Every few months, especially right after New Years and again just before summer, a slew of diet books and articles come in the media. Also during these times, there is an increase in the advertising about diet pills. You know the familiar sound; take this pill and watch the weight just fall off! Or maybe, with the diet-no-diet plan, you will lose one hundred pounds in 4.3 weeks, just like I did!
At first you are skeptical, because, this does sound so familiar. You want to believe, you want to feel that you trust the advertiser. After all, it sounds like they did a lot of research, and it is in a good magazine. This isn't the tabloids after all. And yet, part of you doesn't quite believe that you can lose 100 pounds that quickly, or maybe, thankfully, you don't NEED to lose that much, just the 25 pounds you put on since last holiday/birthday/summer.
So you read more, and in another good magazine, you see another ad, maybe a third, fourth, until you start to feel confident that THIS plan is the right plan for you. You commit yourself. You invest the money, and the emotional energy in following the new plan. This is the one.
The first two weeks are usually the best. You feel better, fewer calories, less fat, and probably more fiber will all contribute to this new sense of well-being. You also feel in control of food again, and confident that will last. Naturally, because you feel so much better, you expect there to be a stunning decrease in body weight. When you get on the scale, you are a pleasantly surprised! Nine pounds (or 12, or 8 or some number better than 4 or 5)! This new diet plan really is working. (And it better be - you are giving up all your favorite foods, and drinks and everything else, but finally you will lose all that extra weight!)
So, the first temptation to resist is going out an celebrating. Often times, this is THE moment that derails many of us. The first big-wow effect. This is also the moment so many of us fear...losing our momentum. What if you could keep your momentum every day? What if it didn't have to be so hard in the first place?
A diet plan, by its very nature is a plan to change, temporarily, how one eats. Unfortunately, by the time we make the decision to lose weight, it usually isn't our FIRST decision; instead it is the 5th, or 8th or 15th, or 25th time we decided to lose weight. We feel exhausted at the prospect of working hard to change our eating, only to find that we gain all of the weight back when we go back to our typical eating. What if we could learn to eat differently - so it wasn't a diet plan anymore? What if we could still eat our favorite foods, but not be a prisoner to them?
Here is the Bottom line: the best way to lose weight and sustain a weight loss is by making sure the changes you make to your diet are permanent and easy accomplished. If you love your pizza - no diet plan in the world will work for you if you can't eat pizza for the rest of your life. The same with chocolate, or alcohol. Very few of us want to live a life where we don't enjoy our food - we just don't want to wear our love of it around our middle.
So what is the BEST diet plan? One that doesn't hint at a magical solution that will make you lose weight. If you have decided you are going to lose weight - really decided - then you know that you need to make changes to the way you eat and move. And if you look, you can find resources out there that will help you to lose weight, successfully, permanently and safely, without making you change what you love so much.
Erin Carraway is the founder of Obesity Free for Life.com - a website dedicated to enhancing the lives of the overweight and the obese. While she was obese for nearly her entire adult life, she stumbled upon a simple, free method to lose weight that changed her life forever. Now she coaches others about safe, permanent weight loss using her teaching and research background. She will teach you how to safely lose massive amounts of weight for the rest of your life. Download her free Manual at obesityfreeforlife.com obesityfreeforlife.com
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