If there’s one thing a person needs to understand before they begin to diet, it’s that fat loss doesn’t occur in a linear line.
It’s not as simple as slashing 500 calories off your overall daily caloric total and expecting to be down a pound seven days later. Expecting fat loss to occur like this will only lead you down a path of hopelessness and frustration.
Personally, that’s why I don’t have my clients focus on numbers at all. We don’t measure foods, we don’t count calories, and we keep scale weight and body measurements to a minimum, if at all.
Instead, we focus on behavior change.
We observe our relationship with food by assessing patterns, emotions, and triggers that lead to moments of overeating. And once those have been identified, then we can begin to start working on implementing healthier choices that support our individual lifestyle, preferences, and circumstances.
No two people are the same. To believe that there’s a ‘one-sized fits all’ approach to fat loss is incredibly short-sighted.
If you’re one of the 95% who have a history of yo-yo dieting, you’ve likely been looking for an answer in the all the wrong places.
It’s not at GNC. It’s not at Jenny Craig. And it’s probably not in the Paleo Diet, South Beach Diet, or Atkins Diet. The problem with all of these diets is that they remove personal responsibility from the equation.
It’s easy to lie to yourself and blame the diet when you fail to implement it correctly. And diets of this nature don’t consider your food preferences, schedule, or your individual lifestyle challenges.
Are you a single parent on a budget?
A college student whose primary source of food comes from a cafeteria?
Do you travel for work?
These are all factors that should be considered to help you be successful in your fat loss endeavor.
Cookie cutter diets also don’t consider the complex component of emotions and how those play into our food choices. If it was as simple as “eat this, not that” we’d have that ideal physique by now.
Most people already know what they should be eating; the hang-up is in the execution.
You don’t get to skip the struggle by finding a solution in a magic pill. Body transformations don’t happen without a transformation of the mind first.
There are no short-cuts on the path to self-improvement.
