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The First Rule of Losing Weight

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Forget the weight loss merchants who promise you the golden goose of weight loss.There is no golden goose,no miracle cure,no exciting new methods.The one thing you must do if you want to lose weight with any degree of success is to give yourself TIME.

Most people want to lose weight as quickly as possible. However following this pattern almost always results in failure. People are always on the lookout for a quick fix that will enable them to shed the pounds and get the body that they want in a couple of months. This is just wishful thinking,if you don't believe me ask people who are overweight how many times they have failed to lose weight. The truth is that quick weight loss is a gimmick. If it wasn't why do so many people have so much trouble losing weight? People never learn and they will continue to jump from one quick fix to another, leading to one failure after another, until they just give up.

The problem is that we now live in a society where we want everything as soon as we possibly can. Patience is no longer considered a virtue. This is true in our working lives and in our own personal lives. When it comes to losing weight people are not interested in what they are going to look like 12 months down the road. They want to look good now; they don't want to waste time in reaching their goals. This is why people spend their hard earned money on anything that promises them what they want to hear.

Too many products offer a dream scanario where people can lose all the weight they want by very little effort,completely ignoring the science behind weight loss. People believe the hype and any logic just seems to evaporate. This happens because the products appeal to your emotional senses and when that happens, logic becomes irrelevant. Now on the face of it many of these claims will sound wonderful to you, but unfortunately your body will not share this joy. Any sudden and drastic changes to your lifestyle will lead your body to fight you every step of the way. This is why after a short initial period of weight loss, any results you may have been getting will slow down to a crawl or more than likely stop completely. This is such a common story amongst people who try to lose weight.

There are two things I want to mention. Fact number 1 is that 1 pound of weight roughly consists of 3500 calories. Fact number 2 is that if you wanted to lose 30 pounds of weight within a one month period, then you would have to find a way to remove and burn 26500 calories a week from your current diet. This equates to 3500 calories a day. No mean feat when you think that the average intake of calories for a woman is between 1800-2400 calories a day. It would mean a massive reduction in the food that you are eating and taking part in long periods of intensive exercise. Do you have any idea what this will do to your body, especially if it is not used to such a lifestyle?

The human body is a hugely complex entity. Many people are not aware of the fact that the human body is one large defence system. Its main role is to protect you and to keep you alive any way that it can. If it feels you need to be protected it will pull out all the stops,completely ignoring what you might want. Your body while very adaptive is also a creature of habit. For example if you have lived life of poor nutrition and little activity for a number of years, then this is what your body has become accustomed to, and it will cater for this lifestyle for as long as it can hold out.

When suddenly out of the blue you cut back heavily on the food that your body is used to receiving and impose a rigorous exercise program on it what do you think will happen? Your body will think that it is under some sort of threat, and it will try to defend against this attack. It will do this by completely slowing down your abilities to burn calories. Because it is not getting the food it is used to, it will put your metabolism into starvation mode. This means it will do everything it can to hang onto any calories, simply because it thinks you must be starving.

On top of this as this new regime comes so suddenly, your mind will also try to prevent you from continuing what you are doing. It will do this by sending you constant messages telling you that it is too hard, you cannot do this, let us go back to the way it was, and so on. This is why after a short period of time you will give up. How can you succeed when both your mind and your body are fighting against you?

People must come to grips with the fact that a quick fix is no fix at all your body and your mind needs time to adjust to any changes that you make to your lifestyle, and it will adapt more easily if you do things slowly and in stages, instead of rushing headfirst into it. As time goes on add more activity, but do it steps. Using this method allows the changes because it is in your body's abilities to do so.

So Time is the golden rule for weight loss, and remember that you are where you are today because of the choices that you have made. If you want to be in a different place then make different choices.