won’t work now. Instead cut your calories gradually and give yourself a small reward when you succeed and you will be well on your way to lasting weight loss.
