Olympus Personal Training
& Weight Management
"The Permanent Weight Loss Specialists"
How many times have you gotten excited about losing weight and getting in shape, started a weight loss program and then quit your efforts soon afterward? Or, lost weight only to gain it all back in a short time?
Every year people lose weight only to gain in back. I know people who have failed to stick to a weight loss program so many times that they have given up hope. They think of themselves as lazy and believe that they will never be able to lose weight; so why bother?
There are few reasons that cause people to not stick to a weight loss program. Here we will discuss the 3 most common mistakes people make when they start a weight loss program, which dooms them to fail before they even get started. Knowing these mistakes, will help you avoid making them yourself, thus greatly increasing your chances of sticking to your weight loss efforts and getting the results you want.
Mistake #1: Loss of focus.
Although most people start their weight loss program with their goal in mind and how good they are going to feel once they achieve it, as the program progresses they lose focus of their objective and the benefits they are going to reap. Instead, they start focusing on the discomfort of exercising, missing their favorite TV shows because they have to go to the gym and not being able to eat whatever they want. As you know, we live for instant gratification; everything is now, we don’t want to wait for anything. So the immediate pleasure of eating what we want now and watching our favorite TV shows or doing whatever we want, NOW, usually wins over the future benefits we will receive if we go through some minor discomfort now. When choosing between minor pleasure now and avoiding minor discomforts now VS achieving major benefits in the future by going through some minor discomforts now, unfortunately, in most cases the first one wins.
How to avoid making the same mistake:
You can avoid making this mistake by preparing yourself the right way before you even start any weight loss or exercise program. When you decide you want to get in shape and/or lose weight, before you start your first workout, you want to sit down in a quiet place and write down all the reasons why getting in shape and/or losing weight is important to you. How you are going to feel once you have achieved the body you want? How is it going to affect your life and how other people see you? Don’t be shy; write down as many benefits as you can think. No one needs to see this list.
Once you have completed the list, start another list of the negative effects if you continue with your current lifestyle habits. How you are going to look and feel, one year from now if you continue the way you are, and without making any lifestyle changes. How would your body look? How much you will be weighing? In what shape your health will be in? How would other people see you? Do the same thing for five years from now, 10 years from now and 20 year from now, if you think you could live another 20 years with your current lifestyle. Don’t leave any detail out. It would even help talking to people who did not take care of their health when they were younger, and now they are suffering because of it.
After you write these two lists put them aside and you are ready to begin your weight loss or fitness program. Once you get started with your program and you find yourself focusing on the current discomforts you have to go through to achieve your goals, pull out these two lists to first, remind yourself of the benefits you are working towards and also, the consequences of not sticking to your program. The choice is simple: you can choose to go through the minor discomforts now and reap the health benefits and the tremendous pleasure that goes with it in the future, or continue as you are today, and suffer some major discomforts in the future from all the diseases you could have prevented. It is your choice.
Mistake #2: Doing too much too soon!
This is one of the most common reasons people fail to stick to any weight loss or fitness efforts. You can’t go from doing nothing to all of a sudden working out five to six days per week and eating the perfect diet overnight and not burn out. No matter how great the results are, you will not be able to stick to a program like that long term. Let me explain.
Humans are creatures of habit. More than 90 percent of the things we do everyday, require little or no active thought on our part. It is like we are on automatic. When we do the things we always did and we know we can do, we are inside our comfort zone. Some people’s comfort zones are wider than others but we all have our comfort zones. If you want to change, replace or add a new habit you would need to take yourself out of automatic and manually input the new habit. Well, inputting a new habit requires more energy on our part. Whether that energy is mental or physical it does not matter, because either way, when trying to input a new habit into our everyday life, that action takes us out side our comfort zones. Every time you go outside your comfort zone, you feel a degree of discomfort and your body is fighting to get you back within your comfort zone.
Of course if you keep repeating the new habit, eventually your comfort zone will expand to include the new habit. The question is, can you keep repeating the new habit and tolerate the discomfort long enough, for your comfort zone to include the new habit? Keep in mind that the more new habits you trying to add to your lifestyle at once, the farther outside your comfort zone you will be, the bigger the discomfort you will feel and the longer it will take to adjust.
