I’m a big fan of weight loss tips, as every once in a while I read one that helps me to think about my fitness lifestyle in a different light. Read enough about weight loss and fitness, and you begin to start developing your own philosophies on the subject.
Not only that, but I find these tips highly motivating. At worst, they remind you of certain aspects of fitness that you might have forgotten about. At best, they can inspire you to push forward and change your life.
However, while most of these tips are beneficial, they still don’t address the problem of weight loss, and therefore are ineffective when used alone.
Everything Tries to Treat the Symptom
That is the problem. Nearly every one of these weight loss tips tries to attack the problem by treating the symptom. Weight is a symptom. Whether it goes up or down is an effect of your lifestyle habits.
Because of this, it makes very little sense to make weight loss the focus of your weight loss program. Instead, we need to focus on what causes the weight loss and treat the actual problem – a faulty lifestyle.
Focus Your Efforts on Creating a Healthy Lifestyle
What we need to do to effectively lose weight is simplify every decision in our life to a basic question. Is what I’m about to do going to make me healthier?
That question is going to get right to the root of the problem. Each time you answer yes to that question you are shifting the momentum towards achieving a healthy body composition.
Think about that for a second. Had you asked yourself that very question during the period of weight gain you experienced, you would have noticed that the answer to the question would have more times than not been no. You gained weight as a result of mindlessly answering no.
That’s because weight gain is a side effect of living an unhealthy lifestyle. Just the opposite also holds true – weight loss is a side effect of living a healthy lifestyle.
Take the Emphasis Off Weight Loss
To create a period of sustainable weight loss we need to take the focus off of weight loss and instead put it on trying to be healthier. When we do this we begin to change our body from the inside out.
Ultimately, we should be trying to figure out how to be healthier, instead of trying to figure out how to lose weight. The latter will always leave us in a period of transition. The former will help us work towards creating a new healthy lifestyle, and in return, we’ll receive all the mental and physical benefits that come along with one.
Suprisingly, we do not control our weight loss, at least not in the technical sense. We indirectly influence it with our actions, but we don’t physically tell our bodies to send fat loss hormones throughout our body to mobilize fatty acids, and then tell them to burn them for fuel. That is an involuntary action undertaken by our body.
So why try to control it? Wouldn’t it make more sense to let your body do as it may, and instead focus on the actions we take in our life that make us healthier both mentally and physically?
These are the things that are within our control. These are the things that empower us.
Once you’ve actually created that healthy lifestyle, influencing your body composition becomes as easy as eating less or eating more. The roots have already been established. Eating less is then a much less overwhelming concept to implement.
The next time you find yourself getting frustrated at your lack of weight loss, take a step back and remember the big picture. Refocus your efforts on creating a healthy lifestyle, and weight loss is sure to be a positive side effect.