How To Lose Weight Naturally

I want to reframe this topic from that of losing to maintaining. The real question here is not so much that of losing weight as it is that of maintaining the weight loss. There are many ways to lose weight, many unhealthy, but these unnatural weight loss strategies often result in you actually gaining more weight. The trajectory of your weight change becomes positive rather than negative. And it happens to you over and over. A strategy you were told provides fast weight loss actually turns into a life time of weight gain. A fast weight loss strategy is one that takes the weight off once and keeps it off for a life time. I want to introduce you to such a strategy.

Characteristics of effective weight loss have been identified. I will introduce you to those characteristics in this article. One of the most important characteristics is maintenance. Taking off the pounds is only half the skill of losing weight. Maintaining that loss is the other part. Losing weight is a change in your life. It is not an isolated incident. And that change is a big one. You should think of your weight loss as a life change. This is not something new. Your life has been changing since the day you were born. Life change is a cumulative function. That is why you gain more weight after losing weight when it is lost without thought to maintaining the loss.

In the task of losing weight, time is your friend. A second characteristic of an effective weight loss strategy is distributing weight loss over time. This temporal distribution achieves a couple of objectives. First, it allows your body to adjust to the weight change and it allows the change strategy to become part of your regular behavior patterns. It gives you a chance to form new life habits. An important result of this kind of change is that the stress of the change is reduced. Losing and maintaining loss becomes a natural part of the way you live your life.

There are five different parts to the strategy you will learn. But the most important lesson I want you to learn is a new way of thinking about your weight.

Ways to Lose Weight

I might have titled this section How to Lose Weight and Keep It Off for Good. Really, the only way to accomplish that said in two words is “Small Steps.” Actually, “small steps” tell the story for both weight gain and weight loss. Neither weight gain nor weight loss happen suddenly, although weight gain often feels that way. Repetition of small weight increases, over time, produces weight gain. Likewise, repetition of small weight decreases, over time, produces weight loss. Your weight is affected by other small changes. A change in the kind of foods you eat; and small changes in the amount of exercise you get. When I say “exercise,” I am talking about the amount of bodily movement required to get you through your daily routine.

Exercise changes in your daily routine can be subtle and easily not noticed. Suppose you injured your knee at the water park on the weekend. For several weeks you have to take the elevator at work, lets say 2 floors. This lasts for 6 weeks. You become accustomed to taking the elevator and continue to do so after your knee heals. Thus, this slight reduction in exercise, walking up and down 1 flight of stairs, begins to add calories over the course of a couple of years. Assume that at the time of your injury you were at the top of your optimum weight range. The increase in your weight will result in other changes that we won’t discuss. My point is that weight gain happens very easily and without announcing itself. Given our life styles, it is amazing if we don’t gain weight.

Multiple Factors

What people really want to know is how to lose weight fast and healthy. The fastest and healthiest way to lose weight is to do those things that really work. Do those things that are supported by scientific data and that are in sync with how your body works. One important fact learned from scientific data is that several factors contribute to weight gain. That means there is not merely one thing you can change that will result in sustained weight loss. There are many things you can do that if you do that one thing will result in weight loss for a period of time. For example, considerably reduce the quantity of food you eat. You will see your weight drop on at least a weekly basis. But that strategy can’t be maintained. Because there are multiple factors involved, it is best to think about weight loss in terms of weight management effected by life style. You can be sure that one size does not fit all in this case.

One useful discovery by science is that of pivotal behavior. Your life is not a grab bag of isolated behaviors responding to an environment. Your behavior has structure with relations between individual behaviors. One such relation is a pivotal relationship. In a pivotal relationship, one behavior, or sequence of behaviors, facilitates the occurrence of other behaviors. For example, how children learn language has been a topic of scientific research for several generations. Researchers have noticed that young children use the question, “What’s that,” as a means of learning new object names. The behavior of asking this question has a pivotal relationship with the result of learning new words. Looking at the process of weight gain and weight loss, we can recognize many pivotal relationships. This recognition is important for managing your weight. When you recognize the factors that facilitate your weight gain and your weight loss, you become better equipped to take full responsibility for your weight.

Weight Maintenance

Everyone talks about weight loss. Still, many people don’t lose weight. Let’s talk about weight maintenance. In my opinion, weight maintenance is more important than weight loss. If you can maintain your present weight, regardless of what it is, then weight loss will easily follow. Maintaining your present weight accomplishes at least three important goals.

