Mental State During Weight Loss

One of the main problems that most people have when attempting to lose weight is that their mind is not in the right place. Some people will feel like they have to do it and don’t believe there is any reason that they should be doing it, and others simply don’t have the willpower to hold up a non-junk diet.
One of the most common attitudes that some people have when attempting to lose weight is the “all or nothing attitude” which is self explanatory – people will want to have the ‘perfect diet’ which will get all of the excess fat off quickly. Sure, you may succeed at this but in a few months down the road, that weight and even more will come back on you (referred to as the yo-yo diet) because you are not prepared for a healthy lifestyle. Even the fad diets are only good for temporary weight loss or an unhealthy loss.

For a day, two days, a week, two weeks, they will run the “perfect diet” and the weight loss will show but then they can’t maintain and will emotionally break down and result to the same foods that made them overweight or obese to begin with. From having a fall back to the old diet, they will gain the weight back, and likely more (due to a metabolism change) in about the same amount of time as it took to lose it.

So for the first few days, weeks, maybe even months, the ‘perfect diet’ will be working ‘perfectly’ but all of a sudden when you hit your goal, you will stop the diet and jump back onto your old eating habits and gain it back in a matter of no time.

There are two questions you should be asking yourself.

1. Is your goal to lose weight permanently or lose the weight long enough to have a lot of fun while putting them back on but think that even by doing this you won’t go over your starting weight?
2. Are you looking for the diet that is well under maintenance and will help you lose 5-7lbs a week or are you okay with losing a pound or two a week? The main idea is to either eat just a little bit under maintenance or to exercise enough that you burn over what you are eating and this will give you a steady and healthy weight loss.

If you end up answering that you want to just lose the weight temporarily or you want to work a miracle and lose all of the fat in a matter of weeks, or in some cases months, maybe you should re-evaluate why you are going on the diet and attempt it when you are focused on the important aspects of dieting.

The next attitude that a lot of people hold is the attitude of ‘sacrifice’ where people believe that they are sacrificing something by going on a diet. You do have to sacrifice some of the unhealthy foods but you should only be dieting for your own personal reasons and it should never be a sacrifice. So you stop yourself from eating the foods which are stopping you from reaching your weight loss goal, that isn’t really a sacrifice, is it?

People with this attitude will usually resort back to their old eating habits early in the diet or even when it is finished and pack the weight back on and become even less motivated of dieting in the future.

Another major problem that people have with weight loss occurs when they fail a goal. This is most common when someone is either dieting for the wrong reasons or sets a big goal instead of little goals. If someone fails a weight loss goal, it will usually target the in the brain that this is all a waste of time and they will never lose the weight and therefore result back to their super unhealthy diet, continue to gain weight, and never believe that diets actually work.

You have to remember that it can take months or even years in some cases to lose the excess fat off of your body.

As far as motivation goes during the diet, weighing yourself in every week can keep you motivated when you do see the results but you have to keep in mind that some weeks are better than others and you could see yourself gain weight at times. With the first few weeks being the hardest for most people, seeing you not making any progress can really hurt your motivation.

If you find that you have ever made any of these errors before, you should not be worried about what happened in the past and you do learn from your mistakes. What happened in the past is done with, if you can’t help the cravings and have fast food all day, don’t let it bring you down and go back to having it every day, just move on and continue with your diet and maybe even push yourself harder to make up for it.

There is only one way you can actually achieve your goal and not gain the weight back ever and that is to adapt to the healthy lifestyle you have been manipulating for a little while already. You don’t just lose the weight and then stop eating healthy and exercising, it’s not that easy. Losing weight is hard work and takes a lot of dedication and getting up after you fall as well.