People often ask how they can lose weight fast. The reality is that you did not get fat quick so why should you expect to lose fat quickly? Everything worth having in life takes time to accomplish. You spend years in school to learn a trade, you spend years building a career, and you should spend years working on your fitness. Too many people view weight loss or building muscle as some kind of task to be accomplished and then strive to complete it as soon as possible. The problem with this approach is that fitness is not something you do once and then never again. Being healthy is more like gardening or learning. It is a continual process in which you make slow steady progress over a long period of time. Now granted you should have some kind of goal in mind like if you are obese and want to lose 50 pounds to be in the healthy range that is great. However, once you lose those 50 pounds you can’t just go back to your previous habits and check it off as complete. You have to continue working on your weight, your health, and your general fitness if you want to maintain those results. Tom Venuto talk about healthy lifestyle changes in his Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle program and does a really good job of laying out the differences between positive life changes and fad diets that don’t work.
When you decide to lose weight, build muscle or just improve your general fitness it is critical to focus on the lifestyle changes you are making and enjoy the process. So let’s say for example that you need to lose 10 pounds. In order to lose those 10 pounds you are going to replace your bad habit of drinking soda with drinking water. You currently drink 3 cans of coke a day so by switching to water you are cutting 420 calories a day which comes out to about 3,000 calories a week deficit. An old rule of thumb says that a pound of fat is about 2500 calories so with change you can expect to lose about a pound a week and achieve your goal in 10 weeks. That is really not that long of a time to wait and you have made a great improvement that will help you long term. A move like this is a healthy life style change that can be sustained long term, doesn’t involve any kind of rapid weight loss or major changes in your diet. Once you adapt to drinking water instead of soda it will be easy to give up soda forever and maintain your weight loss. This is much better and healthier that trying some crazy 2 week tuna fish diet.
Anybody else have good examples of small changes that produce big results? Comment below.
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