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Fighting Obesity: Psyching Yourself to Act
Part 2 in a four-part series on obesity and weight loss

(Story continued...)

2) You are in this for the long haul.

No dropouts allowed. This may be the hardest concept to grasp. I get letters asking over and over why a person who has been following a diet or exercise program still hasn’t seen any changes in two or four or eight weeks. Some people write that they saw good results when they followed a certain plant, only to gain all the weight back again later.

This is where your mental fortitude comes in. You will need to psych yourself up to keep going when you don’t feel like you are getting any results. Revisit the anecdotes you’ve heard about people who have lost weight. You will notice that those who kept it off stuck with the program. Those who followed a trendy diet and lost oodles of fat, gained it all back when they eventually returned to their normal habits, habits  that led to their weight gain in the first place. Notice that people who have successfully kept weight off generally are so busy there’s no time to fall back into old ways. Sure, they may join in on pizza binges, happy hours or cut back on workouts every now and again. But if they are experiencing long-term success with their weight loss, it’s because they are still sticking to healthy habits most of the time.

3) You must improve the way you eat, not change it dramatically.

It’s natural to want to follow a set of diet rules that take decision-making out of the equation. It’s easier to resist the temptation to overeat if you know flat-out that you can’t eat certain foods. That’s why many popular diets work for a while. You say “no” to bread or pasta or alcohol or what have you, and you lose weight. But not all diets fuel you in healthy ways. Many diets aren’t desirable in the long term because even if you lose weight, you could be missing out on important nutrients. (And any diet that tells you not to eat fruit is just plain wrong.)

But even if an extreme diet plan is healthy, if it is too different from the way you eat now and the way that others around you eat, it’s going to be tough to follow for more than a few weeks or months. That’s why you need to improve on what you eat now, rather than totally change your diet.

As you get more comfortable with healthy eating and squeezing more activity into your life, you can start to make more dramatic changes. But trying to do too much at once is a recipe for failure because the changes won’t be realistic enough to stick with. Giving up all meat may not be possible if you love steaks and roast chicken. Axing all bread and pasta would be next to impossible to sustain if your family eats lots of Italian food. A fancy health club far from your home or office might look appealing on first blush, but you won’t go to it if it’s too inconvenient. There is no one diet or fitness plan that is perfect for everyone. You’ll need to identify your own eating and exercise patterns and then improve them with minor tweaks.

4) You must move more.

More people diet than exercise. For some reason it’s seems easier to deny yourself food than to get your butt off the couch. Many people ask me if they can get away with dieting but not exercising. The answer? No way.

True, you will see faster results from a diet. But you will also see faster weight re-gain if you diet without exercising. And if you lead a sedentary lifestyle, you will place a limit on how beneficial your diet will be. You can be thin but unfit. For true health and for long-term leanness, you need to eat well and exercise more.

The good news is that you can buffer yourself against over-eating slip-ups if you are highly active. If you are very overweight, chances are you are very unfit, too. So exercising may not only be unenjoyable, it may feel extremely difficult. Respect the pain. Exercising doesn’t have to hurt. In the beginning, just simply dial it down and do something that is easier. You will become fit very quickly if you are consistent. And then you can bump it up a notch. You will still have to wage the mental struggle that predisposes you to want to quit. But the tough stuff physically will pass once you get into a regular program.