Are You Having Trouble Losing Weight?

Starting the journey of weight loss is often difficult and certainly can be confusing. All of the conflicting advice can make somebody new to dieting overwhelmed and worried about whether they're doing it right or not.

 Luckily, I've done my fair share of dieting and I've learned a lot on the way. I've got a few tips that I'd like to share with you to try and make it a bit simpler for any new dieters and possibly even some tips that people who have tried and failed may find useful.

Diet Tips

The first thing that you should know is that it's generally a good idea to talk to a doctor before you start your diet. They will know a lot about your specific needs and can help you avoid some pitfalls that you might fall into if you don't seek their advice. 

Not only will they be able to help you with things that you might specifically need to do or not to do they often have access to some high quality resources to help you on your journey!

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The next thing you need to do is make an attitude adjustment. Many people go into diets believing that they can lose the weight and than simply go back to their old habits once they're done. 

You sure could but after some time has passed all of the hard work and effort you put into losing that weight will be to some extent wasted as you regain all of that weight. When you start dieting you need to realize that the changes you make here are things that you'll likely have to stick to for the rest of your life. 

With that in mind you need to keep in mind the things you are doing. Am I going to be able to do this for the long haul? When you pick things that you believe you can maintain you'll often find that your weight loss will slow down. 

Nobody likes to wait but it's better to have a diet you can maintain for the long term to eventually reach your goal than to pick some kind of starvation diet that will cause you to relapse into bad habits the moment you reach your goal.

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Getting to the diet proper, your biggest concern should be calorie consumption. There are a lot of fancy diets out there that suggest that you only eat this or only eat that. The thing is that these diets are only good if they give you a calorie deficit. 

The single most important aspect to losing weight is your calorie consumption. To start you will want to figure out the amount of calories that your body expects in a day. You can do this by simply looking up a calorie calculator and putting in the information to get that magic number. 

From there you want to make sure that the amount of calories you are taking in are less than that number. The general rule of thumb is that for every 3000 calories under your expected amount you will lose around a pound.

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Now that you know how many calories your body wants in a day you need to decrease that by a certain amount in order to lose weight. You need to keep in mind two things when making this decision. A big one is that you don't want to go below 800 calories in a day. This number could actually be higher for some people but this number is generally considered a safe cut off for the amount of calories your body NEEDS to function. If you go below this number on a regular basis you can do your body some serious harm. 

The other aspect is that you need to pick a number you can actually maintain. If your number is 2500 calories you might be tempted to drop down to like 1000 calories a day for maximum weight loss while still being above that 800 calorie limit. 

The problem is that unless you are eating a LOT of plain salad to fill you up you are going to be HUNGRY! Try and pick a number that you can reasonably expect to follow for any length of time.

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Exercise is often touted as quite important when it comes to diets. I maintain that it isn't actually that important. 

Don't get me wrong it has all sorts of benefits. You will improve your health, your fitness level and so on. It will also help burn calories which can be a great help in losing weight. The thing is that it takes quite a bit of exercise to actually burn a decent amount of calories. 

If your goal is to lose weight exercise will help but it is NOT necessity. I suggest you exercise as often as you are able for all of the mentioned benefits and more but if you aren't able to don't feel like your failing your diet. You can easily lose weight simply by controlling your calories without ever doing a jumping jack or lifting a weight.

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Failure. I believe that this is a huge part of many peoples weight loss journey. You will likely have the occasional day where you absolutely destroy your calorie count by going to a burger joint or a pizza place. 

The big thing here is to accept this and simply get back on the saddle. The simple reality is that you only fail a diet by quitting the diet. The occasional cheat day is not actually failure. It will slow your diet down but this is a journey and journeys have ups and downs. 

As long as you get right back to eating properly you will be fine. Don't talk yourself into quitting a diet because you already "failed" it.

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There's a lot more that you can learn that will help in a diet but this was supposed to be some simple advice to get you started. Just remember that this won't be easy but it will be worth it.