Now, let assume you are trying to lose weight. In order to lose weight, the healthy way, of course, you need to be eating a diet high in vegetables and fruits and low in refined carbs and other junk foods. Also, you want to be doing aerobics minimum of four times per week and lifting weights at least two times per week. Let say your diet includes lots of junk foods and animal products, and few fruits and vegetables, and you don’t exercise at all. If you try to improve everything at once, the new actions will bring you so far outside your comfort zone and make you so uncomfortable that you will not be able to stick with the new actions long enough to be incorporated into your comfort zone, no matter how great the results that you achieved are. Most likely, you will quit, as most people do who jump head first into a weight loss program.
How to avoid making the mistake:
The advice I give my clients at Olympus Personal Training, to avoid burn out is as follows: If you are a beginner, and you have not exercised regularly for the past four months and your diet needs a lot of work, your goal for the first three to four weeks should not be weight loss, but establishing the habits that will help you lose weight. Give yourself a change to get used to the new habits before you start pushing yourself.
Let me explain. I would begin with the exercise, without worrying about diet for two weeks. To start, I would do the minimum amount of aerobics and weight training I need to be doing so I can get some health benefits from it. For aerobics, the minimum is three times per week of 20 minutes each workout. Try to work your way up to 30 minutes each aerobic workout, within the first few weeks. For weight training I would do two times per week, single sets of each exercise. The whole weight training routine should not take more than 20 to 30 minutes. Do this for two to three weeks.
When you feel comfortable with your new habits, start working on your diet. First, start adding more fruits and vegetables into your life. Than start eliminating the amount of junk food you eat, and so on. Keep in mind you do not need to eliminate all junk food from your life. All you want to do is cut it down. My rule is 80/20. If 80% of the time you eat nutritious foods, most people can get away with the other 20 percent not eating as great.
The idea is to add one or two new habits into your life at a time. Give your body a chance to adjust to the new changes, and your comfort zone, time to expand to include the new changes. Then, if you feel ready, you might want to add a fourth aerobic workout, and so on and so forth until you are doing everything you need to be doing to lose the weight you want.
How fast you can add new habits into your life and remove old ones is up to you and your tolerance level for discomfort. Some people can tolerate more discomfort than others. The one thing that is for sure is very few people can tolerate a lot of discomfort for a long time, but most people can tolerate small amounts of discomfort for a long time. So figure out how much tolerance you have for discomfort, and plan accordingly. My advice to you is that you are better off taking a little bit more time and doing it right, thus greatly increasing your chances of maintaining the results you achieve, than rushing through and greatly increase your chance of burning out and achieving nothing in the long run.
As you might already know, there is a lot of misinformation in the weight loss industry, which sabotages countless people’s efforts to lose weight and get in shape. The biggest problem I find with most weight loss programs is that they offer only part of the solution to people weight problem, so the result is, no matter how well people follow the weight loss program, and no matter what kind of results they get, they will not be able to maintain the results. (That’s if they get any results at all.) As you might already know there are four keys to permanent weight loss, and you must incorporate all four keys into your life if you want to achieve and maintain weight loss. The four keys to weight loss are as follows. Key #1 is some form of resistance training, key #2 is some form of aerobic training, key #3 is proper nutrition, and key #4 is consistency with all of the above. Any weight loss program that does not incorporate all four keys is doomed to fail from the start.
How many times have you seen aerobic machines like steppers and treadmills promoted as if they are all you need to get the body you want? If someone were to follow their advice and use their aerobic machine, assuming their diet is okay, yes, they will lose some weight initially. However, after a while the weight loss will stop. Why? Because, as you might already read in my other reports, if you are trying to lose weight by aerobics or aerobics and diet only, up to 25% of the weight lost is muscle. As you lose muscle mass, your metabolic rate slows down and we all know what happens when your metabolic rate slows down. Weight loss stops, unless we further cut down our calories, but how much less can we eat?
By doing some form of resistance training as we are losing weight, we ensure that our bodies will hold on to the muscle which will keep our metabolic rate at a higher level, which is good for losing weight. This is only one of many examples of what happens when a weight loss program does not incorporate all four keys into your life.
How to avoid making the mistake: This is very simple; just make sure your program includes all four keys to permanent weight loss.
© 2008 Stavros Mastrogiannis
If you have been thinking of starting a weight loss program, give us a call at (203) 778-9545 or email us at olympus@liveyourwaythin.com and schedule a free fitness consultaion. We can help you start on the right track.