First, it gives your body a chance to adjust to any weight gain or loss you have recently experienced. If you have gained weight, then your body has more work to do each day carrying the extra weight. If you have lost weight, then your body needs to adjust to that change. For one thing, it has less stored energy available. The effect of losing weight probably has resulted in an increase in activity requiring even more energy. Your body needs time to adjust to these changes.

A second important effect of weight maintenance is access to habit formation. Habits perform useful work in our lives. Habits systematize our actions, they reduce our cognitive labor, and they strengthen our responses. This concept of strengthening our responses is important for weight management, When we say that a certain behavior or behavior sequence is strong we mean that it has a high probability of occurring in certain situations. Thus, if the sequence of behavior is that of eating less food at meals, then the repetition of this behavior that occurs in maintenance increases the chances of you eating less at meals. Eating less at meals starts becoming a habit and a natural part of your daily life.

The third factor effected by maintenance is that of over-learning. This is an educational concept and is related to habit formation but is different. Both processes strengthen behavior. Over-learning doesn’t strengthen a behavior as much as habit formation. In habit formation, the strengthened behavior is locked into a sequence of responses that comprise the habit. Those responses are not available outside the sequence that makes up the habit. In over-learning, the response remains more flexible in terms of its availability for your responses. In maintaining your weight, it is good to have strong, non-eating responses available, strong responses that are flexible in their availability. This is accomplished through over-learning that occurs by maintaining a weight for a time.

Importance of Subgoals

Any change in your physical or mental status is stressful, even if it is a good change and pleasurable. Your mind and body need a certain amount of status quo. Science has established the importance of goals for motivation and for maintaining consistency of effort. One thing that doesn’t get mentioned is the role of subgoals. You want both a broad goal and a focused goal. Subgoals are really just goals focused on a particular part of a task. A subgoal requires you to look at a particular aspect of the task in more detail. For example, lets assume your goal is to lose 50 pounds. A subgoal for you might be to reduce the amount of carbohydrates you eat. If eating carbohydrates has been a large part of your eating habits, then you don’t want to suddenly eliminate carbohydrates from your diet. You will want to slowly reduce them. This will require a subgoal related to eating carbohydrates. This subgoal provides you a road map to reducing carbohydrates. Maybe you don’t need to completely eliminate carbohydrates from your diet. The subgoal will allow you to determine this.

Subgoals give you a clearer path to your final goal. They help you develop a clearer image of the path to your destination. Knowing how you will accomplish a task and being able to visualize that accomplishment is very important to your achievement.

That clearer image of your goal that is provided by your subgoals also provides you with a close look at your task. All tasks are composed of what I call “little skills.” Little skills are parts of a skill that are not central to its execution but that can be important in how well the skill is performed. Olympic athletes do the little skills well. Amateur athletes do not. For example, I was watching a video of the marathon runner who was the first person to run a marathon in less than 2 hours. The announcer noticed how this runner kept his upper body straight while running. This is a little skill for distant running. Keeping your upper body erect while running could be a subgoal for a marathon runner.

When you are losing weight, maintaining a particular weight for a time will give you the chance to become the person who weights 150 lbs. for example. For maintaining a particular weight, it is important that weight becomes part of who you are. It is important for you to experience the feeling that “I am that person who weights 150 lbs.” To illustrate this concept, which person would you rather identify as you? “I am that person who weights 200 lbs.” or “I am that person whose weight is constantly changing and generally is increasing.” Maintaining a weight loss is a skill that allows your body to adjust and your thoughts about yourself to grow so that you see yourself as a different person than you were.

Positive Approach

Negative thoughts and experiences decrease your abilities to accomplish the goals in you life. On the other hand, positive thoughts and experiences increase your abilities to accomplish your goals. People who struggle with depression often view life in negative terms. These kind of thoughts live in the background of our minds and color our views in somber tones. These negative feelings about life cannot help anyone do the things they need to do in life. Be as aware of how you talk about yourself as you would be about how others talk about you. In my opinion, what we say about ourselves has more powerful effects on who we are and what we accomplish than what others say about us. There are a couple of habits that are useful and everyone should acquire them. First, make only positive statements about yourself. Secondly, make only positive statements about others and the world. Get rid of a habit of negative thoughts. This is a very harmful habit

Conclusion

When you have accomplished something in your weight program, take a bird’s-eye view of yourself and appreciate the change that has occurred in your life. It only occurred because you made it happen. Notice that you are not the same person. You have changed and you know exactly how you did it. Regardless of how little the change is that you created, you are not the same person you were before the change. Leverage these changes; they are your power.