You know from the media that extra weight will reduce your life span, increase your risk of diabetes, high cholesterol, heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure, heart disease, peripheral vascular disease, sleep apnea and stroke.

Ok, I’ve had enough – I want to lose weight!

You are the only one who can finally make the decision that it is time to do something about your weight. You have to take an objective look at your current lifestyle, stress levels, commitments and emotional stability. And before you begin trying various things to lose weight, you have to have a very strong ‘why’.

Your ‘why’ must be strong enough to carry you through the weight loss plateaus or you’ll be left feeling let down and wanting to binge for a week. You can’t get the ultimate motivation to work through this lifelong determination from your doctor advising you, or your husband or wife harping on you.

Instead, your reasons to lose weight have to come from deep inside of you. Whether you feel like you are being overlooked for promotions at your job, you’ve been laid off because of the increased risk to the company’s health insurance policy, you’ve been turned down for dates, or you just have less energy or feel lazy. It must be ‘your’ reason for getting healthy, desiring more energy and improving your overall health. And because losing weigh won’t happen overnight, that reason must also be a strong one.

The determination to lose weight must start at a time in your life when you are emotionally and mentally prepared to take on learning new nutritional information and incorporating it into your daily routine. While those boxed or frozen meals may be convenient when you’re pressed for time, they are also high in processed chemicals, fat and calories, so you must be ready to give that stuff up.

Sometimes making just small changes to your diet will result in weight loss and other times you’ll need to make more changes. You’ll also need to incorporate about 30 minutes of exercise each day to boost your heart rate and metabolism. This may mean making changes to your daily activities and priorities to clear a 30 minute time slot to walk, jog, row or play basketball.

If you are under a lot of stress, this won’t be a good time to pack on the additional stress of trying to stay focused on new diet and lifestyle changes. If you’re going through the negative stress of a divorce, for instance, or you’ve recently experienced the death of a family member, the loss of a job or starting back to college as an adult, it will be hard to get in the right mindset to lose weight.

Weight loss is a process and a journey that takes months and years, not days and weeks. And although there will be some positive reinforcement at first as the initial pounds come off, the process will slow down eventually. This slow down is often seen as a failure in a person’s life, and added to the stress of the other negatives going on, can lead to reverting back to old eating habits and gaining even more weight.

Instead, give yourself permission to get through the emotional upheaval of these changes before adding in a new one. But, by all means, if this dietary change was started weeks before other stresses showed up, try to maintain the dietary changes as much as possible.

It should be noted that regardless of how strongly you feel like you are ready to lose weight, eating forbidden foods on occasion or skipping exercise once or twice a week is bound to happen, but this isn’t cause to stop the positive changes in your life all together. Instead, it is a time to recognize that although you won’t be able to be as focused in your efforts, those efforts shouldn’t be totally ignored.

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