How To Stick To Your Weight Loss Plan & Lose 10 Pounds

One of the hardest things about losing 10 pounds, or just weight loss in general, is sticking to your diet or exercise plan.

Sure, you may be very enthusiastic about losing weight and be very committed during the first few weeks, but maintaining a long term level of commitment is something most folks find extremely difficult.

In fact, the failure to stick to diet or exercise plans is one of the major reasons why people fail to lose 10 pounds.

Usually, this occurs because people set themselves unrealistic expectations as to how much weight loss they are going to achieve, or because they want to lose that weight in too short of a time using too drastic or strict measures.

Create A Realistic Plan To Lose 10 Pounds

In order to be successful at losing 10 pounds, you need to balance what you want with what is possible.

For example, you may want to lose 10 pounds in 2 weeks, but your busy lifestyle means you have little opportunity to exercise or prepare yourself healthy meals.

As a result, a realistic weight loss goal for you would not be to lose 10 pounds in 2 weeks, but rather to lose 10 pounds in 8 weeks.

Even though this may not be the time frame you were initially looking at, based on your level of commitment, it is what you can realistically expect to achieve.

Why Realistic Weight Loss Expectations Are Important

Setting realistic weight loss goals is absolutely essential to successful weight loss, because goals can have two different types of effects on you.

The first is that they motivate you. A goal will motivate you when you have achieved that goal, because you feel good for reaching a set target.

The second type of an effect a goal can have on you is that it demotivates you. This usually occurs because you failed to reach a set target, and the primary reason this occurs is because the goal was unrealistic to begin with.

When you become demotivated, especially when you are trying to lose weight, you become much more likely to give up on your goals entirely and go back to your old routines and old unhealthy lifestyle.

Creating A Realistic Dietary Plan To Lose 10 Pounds

To create a realistic dietary plan, you first need to make an assessment of your current dietary habits.

If you currently eat relatively healthy foods, then you could probably keep on eating the same foods and not need to make many changes.

If however you eat junk food every day and then suddenly switch over to eating healthy food, you probably won’t last very long because it’s too big of a change too quickly.

It would be far more effective for example, to gradually phase out unhealthy food so you give yourself time to adjust to your new eating habits.

Giving yourself rewards for sticking to your new plan is also likely to increase your motivation, and in turn the likelihood that you will continue with your healthy eating plans.

So always assess where you are, where you want to go and then determine the most realistic way you will get there.

Creating A Realistic Exercise Plan To Lose 10 Pounds

Much of what has been said for creating a realistic dietary plan applies to creating a realistic exercise plan.

You first need to decide what you would like to do, and then what you can do. For example, if you want to exercise one hour every day but don’t appear to have time in your schedule you have two options.

The first would be to reduce the amount of exercise you do each day. So instead of doing one hour a day, you do half an hour each day.

An alternative option would be to make extra time in your day. For example, could you wake up early to exercise?

Again, what you decide to do should be realistic, even if that won’t give you the results in the time frame you were hoping for.

The key is just to doing something on a consistent daily basis, which you know you can commit yourself to and will definitely do.

Once you get the ball rolling and build up momentum, you will find it much easier to lose weight and will also probably be able to do it quicker because when you really want to do something, you will find a way to make time for it and do it.

You Will Eventually Lose 10 Pounds So Hang In There!

We would all like to create a weight loss plan in which we lose 10 pounds in the shortest amount of time possible, but as you can already see, what we want can often significantly differ from what we can actually do.

The important thing to bear in mind with any weight loss effort is that eventually you will lose the weight, it’s just a matter of how long it will take you.

There is no point in trying to rush yourself, and setting unrealistic goals, because the chances of you achieving such goals are slim.

This may then result in you giving up on your goal or it taking you even longer to complete, because you keep stopping and starting. Incidentally, this is exactly what happens with yo-yo dieters.

So even though a realistic plan may seem to take longer at the start, it is most likely exactly how much time it would take you anyway based on your current lifestyle and how much time you can commit to your efforts.