According to Time Magazine, over 65% of American adults are overweight.
According to the Calorie Control Council, 23% of Americans are currently on a diet.
If everyone who went on a diet was successful, would we have so many overweight
Americans? Probably not.
There are three keys to making your next diet a successful one.
1. Nutrition
2. Exercise
3. Motivation
Nutrition does not necessarily mean starving oneself. Everyone’s body is different. Some people respond very well to high protein diets. They don’t feel hunger, feel energetic and actually lose weight on Atkins style diets. Then there are people who respond very well to high carbohydrate diets. Then, of course, there are those who can cut their calories down to nothing and eat only celery and still not lose an ounce. Finding the right nutrition program to help you lose weight and keep it off means knowing your body well enough to know what it responds to. Choose a nutrition program (Atkins, Body-for-Life, Mediterranean Diet, Zone Diet, etc.) that will yield you the best weight loss results without making you absolutely crazy in the process.
Exercise doesn’t have to mean boring yourself to tears playing gerbil on a treadmill. Find a physical activity that you enjoy and do it at a high intensity for at least 20 minutes a day. What gets you jazzed? Playing Dance Dance Revolution against your kids? Hiking in a nearby state park? Running laps at the local high school track? Tennis? It doesn’t have to be as intense as a spinning class or as boring as the back and forth of an elliptical machine for an hour a day. If you can break a sweat, you’re burning calories! If you can break a sweat on a regular basis then you’re exercising, and with the right nutrition plan, you’ll lose weight!
Motivation is the thing that will keep you going on those days when you’re craving a Three Musketeers bar and haven’t seen the number on the scale go down in three days. Without motivation, eating right and exercising just won’t work. You need to be motivated to eat right. You need to be motivated to get up and exercise every day. If you aren’t motivated then you just aren’t going to bother. So what motivates you?
We’ll talk about that in my next blog.