The biggest obstacle to any permanent change is doing too much too soon. I remember my Chemistry professor used to call this behavior 'Soda bottle enthusiasm'. How true that is. Once the fizz is gone, it does become flat. Lasting change in weight is best brought about by small but sustained efforts. It is hard to be both fast and steady. You must take one small step at a time and stay there until you feel ready for the next step. By doing this, you will find the journey almost effortless, thereby enjoying it more and since you are building on each step, it is less likely that you will tumble down all at once.
Let your goal be to have a healthy lifestyle. And let weight loss be a happy result of it. By not making weight loss your primary goal, a lot of stress is taken off you and when you do lose weight you will be twice as happy. Focus on building healthy habits, one at a time.
Here's how to build a healthy lifestyle and lose weight. I have explained it with my own account of it. Modify it to suit your lifestyle.
1. Figure out what a healthy lifestyle means to you - For me, a healthy lifestyle means:
- Simple but regular exercise 5x a week
- Healthy balanced meals 3 times a day
- Eating right amounts of food (read not being a glutton)
- Atmost one healthy snack in between
- 8-10 glasses of water everyday
- Avoidance of junk food (fries, cheesy pizzas, cakes, large bag of chips etc)
A note about avoiding bad foods: I completely forbid myself from eating them. I do give in to temptation and have them once in a while and I think that should actually be the frequency of eating them anyway. Not every week. So this works for me. I did gradually work towards it and now I like it this way and am hardly tempted by them.
2. Choose the smallest step that you are willing to take - The biggest challenge here is to stop yourself from doing everything at once. Constrain all that energy and excitement. That will mostly translate to wanting quicker results. Train your patience, this is going to be a long journey.
The smallest step I first took was starting to drink water. I had the very bad habit of not drinking water. I could stay the entire day without a single drop of water. This is wrong on so many levels. It makes you constipated, sluggish, wrinkly, hungry and also dumber. So this was the easiest thing I could work on. I didn't attempt to drink 8 glasses everyday at once, I had already tried that before. I first set an aim to drink 2 glasses of water. Simple enough. I could do that. I chose to work on it for a couple of weeks and did not care if I ate too much or didn't exercise or ate out everyday. All I concentrated on was drinking 2 glasses of water everyday. I even gained weight in the beginning. But I was not focussing on the numbers just then. Soon, I graduated to 4 glasses and maintained that for a couple of weeks until I felt comfortable doing it.
3. Take the next step when you feel comfortable - After I was easily drinking 4-6 glasses of water everyday. I moved on to exercise. I chose to walk for 30 minutes 3 times a week. No backbreaking workouts. I didn't even have to do it everyday. Just a simple walk 3 days a week. That was easy too. Initially I did skip a day or two. I would either make up for it during the week or let it be. Once you start having small successes, the momentum will surely build up, the motivation will surely build up. It becomes easier and enjoyable to move on to the next steps.
4. Keep going - It is important to keep climbing the small steps. Think of it like adding feathers to your cap. I can assure you success is very addictive. I eventually progressed to exercising 5 days a week, I then concentrated on not overeating, then I concentrated on eating sensibly. I did it slowly but steadily. In around 5-6 months, my lifestyle had started to be more or less what I have described above.
5. Expect setbacks - You are not going to follow it every single day. You will pig out at restaurants somedays. You will feel like curling up in your bed instead of hitting the gym. That's ok. Don't expect yourself to follow the plan to the letter. Remember you are going to be doing this your whole life. You will deviate from it every now and then in the next 50 years. Don't beat yourself over it. What usually happens is that once our idea of executing it perfectly is spoiled, we don't see the point in continuing it and eventually give up. The best way I was able to overcome it is by having a rule of thumb. I figured that if I'm following my lifestyle 80% of the time, I'm doing good. This gives me a lot of leeway for making mistakes and helps me not get discouraged by them.
6. Track your progress - I am a huge fan of tracking my progress by little checkmarks on a piece of paper. Over time, it gives you a visual description of how you have been doing. I have a chart spanning over 12 weeks and I track my healthy habits in there. You can take a look at it here. As you can see, I have concentrated on one habit at a time. I've had some good weeks and some bad ones, but I've consistently lost weight over the 12 weeks. I keep repeating this sheet and am on my 5th 12-week sheet now!
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You can download the excel sheet here. Download it, change it, print it and start using it!
Think about this and take the first step soon!
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