Weight Loss Success Tips

Top 10 Ways To Lose 10 Pounds

Virtual everyone wants to lose some amount of weight, because by doing so they will be able to look and feel better.

If you want to lose weight, follow these 10 weight loss tips to ensure your success.

1 - If You Want To Lose Weight Set Realistic Goals

One of the most important weight loss steps you can take is to set realistic weight loss goals.

There is no point in setting a goal to lose 10 pounds in 1 week for example, if you are not willing to make major changes to your current dietary and lifestyle habits.

The type of goal you set will also be dependent on what is possible for you to do. For example, you may want to exercise 5 days a week, but may not have the time to do so.

When setting weight loss goals, it is far better, and also much more effective, to set goals that might take you longer to achieve than you would like, but you know that you will be able to easily stick to them.

This can double your chances of losing weight, because one of the biggest reasons for weight loss failure is because people set themselves unrealistic goals which they find demotivating and impossible to stick to for the long term.

2 - Understand Your Eating Habits To Achieve Weight Loss

Your past eating habits are largely responsible for your current weight. Therefore, your current eating habits will determine your future weight.

If you are overweight, it is likely that at some point in your life you developed bad eating habits. You now need to find out what these are, and why you do them.

For example, do you eat a lot of junk food in the evenings because you feel lonely or bored? If so, what else could you do instead to break that habit?

Or perhaps you don’t like healthy food because you think it doesn’t taste very nice? In that case, perhaps you could try experimenting with lots of different types of healthy food until you find something you do like?

Whatever your bad habits are, it is important that you identify them, understand them and then replace them with new and healthy eating habits. If you can do this, you are virtually guaranteed to lose weight and keep it off.

3 - Lose Pounds Through Diet & Exercise

In order to lose weight, diet and exercise are two things that go hand in hand. A healthy diet will help to stop you accumulating any more weight, whilst a good exercise routine will help to accelerate fat burning and increase your energy levels.

If you are really serious about losing weight, you must incorporate both into your life in one form or another.

4 - Lose 10 Pounds Before You Lose The Rest

Because most people want to lose weight fast, they look at themselves in the mirror and say something like “I want all my excess fat to be gone so that I am slim”.

Whilst this may be their end objective, trying to lose so much weight all in one go is very often counterproductive, because the mind doesn’t see it as being possible.

As a result, the person eventually starts to lose the motivation to lose weight, because they feel they are not making any visible progress.

To lose weight successfully, it is absolutely essential that you set yourself a goal, but also that you break this goal down into smaller sub goals.

For example, you may aim to lose 10 pounds in one month, and then lose another 10 pounds the next month and another 10 pounds the following month.

You are much more likely to complete a goal if you break it down into smaller goals, and when you complete each goal, your motivation will increase which then makes it much more likely that you stick to your weight loss programme and achieve your overall objective.

5 - Monitor Your Weight Loss Progress

Just as it is important to set weight loss goals, it is also important to monitor the progress of those goals.

Keep a record each week of how close you are to achieving your goal, and you will find doing so will help to increase your overall motivation and also keep you focused on what it is you are trying to achieve.

6 - Weigh Yourself Once A Week!

It can be very easy to become obsessed about how much you weight, and then to start weighing yourself everyday. However, doing so can very often ruin your chances of weight loss and/or lead to an unhealthy obsession about your weight.

Weighing yourself more than once a week is pointless, because it takes time to lose weight and the only accurate judgement of how effective your weight loss efforts are is weekly or fortnightly measurements.

It is also important to remember that your weight may not tell you the whole story. For example, when people lose weight it is not uncommon for their weight to increase because they are developing more muscle mass.

This is a good sign, as it means your metabolism is increasing and so is the rate at which you burn fat.

If you find that your weight has increased, measure your body mass index or waist fat ratio to get a more accurate representation of your weight loss progress.

7 - Don’t Feel Down If You Don’t Lose 10 Pounds

Another common reason for weight loss failure is because people start to feel depressed when they are not getting the results they had expected. Usually, most of the time this occurs is because of setting unrealistic weight loss goals.

If you find yourself becoming demotivated, reexamine the goals you had set for yourself. Were you trying to lose weight too quickly? Were you on too strict of a diet?

Determine what it is that is causing you to feel down, and then resolve to do something about it. To help get you through the pain, keep your mind focused on your end objective.

8 - Lose Pounds By Eating Smaller Portions

An interesting psychological study showed that people tend to eat as much food as is on their plate, and that people who were given smaller portions tended to be just as satisfied in terms of hunger as those who were given larger portions.

Use this knowledge to your advantage, by preparing yourself smaller portions than you would normally eat. This can be a great way to reduce calorie intake, whilst at the same time accelerating your weight loss efforts.

9 - Phase Unhealthy Foods Out Gradually

You may desire to eat the perfect diet, but if you are currently eating only junk food then switching to healthy food all at once is unlikely to work out well for you.

People tend to respond best when they are given time to adjust to new routines. What this means is that if you are trying to eat healthier food, then you are much more likely to do so if you gradually replace unhealthy foods with healthy foods.

The reason this works so well is because you give yourself the chance to develop new food habits, whilst still enjoying some of your old habits.

If you try to do everything at once, you won’t enjoy it, will crave your old foods and will probably eventually go back to them.