Have you ever tried to lose weight and floundered around trying this and that with little or no success? Or maybe you lost weight in the past and have no real idea on how you did it so that you cannot reproduce the results.
I have seen a lot of people have dreams, plans and goals to drop 20 pounds before a wedding, or shed a size or two before their summer vacation, only to make themselves crazy, trying starvation one day and eating only soup the next, then salads and extreme exercise the next. They find themselves frustrated and confused about what works and what doesn’t.
Does this sound familiar? Does this resonate with you? If so, you can avoid a lot of the frustration, anxiety and time loss by systematically following a plan and measuring the results. As boring as it sounds, having a plan is a great strategy – almost irregardless of what the plan actually is. The important thing is to start with a plan, measure the results from working that plan over a certain time period (say two weeks) and then tweaking the plan accordingly based on the results. If your results aren’t the best, at least you can cross out that plan of action and adopt a new strategy and try again.
Say a strategy is to limit your eating to 2000 calories a day and exercise 3 hours a week. You start this plan on a Monday morning and closely monitor your daily calories and show up for your workouts three times a week, as scheduled. You do this for two solid weeks and journal the daily scale reading, your energy levels, mood, sleep and whatever parameters that you want to track. Then after those two weeks you can determine if the results are acceptable to you or now. If, for example, you lost a pound or two and feel more energetic from the exercise, then you know that it is working and you can keep going. On the other hand, if you find that your calorie goal of 2000 calories is very difficult to maintain, or you are starving all the time, and the scale did not budge a drop, then you know that this plan does not seem to be working and it’s time to go back to the drawing board and try something else.
The key is to have a plan and evaluate, make changes to the plan and try again as you go. Eventually, you will hit on the strategy that works for you! As long as you don’t quit, you can’t fail in this way.
Check out this great discussion on this topic on the ALL Bodies Fitness Podcast
Need help with your plan? Get help from one of our coaches to get started on the way to your success – contact us today.
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