The Quick Weight Loss Manifesto
The most common approach to weight loss tends to be to try and figure out whatever seems to be the quickest way to lose weight and run with it full-steam for just a few weeks. After those first few weeks, the average dieter will abandon all hope and go right back to their previous lifestyle, even if they were succeeding on their diet!
The reason for this is predictable: dieting sucks. And quick weight loss diets tend to be even worse, because in order to lose weight quickly you are going to have to seriously deprive your body of calories. That usually means depriving yourself of nutrients, which usually results in very uncomfortable feelings. If you were to continue on the type of diet that relies on severe restriction of nutrients for very long, you would experience a lot of different health problems. But your body is smart enough to not let you do that to it very easily, and so you will experience poor mood, tiredness, and even pain. And cravings. Lots of cravings.
What about using a quick weight loss center?
Just as there are many people who would like to shed those extra pounds extremely rapidly, there are innumerable dieting centers that will offer to help you with this. The problem of motivation is somewhat addressed in this scenario, because you are offered support from the personnel at the diet center, who will coach you through a variety of ways to cope with feeling awful. But the fact remains that if you are simply restricting your diet, you will feel bad. You need a healthy diet in order to feel energetic and happy, and you will feel the difference very quickly if you begin to reduce the nutrients that you are putting in your body.
Some people do experience success with weight loss centers offering this type of rapid diet service, but the majority of those people will end up putting all the weight back on as soon as they stop paying their monthly or weekly service fee. That is because these types of diets are not sustainable. Often you will have to buy and eat particular foods to get where you want in your program, and what do you suppose will happen when you go back to eating regular food? Will you know exactly what you can and cannot tolerate without accumulating fat? Of course you won’t, how could you? All you have learned is how to eat pre-packaged meals.
In my opinion, points systems are equally problematic. They make it very easy to cheat, and very hard to lose weight. Many of these plans promise lifetime results, and lifestyle changes, but the plain fact is that in my experience with people working these types of programs is that it simply doesn’t work out that way. Often people counting their “points” don’t end up with any real understanding of what foods do cause weight gain and which do not, and so typically end up fatter than they started. That has been my observation.
Does any quick weight loss diet offer lasting results?
In my opinion, this will depend on how much weight you need to lose and it will depend on whether take the time to really try and learn how your body works, rather than following some guru. When you look at the way that the human body actually stores and uses fat, I think that things start to become a little simpler to understand. Because up until that point, you are simply blindly following advice, purchasing meals, and hoping for the best. You may as well be burning incense and chanting.
But when you start to understand the science behind weight loss diets then things become much more readily comprehensible. Because the body does not think in terms of points, but it does respond predictably to the intake of specific nutrients. So your job becomes to understand what it is that each chemical constituent of your food is going to convince your body to do.
Does that mean there is a magic bullet for quick weight loss? I don’t know that there is. I do think that there are very specific ways that you can help the process along by manipulating the way that your food affects your hormonal balance. You see, the body’s whole decision-making process with regard to gaining and losing fat is controlled by hormones, and the release of those hormones is controlled by the food you eat. So if you are fasting, your hormone balance will be much different than if you have been eating a lot of steak, and that will be much different than if you have been eating a lot of candy. Your body natural adjusts to the types of food that are available.
Also consider this: quick weight loss diets should lead to long-term lifestyle changes
You cannot simply make a quick change to your diet and suddenly reset your whole biological clock. It will not work out for you. What you need is a weight loss program that will give you a quick boost at the beginning that you can then proceed to take advantage of over the long hall. Think of it like rebooting your computer after it has been running for a long time.
You start to experience all kinds of bloating once you have been running machines for a while, because the memory gets all used up. After the reboot, everything feels much leaner and faster. But that is only the case until you have again loaded everything into memory and experienced the leaking of modern complexities. After that, you are stuck in the same position that you started. This is precisely the situation we are trying to avoid.
What you want is a very rapid start to your diet, followed by a transition into a sustainable and long-lasting weight loss diet plan. Don’t just look at the quick weight loss methods at the beginning or the long-term weight loss or weight maintenance periods, because none of these individually will get you where you want to go. You have to follow an entire program that leads to lasting lifestyle changes.
You cannot live the way you have been living and be thin. That is a fact, otherwise, you would not be in the position to be dieting in the first place. It is because your overall style of living has led you to a sustained state of weight gain. As long as you continue to live the way you have been living, you will get fatter and fatter. A little break in the middle in which you lose weight quickly is not going to solve the problem.
Quick weight loss tips
In my experience the best way to get involved in this type of sustained weight loss program both physically and mentally is to change the way that you think about food. It is easy to go off track in this modern world where you are constantly marketed to, where there is always someone offering you a piece of birthday cake or a tempting dessert or a decadent breakfast. it is very difficult to make the decision that you will not eat these foods, and the only way that I know of to make that easier is to develop a comprehensive worldview that you know is informed by up-to-date and sound knowledge.
This means always staying informed. You have to always be seeking out and absorbing information about how to tweak your dietary intake in order to make it more optimal. In other words, your goal cannot be as simple as quick weight loss: it has to include being as healthy as you can. You must really invest yourself in the idea of being healthier, and happier, and more energetic.
As soon as you make that decision and start to involve yourself in really learning on your own, that is when the healthy choices to avoid fattening foods will become extremely natural for you. You will not have to resist, because you will have created a cognitive context in which you no longer want what that unhealthy food has to offer you. After all, what do these foods give you? They give you an immediate burst of flavor, and a few-second feeling of satisfaction.
Once you have understood and experienced the lasting satisfaction that comes with being a highly energetic and intrinsically fulfilled individual, then you will not have any cravings for those foods because you will prefer your present feeling to the feeling they have to offer you. That is ultimately my main quick weight loss tip: change your frame of mind, and your behavior will change naturally.
Comments
Very sensible stuff, and good advice. Weight loss is simple. It is just a case of calorie control. How you manage that calorie control is the try part of course. Getting and then sticking to a routine is probably the best advice that I can give.