Lose Weight For The Summer
1. Lose Weight For The Summer
Being overweight under the scorching summer sun is not enjoyable. It’s also not particularly pleasant to be seen in your fat stomach or your fat thighs when everyone else around you is wearing gnat-sized beachwear and dripping oil onto their wasp-like abdomens.
In reality, for persons who are overweight or obese, summer may be a particularly terrible challenge, with endless opportunities for embarrassment and suffering to be had. So let’s have a look at some of the ways you might lose some weight and have a more enjoyable summer experience. But first, a word of caution.
2. Summer Weight Loss Trap
One guaranteed way to fail is to look for a “shortcut” weight-loss method or diet. You know what I mean: the type of program that promises “a fast effortless way to reduce weight”.
In my experience, none of these diets or pills actually work, and the medical evidence is quite clear: the maximum rate of sustainable fat loss is between 1 and 2 pounds per week, perhaps a little more if you are obese.
Besides, if a brilliant scientist did manage to concoct a formula for rapid effortless weight reduction, overnight he would be more famous than Einstein.
He certainly wouldn’t be peddling his program in 30-second TV infomercials or mail-order advertisements. So for the sake of your sanity as well as your financial health, don’t waste time on weight loss methods that make extravagant claims.
If you don’t believe this, think of any of your overweight friends who favor the short-term “lose 20 pounds in two weeks” type of approach, and ask yourself why they are still overweight.
3. Three Month Summer Diet Plan
It’s impossible to drop significant amounts of weight in a week or two. It takes around three months to notice a substantial difference in your body form.
Recall that the human body is more interested in ensuring its survival than it is in improving its appearance and that rapid weight loss is a symptom of disease rather than good health, the only guaranteed way to improve your body shape is to adopt a gradual approach that includes healthy eating and increased physical activity.
In three months, you can drop approximately 26 pounds, which is more than enough for the majority of overweight people to notice significant health benefits as well as a significantly leaner body.
Furthermore, by losing weight gradually in this method, you have a far lower possibility of gaining it again, allowing you to lose even more weight if necessary without the risk of hitting a weight loss plateau or encountering another impediment to your progress.
4. You Need A Motive
No one likes to change their habits. So if you want to change your eating and exercise habits, you need a strong motive – something to keep you dieting and exercising when boredom sets in. Whatever motive you choose, it must be something more powerful than the urge to eat tasty high-calorie foods in front of the TV!
A Good Motive For Summer Weight Loss
Anything that encourages you to commit to your weight loss goal in advance is a terrific motivator to stick with it. So don’t be afraid to take risks.
You may spend your money on an extravagant beach vacation or on beautiful clothes that will fit the figure you hope to achieve at the end of your diet program.
The fact that you must succeed in both of these acts serves as ongoing motivation throughout the process of completing both.
5. Men And Celebrities Have Better Motivation
In my experience, both with private clients as well as dieters who belong to my weight loss forum, men and celebrities exhibit the strongest motivation. Men, I suspect, because typically they have a narrower range of daily tasks and responsibilities than women.
Celebrities, because typically they have a powerful commercial motivation to maintain their physical appearance.
I offer weight loss help to a number of celebrity figures, some of whom are regulars on my forum, and I am always impressed with their ability to make short-term sacrifices to further their longer-term goals. I guess that’s why they achieve so much.
6. Be Positive About Short Term Sacrifices
Whether you’re trying to lose weight for the summer, save money or pass exams, an important piece of the motivational jigsaw is your ability to be positive about making short-term sacrifices.
The choice is fairly simple: you can focus on the “deprivation” involved in giving up certain foods, or you can focus on the benefits you will get by not eating these foods. Sadly, many dieters focus on feeling deprived. After a while, they see their diet as a burden, a bore, an evil necessity.
This is why so many of them quit. They can’t “see” the benefits that weight loss will bring them. If you want to improve your body shape for the summer, you must avoid this trap and appreciate the longer-term benefits you will receive by making short-term adjustments to your lifestyle.
7. The Good News About Improving Your Diet
Many of our eating preferences, hunger cravings, and general attitudes toward food are greatly influenced by the foods and beverages we consume.
