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I wish more people understood these 10 things about weight loss. People want quick, they want easy, and they want impossible, but those things do not help you on your journey down in pounds.
1. Temporary motivation is temporary
Ever seen an advertisement, just 16 weeks to weight loss results? What happens after 16 weeks. Are you magically going to maintain your weight loss when the program has ran it's course? If you are overweight, and you start a weight loss program because your girl/boyfriend kept telling you, you're fat, or your brothers wedding is in 3 months, what happens in a year+ when you've broken up with that boy/girlfriend, or you don't have a wedding to train for? What is your motivation then to keep it off? Temporary reasons for weight loss, will only lead to temporary success. Weight loss and weight maintenance do not have an end date. They should be life long goals because who wants to keep starting and stopping over and over again? Focus on starting a program to get healthy LONG TERM.
2. You Can't Spot Train
If you're dreaming of that 6 pack, and you start doing 100 sit-ups a day, you are not going to get that 6 pack if you don't do anything about your diet, don't do anything about your cardio, and don't train other parts of you because your muscle groups work in tandem with one another. It's the same reason having back pain can lead to knee pain. When there is an imbalance, one thing affects the other, but in this case, not creating a balance and just trying to overwork one muscle group, it's not going to magically improve that or the other ones that surround it which are actually what give you that beautiful overall sculpted look.
3. Beware of Weight Loss Drugs
Everybody knows of the newest latest and greatest weight loss drugs on the market. You can't spend five minutes (in the US anyway) without hearing about them, or this or that celebrity who used them. Are they effective? Sure, to some degree, but are you also paying attention to the side effects? Are you also aware we've been down this road several times before with so called miracle drugs which 5-10 years later are literally banned when they were once in the hands of millions of Americans and praised just as hard as the current ones are? These drugs have not been studied hard enough or long enough to know long term side effects. Drug companies get rich off your desperation and then when lawsuits and medical studies come out, they take their billions and go leaving you to live with the long term side effects.
4. The thigh gap (and other body part obsessions) are stupid
When thigh gap became the latest craze , women everywhere began killing themselves trying to get it. Of course, you feel like some type of failure if you're working hard in the gym every week, and you didn't see it or bigger boobs, or strong calves, or a sculpted bigger but, but the presence of a thigh gap is primarily determined by bone structure and genetics. Meaning, you could work out until you are blue in the face, but you will NEVER have thigh gap, NEVER. Nothing you can do. No surgery. No weight loss pill. No plie' squat combos, NOTHING if you weren't already born that way. For a lot of things this or that celebrity has and you dream of, you may physically be incapable of achieving it. Focus instead of getting healthy for you.
5. You need to eat real food
When the convenience foods of the 1950s kicked in, and preservatives, and GMO's, and microplastics, and food dyes, became standard, we long ago lost our way from what foods really fuel our bodies. Those are things born of this earth naturally. An apple from the tree, a berry from the bush, meat from a cow only grazing on grass. Start getting back to whole natural foods and cooking your dinner instead of getting it in a bag through a window as best as you can and there will be marked improvements to your health.
6. Your Mental Health is just as important
A lot of weight gain issues can be traced to a lot going on in our lives that we have not been addressing in any type of meaningful way. A lot of people eat to fill the voids, to suppress their bad memories, to try and self-soothe, but they don't actually talk to anyone about why they are feeling this way. You might be killing it at the gym, and eating well, but if you accidentally break your ankle and have to be on the couch in recovery, can you keep going and doing things in a healthy manner if you're stuck with your thoughts and the darkness that can surround them?
7. Toxic people need to go
If you're trying to lose weight and someone is trying to sneak you cupcakes, or they are making fun of you literally as you are trying to lose weight, or they keep telling you, you're going to fail, do everything in your power to spend as little time as possible around these people or flat out cut them from your life. Weight loss is hard, it can be a very long process. You need people who understand that or at the very least are encouraging you in your space to keep going because again, that mental aspect of it, is half the battle.
8. You deserve to look good at any size
A lot of weight gain doesn't happen overnight, and neither does weight loss. There are absolute idiots out there that think because you may be a larger size, you don't deserve to be seen or heard from until you are a small size. Dressing for the size you are now, in cute or flattering clothes is something you can do at any size, and all during the process of your weight loss journey. Stop waiting until you reach your end goal, to wear things that make you happy. Stop letting people tell you, you need to hide yourself or your body. You are a human being that isn't just the pounds on the scale. No one's tombstone reads, Mark was such a great guy because he weighed 175 lbs or forget that Dr. Anne saved dozens of lives, the most important thing was she was a size 6. No. Ridiculous! At every stage of your weight loss, wear clothing you feel good in, and don't stop believing that you can't because of a few idiots or a scale.
9. Find fun in your workouts
Working out does not have to be a dark basement with a treadmill, some weights, and no windows. Exercise is NOT just found in the gym. Find exercise that makes you feel joy---a bike ride, a hike with your dog, a zumba class, playing basketball with your boys. You're never going to keep working out if you find it all so tedious and boring.
10. Hard days will come
Early in weight loss, you're often super motivated because the weight and water weight tends to peel of quickly, but around that 3, 4, 5th month mark when the weight loss slows down a bit, or you hit plateaus and you're just over it, do not stop. Just don't. Find a friend to vent to, workout somewhere new, change up your diet and workout plans, but know you are not broken, you are not a problem, and you can have a relapse and eat a bunch of junk one day, but tomorrow is a new day to work on things one day at a time. And it is, one day at a time. You are not meant to be perfect, you are not meant to compare yourself to someone who's physiology and genetics are completely different from your own and how their body loses weight. You are just a human being who wants to get healthy. It is not the end of the world if you have bad days. Those are normal, but it is in how you keep going when you absolutely do not want to and feel you can't go on, that are the difference between your success or your having to start all over again and again.
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