Weight Loss - Developing Your Own Weight Loss Program

Are you interested in losing weight? If you are, you may have been told to create your own weight loss plan. Weight loss plans, which serve as guides and motivation for many individuals, have been known to help many achieve their diet goals. With tons of new weight loss shakes popping up everywhere, it is easy to wonder how well they actually work for losing weight. Health fitness and weight loss. We all know the drill eat less, exercise more and you lose weight.

Contrary to what most people believe, weight loss workouts do not have to be time-consuming and demanding. A growing epidemic is on the rise, and it's disease is obesity and being overweight. Losing weight might seem like an insurmountable goal, even more so if you have a lot of weight to lose. Permanent weight loss should be everyone's goal when entering a weight loss program. Fit into a new pair of jeans that is two sizes smaller than your current size!

You will lose plenty of weight. Will it be healthy? Nope. Will the weight stay off once you are done with this diet and are then forced to go back to your "normal" way of eating? Not a chance. Will the weight you lose come from fat or will it be muscle, water, bone, and (hopefully!) some fat? Which brings me to my test: I call it the "Can I eat that way for the rest of my life?" Test.

I know, it does not exactly roll off your tongue, but it gets the point across. The lesson here is: any nutritional plan you pick to lose weight must be part of a lifestyle change you will be able to follow - in one form or another - forever. That is, if it's not a way of eating you can comply with indefinitely, even after you get to your target weight, then it's worthless.

Will the diet plan you are considering teach you how to eat long term, or does it spoon-feed you information? Will the diet rely on special bars, shakes, supplements or pre-made foods they supply? Let's do another diet A vs. B comparison. Diet A is going to supply you with their foods, as well as their special drink or bars to eat, and tell you exactly when to eat them. You will lose - say - 30 lbs in two months. Recall the Chinese proverb. Both diets will assist you to lose weight.

Only one diet, however, will teach you how to be self-reliant after your experience is over. Diet A is easier, to be sure, and causes faster weight loss than diet B, and diet B takes longer and requires some thinking and learning on your part. However, when diet A is over, you are right back where you started and have been given no skills to fish.

Diet companies don't make their profits by teaching you to fish, they make their money by handing you a fish so you must rely on them indefinitely or come back to them after you gain all the weight back. Thus, diet B is superior for allowing you to succeed where other diets failed, with knowledge gained that you can apply long term.

We now make our way to another test to help you choose a nutrition program for long term weight loss, and it does not actually involve nutrition. The missing link for long term weight loss is exercise. Exercise is the essential component of long term weight loss. Many diet programs do not contain an exercise component, which means they are losers for long term weight loss from the very start.

Any program that has its focus on weight loss but does not include a comprehensive exercise plan is like buying a car without tires, or a plane without wings. Any exercise is better than no exercise. However, like diet plans, not all exercise is created equal, and many people often choose the wrong form of exercise to maximize their efforts to lose weight. For example, they will do aerobics exclusively and ignore resistance training.

Resistance training is an essential component of fat loss, as it builds muscle essential to your metabolism, increases 24 hour energy expenditure, and has health benefits beyond aerobics. The reader will also note I said fat loss above not weight loss. Though I use the term 'weight loss' throughout this article, I do so only because it is a familiar term most people understand.

However, the true focus and goal of a properly set up nutrition and exercise plan should be on fat loss, not weight loss. A focus on losing weight, which may include a loss essential muscle, water, and even bone, as well as fat, is the wrong approach. Losing the fat and keeping the all important lean body mass (LBM), is the goal, and the method for achieving that can be found in my ebook(s) on the topic, and is beyond the scope of this article.

Bottom line: the type of exercise, intensity of that exercise, length of time doing that exercise, etc., are essential variables here when attempting to lose FAT while retaining (LBM). Many diet programs out there don't address the psychological aspect of why people fail to be successful with long term weight loss.

However, quite a few studies exist that have looked at just that. In many respects, the psychological aspect is the most important for long term weight loss, and probably the most underappreciated component. Studies that compare the psychological characteristics of people who have successfully kept the weight off to people who have regained the weight, see clear differences between these two groups. Had the tendency to use eating to regulate mood.

Additional studies on men and women find psychological characteristics such as "having unrealistic weight goals, poor coping or problem-solving skills and low self-efficacy" often predict failure with long term weight loss. The main point of this section is to illustrate that psychology plays a major role in determining if people are successful with long term weight loss. If it's not addressed as part of the overall plan, it can be the factor that makes or breaks your success. This, however, is not an area most nutrition programs can adequately tackle and should not be expected to.