My network includes a plethora of mothers with families who have reported dramatic improvements in their personal and family food habits after less than three weeks of improved eating habits. The point is that the ordinary modern diet is laden with sugar, fat, and sodium, all of which train us to crave even more of these foods and beverages.
However, if you can manage to break free from your dependency on junk ingredients for even a couple of weeks, you will notice a significant improvement in your taste buds. This brings me to the topic of healthy eating.
8. Think Healthy Eating Not Weight Loss
According to my own experience, one of the most successful weight loss tactics is to concentrate on eating healthy foods. I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t stand on your weighing scales; I’m just saying that you shouldn’t judge your progress only on the results of the scales.
Keep in mind that it’s just as vital to enjoying your meals and feel good about your new eating habits as it is to lose weight.
And any diet that you despise is doomed to failure, no matter how much weight you lose, since as soon as you reach your target, you will revert to your old eating habits and recover every pound you had dropped in the process.
9. The Top 10 Healthy Eating Habits
In a nutshell, a healthy diet involves
(1) More home-cooked food, less eating out.
(2) More fresh fruit as snacks.
(3) More fresh vegetables as snacks and with meals.
(4) More beans as sides or in stews.
(5) More dense chewy bread, less refined white bread, and bread snacks.
(6) More fish, skinless chicken/turkey, less red meat.
(7) Smaller servings of red meat, larger servings of vegetables.
(8) Eating low-fat dairy foods.
(9) Adding less fat in the form of butter, mayo, sour cream, to the food on your plate. This is a huge source of excessive calories.
(10) Stocking up with healthy snack foods to keep hunger at bay.
If you fill up with healthy nutritious calories, you won’t want the junk foods that hunger makes you eat. As far as weight management goes, hunger remains Public Enemy Number One.
10. Exercise Provides Wonderful Indirect Benefits
Exercise does burn extra calories and therefore does help to widen your calorie deficit. But its direct effect on weight loss is typically quite small. In fact, it’s not uncommon to gain weight when you start exercising. The real weight reduction benefits of exercise are indirect ones.
It raises our metabolic rate, helping us to burn calories at a slightly faster rate, and improves our mood, which typically reduces our need for comfort eating.
However, don’t overdo your exercise workouts. I’ve lost count of the number of dieters who started exercising too vigorously and burnt out within 3 weeks. Ideally, start with 45 minutes/day of any physical activity you can easily manage, and very gradually increase the duration and intensity. Listen to your body at all times, and be sure to loosen up beforehand and wind down afterward.
Related Post: ARE WEIGHT LOSS PILLS SAFE?
11. See Yourself As You Want To Be
If your goal is a waistline you can proudly display in the sun, then don’t wait until it happens to “see” it. Visualize it from the moment you start dieting.
Visualize yourself walking along a beach, or lying next to the pool with a perfectly flat stomach. Whatever your ambition for your weight or body, get used to visualizing it in the greatest possible detail. Because “seeing it” is the first step to making it come true. As they say, one picture is worth a thousand words.
12. Very Overweight? Just Visualize The Benefits!
If you have a lot of weight to lose (100 pounds+), you may not think that losing 26 pounds in three months is particularly worthwhile. If so, ask yourself this question. What’s the alternative? No matter what method you choose, you won’t lose weight any faster, so it’s only a question of when you start and how long it’s going to take. I can answer the last question right now.
Losing 100 pounds takes about a year – typically a little longer to allow for disasters along the way. Fifteen months would be a more realistic time span to reduce weight by this amount.
This is nothing. Just visualize yourself walking down the street 100 pounds lighter, and tell me that eating healthily for 15 months is too high a price to pay for such a wonderful prospect.
13. Your First Priority – Get Support
If you are serious about losing weight for the summer, your first step should be to seek out assistance. Participate in a weight loss support group at work, a fitness class, or attend weight loss meetings. Alternatively, you might participate in an online forum.
Losing weight on your own is entirely possible, provided that everything goes smoothly and your scales continue to report positive results. If you run across challenges along the way, as you will almost certainly do, having the support of actual people can make all the difference between success and failure.
If you’re having trouble getting help, you can try my own weight loss discussion forum. Everything about it is fantastically entertaining and extremely inspiring.
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