Losing weight and keeping fit and healthy means more than turning up at your local gym or health club. The ability to lose weight requires a particular mindset and one that you have to persevere with. Diet plans and exercise programs are only a tool which you can utilize to lose unwanted weight and become healthier, but by themselves, unused, they do nothing.
Predictably there is a boom in the membership of health clubs and gyms, at the start of each year. Everyone starts the New Year with a new resolution to slim down after self-indulging over the holiday period. Each year the health clubs try to understand why they have such a hard time keeping new recruits and then to get them to keep coming back after February. The answer lies in appreciating what makes a customer to sign up to a fitness club in the first place.
The answer is plain to see, you become a member of a health club or gym to lose weight and make yourself fitter. You don’t join the health club to buy a diet, or to be sold any other health services or products. A healthy body is about people and their dreams and not about making money.
Ok, you need some advice on what to do and you need a schedule of how to go about it. You may benefit from a particular diet type and you may benefit from vitamins and healthy food types, but it is all too easy to get burdened down with all of the number-crunching calculations of an exercise or diet program. Sometimes focusing too much on the numbers can and will result in forgetting your original motivation andas a result, set you up for failure.
Instead of thinking positively about losing weight and getting fit, which is the reason that you began, you may start to think that all of the calorie counting, reps, and heart rate tracking are too much to deal with. The detail starts to take over and you start to lose sight of your targets. At this stage it becomes more of a hassle than a hobby and instead of being a means of stress release the whole thing becomes very stressful! You may even be tempted to quit exercising and dieting as a result.
Yes, you are going to have some tough days, it would be silly to think otherwise. It’s not easy losing weight. It takes determination and discipline. More importantly, you need to be able to look through the hard times when it all seems pointless, and keep the end goal in sight. Whatever you do, you should not get too concerned about meeting all the numbers on the charts all of the time.
The greatest challenge for anyone who is going to lose weight or get fit is to be able to keep on going. In order to keep on going, you have to be a Weight Loss LIFER!
The phrase ‘lifer’ comes from the military where it is a term for ‘a person who has been in the military a long time or plans to stay in long enough to retire’. These are people who have the commitment to finish the course. If you are serious about losing weight or improving your fitness, then you have to be Weight Loss Lifer. Are you a Weight Loss Lifer?
A Weight Loss Lifer understands that there will be hard times to go through; that there may even be really bleak times in the future, but they get through them or they go around them. It may require support from others, but whatever it takes, it gets done. They know that losing weight is so much more than the measurements of a single day, or a single week. It is the total of everything that you have done to date.
You may not be a lifer at the moment, but you won’t ever become one if you don’t make changes now! New Year’s Resolutions are good because they are a great trigger for making a lifestyle change. On the other hand they are bad because few people expect to adhere to their resolutions for very long and quit at the first sign of failure. If you didn’t quit on your weight loss resolution then you would still be loosing weight. You would already be a Weight Loss Lifer.
We are all individual. We are all different. You cannot just buy a diet plan or an exercise regime and “guarantee the results.” It just doesn’t happen like that. Each one of us needs to fit the diet or exercise plan to match our own requirements. You can buy different diet types and plans or exercise plans but what you can’t buy, is the determination of a Lifer.
Do not get over-whelmed with the details of losing weight or getting fit. Make exercising and healthy eating a high priority in your life but make sure that it is not the only thing in your life. Be aware of the long term picture and make sure that you keep focused. Bad days will occur, but they are much easier to handle if you are a true Weight Loss Lifer.
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– Roger Titley