GET TO A HEALTHY WEIGHT

Don’t Diet, Eat Healthy

Dieting is a multi-million dollar business and the idea is to keep you on some kind of fad diet forever. Just keep you spending money on one thing after another. Fad diets will work for a short period of time but you can’t stay on them very long. In a couple of months, you stop losing and begin to drift from the diet and the weight starts to return. And believe me when I say that that’s what they are designed to do.

First, change your thinking

Dieting will not make you look like your favorite TV star. Losing weight will help you to look like you did when you were in your prime. Today I’m 60 something and I still weight the same as I did in high school. I do a little exercise and some yoga but I’m not a fanatic. I just do what I have to, to maintain my weight and I do Yoga to stay limber. My doctors say my body is much younger than my age. I’m sure I save a lot of money on prescriptions. I don’t need them.

If you need to make some lifestyle changes to get to a healthy weight, you’ll have more success if you first change the way you think about certain things:

Don’t compare yourself to others. Healthy bodies come in all shapes and sizes. Our culture focuses much too much on thinness, and thinness is just not realistic or natural for most of us. Body size isn’t as important as being healthy. Losing body fat can restore you into the person you were at an earlier age. Pay attention to how hungry or how full you feel. When you eat, pay attention to why you’re eating and how much you’re eating. Forget about dieting. Dieting almost never works over the long term.

Decide that you’re going to improve your health

Eating healthy:

This includes fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. If you eat meat and dairy foods, choose lean meats and low-fat dairy foods most of the time. Avoid eating too much sugar, fat, or fast foods. You can still have dessert and treats now and then. The goal is moderation.

Find ways to increase your daily physical activity. ”Physical activity” doesn’t have to mean regular visits to the gym or running marathons. There are lots of other ways to fit activity into your life. Just do extra walking, walk more at work. Use stairs whenever possible, park your car in the back of the parking area if you can. Fit in a short walk after lunch. Take a short walk at break time. Try and take a short walk after eating or do some type of physical activity that keeps you moving around. In a previous post, I wrote about fitness trackers. There’s a thousand on the market. If you don’t believe me look on Amazon.com. A fitness tracker will count the steps you take in a day and the more advanced ones will even keep track of your sleep and much more. These trackers will help someone who has no time to plan out an activity program. Check it out and find the right one for you.

Drinking only moderate amounts of alcohol. That’s up to 2 drinks a day for men, 1 drink a day for women.

Stress: Many people find that eating is their way of managing stress. If you have a lot of stress in your life, it can be hard to focus on making healthy changes to your lifestyle.

Becoming more active and improving your eating habits are the two main ways to reach a healthy weight. I know all about stress and I found that we often make our own stress. I use Yoga to manage my stress. Stress will tighten your muscles to the point where you’ll have a stiff neck, or stiff shoulder or lower back and you won’t know why. Some people have these problems and don’t know it’s from stress. Yoga helps me with those muscle pains. You can do yoga at any age, any size or any physical condition. Read about it on the internet. There is even Yoga exercises for your hands.

How do you change your lifestyle?
Making any kind of change in the way you live your daily life is like being on a path. The path leads to success.
1. Have your own reasons for making a change
2. Set goals you can reach
3. Measure how your health has improved
Before you make lifestyle changes, talk to your doctor

Keeping track of your weight
Weigh yourself no more than once a week, unless your doctor tells to you to do so more often because of a health problem.

Try to weigh yourself on the same scale, at the same time of day, in about the same amount of clothing.

Remember that many things can affect your weight. It’s normal for your weight to go up and down by a few pounds from one day to the next. Try to look at the general trend of your weight, rather than the day-to-day changes.

Aim to lose no more than 1 to 2 pounds a week. Weight loss of more than that often means that you are not getting enough nutrients to be healthy. And some of the weight you lose may be from lean body tissue (muscle and organ tissue) or water loss, not fat.

Have your cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar checked again after you have lost 5% to 10% of your weight or in 3 to 6 months. You can also check your blood pressure and blood sugar at home.


Another way to measure improvements is to look for changes in your fitness level. For example, are you able to walk longer and on more days than when you started? Can you climb a flight of stairs without getting as tired or out of breath? Do you have better strength and muscle tone? Do you have more energy?

4. Prepare for slip-ups

Have a backup plan. For instance, if you walk outside and it’s raining then have a back-up plan for indoor walking. I walk in the Mall when I can’t walk outdoors. My mall opens at 6 a.m. Not the stores, but for employees and walkers, so I can go before work or after.

5. Get support

Find someone who wants to walk with you. Sometimes you can have two people or more. One person at work and maybe a neighbor at home that wants to walk on weekends or after dinner.

The idea is to be with like-minded people who have the same goals you have. Be healthy and stay healthy.

If you really want to lose the extra flab you can get help, I write 4 blogs and I’ve written two E-books. E-books are the easiest and cheapest way to learn about any subject without groping through hundreds of website looking for the material you want. 

My first e-book is “HowBadDoYouWantToLoseWeight” and it sells for $2.99 on most online bookstores like Amazon, BN.com, iBook, Kobo, and Gardner books in the U.K.

My second e-book is available in the same stores. And on smash words.com. If you use the smash word promotional code You can get my second book for $1.99 (PJ42H). Just type in the search line “getting to a healthy weight”.