Permanent Weight Loss...  Is it Possible?

These days you can’t turn on the TV or look at a magazine without seeing some ad for a weight loss product or service. One would think with all those weight loss products and services on the market today, we should be the thinnest nation in the world, but we are not!   In America alone, we spend over $50 billion per year on weight loss products and services and yet we are still losing the weight loss battle.  Has anybody stopped and asked why? 

There are many reasons why we have not been able to lose weight, or to be more precise, to lose weight and keep it off.   Here I will cover what I consider the number one reason.

I would like to start with a question.  What is the one thing that most weight loss products and services you see on the market today have in common?  Give up?  They promise fast results and the reason they promise fast results is because that is what people want to hear.  They don’t take into consideration at all the fact that fast results are almost impossible to maintain long term, but then again that is not their problem.   Most weight loss products can deliver on their promise of fast results but where they fail miserably is permanent results.  What is the point of losing weight if you are only going to gain it all back again?  Let me explain the reason why most weight loss programs and diets fail at helping people lose weight permanently.

Here is an undisputed fact:  In order to lose weight fast, you must make big changes in your life.  There is no way around it.  The problem with big changes is that they get you far outside your comfort zone and the farther you get away from your comfort zone, the more likely you will get overwhelmed and quit. 

Humans are creatures of habit.  More than 90 percent of the things we do every day 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.  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 your 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, mental or physical, that new action gets us outside our comfort zone.  Every time you get outside your comfort zone, you feel a degree of discomfort and your body is fighting to get you back to its comfort zone.   Of course if you keep repeating the new action, eventually your comfort zone will expand to include that new action.  The question is, can you keep repeating the new action and tolerate the discomfort long enough, until that new action becomes a habit and gets within your comfort zone?  Also keep in mind the more new habits you are trying to develop, the farther outside your comfort zone you will be, the bigger the discomfort you will feel and the longer it will take for your comfort zone to expand to include the new habits and the greater the chance of burning out. 

Unfortunately, most weight loss programs and diets on the market today simply don’t understand how habits are formed and how people’s comfort zones work or they just don’t care because all they want is to make a quick buck.  They wrongly assume that once somebody starts seeing results they would be motivated to stick with their diet or weight loss program.  WRONG!  If results were enough to motivate, then how come most people can’t keep the weight off after they lose it. Statistics show that the vast majority of people regain all the weight back within 1 to 2 years. 

The main reason people regain all the weight back is because with most weight loss programs and diets they are asked to make big changes into their lives at one time.  They fail to understand how to apply change into someone’s life without getting them overwhelmed.  They have no understanding of how to best eliminate or develop habits and that is why most weight loss programs and diets fail. 

Signs that indicate that a weight loss program will not be effective long term:

Remember, knowledge is not power, applied knowledge is power.  So for any weight loss program to be effective, beside providing you with the right information, it must have a plan of how you can apply that information into your life with the lowest risk of burning out.

So what is the best way to lose weight?

The best way to lose weight is through small sustainable changes over time.  All the actions required to lose the weight have to become automatic and part of your comfort zone if you want to keep the weight off.  Actually the process of losing weight permanently is much easier than losing weight fast, because you only need to make small changes in your life.  Yes, with this method you will lose weight much slower, but at least you will only need to lose the weight once, unlike most weight loss programs and diets on the market today, with which you get to lose the same weight over and over again every year.

My question to you is this:  What is the point of losing weight fast, if you are going to gain it all back again?  Wouldn’t you rather take a few extra months and lose the weight the right way and never worry about your weight again for the rest of your life?

Bottom line on weight loss

So, the bottom line is, having the right knowledge on how to lose weight is only half of the weight loss solution.  How to apply that knowledge into life without getting overwhelmed and burning out is the other half of the solution.  Unfortunately most weight loss programs and diets on the market today only provide half of the solution to the weight problem and that is the biggest reason why we are losing the weight loss battle.

Fortunately there are some weight loss programs that do provide a complete solution to the weight problem.  One of those programs is the Stavros Method.  With the Stavros Method participants don’t just learn what they must do in order to lose the weight they want and improve the health in the process, they also learn how to implement that knowhow into their lives in a way that will not get them overwhelmed and they might even enjoy the process.

If you would like to learn how to lose weight and keep it off for life, call us today and schedule a free no obligation consultation.  (203) 778-9545

Olympus Personal Training

& Weight Management

18 Mill Plain Rd

Danbury CT 06811

(203) 778-9545