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Once you’ve achieved your desired weight, you return to your old eating habits and levels of activity, the weight will return. Plain and simple.  Quick-fix diets face this kind of problem. They don’t offer long-term changes which sometimes cause the downfall of the program.

Stay realistic

Avoid feeling dissatisfaction with what you have accomplished. Enjoy your life and be satisfied with the healthy weight you can achieve. Initially, weight loss is gradual compared to those who return to their previous weight.

Have self-discipline

People who watch their weight show flexibility in their self-control. Most of the time, they make healthy choices but do not avoid eating food. If you want an indulgence, allow yourself one a week, not one a day and not 5 at a special event, just one a week and make it special!

Eat healthily

Learn proper choice, preparation and enjoyment of a balanced diet. Gain skill in cooking a low-fat diet, understanding food labels and being able to judge portion sizes. Eating regular meals, tasting them and planning ahead is also a part of this.

Stay active

Getting regular exercise is one of the factors that determine long-term success. It does not only burn unwanted calories and increase metabolism but also increases self-esteem and fights stress. According to research, walking alone for 30 minutes daily plus some additional activities during the week can be enough.

Have ongoing support

The right kind of support during and after weight loss is vital. It is not an easy task and maintaining them is not easy as well. A well trained weight loss coach like those we have talk to from My Herbal Plan and the WAVES Take Shape program are great.

Learn to deal with stress

Food is a quick and effective method of handling stress for some people. Evaluate the stresses in your life and your response to these stresses. WAVES offers classes to help you conquer your triggers and learn to deal with them in a different manner.

Remember, being healthy is a life-long goal. With proper monitoring and the help of a wellness coach, you CAN achieve your goals and be the healthiest you possible!

 

There are beverages and activities that dehydrate your body quickly so that your essential amount of water intake needs to be increased. Beverages that deplete water from your body include sodas, coffee, tea and alcohol.

So, what should you drink? In order to ensure that you stay properly hydrated, drink one glass of water for every glass of soda or other dehydrating beverage. Also, for every half-hour of sweat-inducing exercise, you should drink at least one cup of water. If you are exercising in a particularly humid environment, you may have to drink more water in order to avoid headaches, illness and overall dehydration.

Water truly can aid your weight-loss process if you are diligent about consuming generous portions of it. Many people find that carrying a water bottle with them everywhere they go is the best way to remain tempted to treat your body right. Just watch for the dehydrators and combat them with proper water intake.

A common remedy recommend to everyone, not just those wanting to lose weight, is a detox program. Many detox programs are harsh and leave you running to the restroom at every turn. Those programs may clean out your body but not really detox it.

The one I like to use is the 21-Day Herbal Cleansing Program manufactured by Herbalife. This gentle program is easy to use. You simply take 2 of the am pills each morning and 2 of the pm pills each night for 21 days. This formula is designed to clean the ville in the intestines to help it better absorb nutrients as they pass through.

I pair this with aloe. I love the mango flavored aloe concentrate. I take 3 capfuls a day. Aloe is a fantastic detoxer. Aloe not only helps coat our digestive system to make elimination more regular and easy, but it also binds to any toxins to help our body eliminate them.

A regular detox is important to everyone’s health. After-all, just because a toxin found its way into our body doesn’t mean we have to keep it! Are you ready to detox?

Losing weight is not rocket science. There is no magic in it, there is work effort and continually moving toward your goal.  Despite this, as well as an ever growing number of diets and weight control plans, obesity continues to grow. And the vast majority of dieters find it almost impossible to lose weight without regaining everything within a matter of months. Why is this? Answer: because we don’t get enough support.

Get Proper Help To Lose Weight

Our greatest need when dieting is encouragement. We need people to cheer our successes and help us overcome our disasters. Amazingly, most online weight loss programs fail to address this need. Instead, they focus on what we should eat, how many calories we should consume, and what exercise we should take. And while this advice is useful, it’s not critical.

Because most of us know this stuff already. What we have difficulty with, is motivation. We know what to do in order to lose weight, but we can’t sustain it. Maybe we lack a strong incentive, or perhaps our family situation interferes with our weight loss plans, or maybe we hate cooking and eat out too often. Whatever difficulty we have, it’s not likely to involve food or exercise. It’s much more likely to be a motivational or lifestyle problem. Yet as I say, most online programs don’t offer motivational or lifestyle support. And even when they do, their advice can often be expensive and quite uninspiring!

Thus, WAVES was born with a free assessment offered to anyone and free ongoing support through the use of any of our recommended programs like My Herbal Plan or the WAVES Take Shape Program. Without support, our participants would have had to struggle on their own.

Survey Of Dieters

The value of proper support was highlighted in a recent survey of members of an online weight loss program. The program includes a 24/7 community forum specializing in motivation and lifestyle support, with several thousand topics and approximately 100,000 posts. Subjects were asked to assess the personal benefit they had obtained from the forum. A total of 1,348 subjects responded, of whom 81 percent rated the program’s community forum as “important” or “very important” in helping them to lose weight, while less than 5 percent said it “made no difference.” While in no way conclusive, the results indicate the practical value of a “community” approach to weight management. WAVES has recently added new forums to make posting and communicating with other members easier.

Weight Loss Meetings

Many people also need a group setting. To combat this, WAVES offers challenges, the challenges are low cost. Meetings are held every other week, but support is offered continually in the form of online chat, text, email, telephone, in person at local locations.

Not Easy To Change Habits

Changing our eating habits is no easy matter. Sure, it helps to know that a cup of fat-free milk contains 40 percent fewer calories and 16 times less fat than whole milk, or that lean ground steak contains half the calories and 4 times less fat than regular cheddar cheese, but how does this help us to say No to a second helping of pizza?

How does it quench our desire for a double cheeseburger and fries? It doesn’t. Because facing down temptation requires a change of attitude, a change of priorities. And in my experience, this takes time and as much encouragement as we can get. We need to hear from people like us who have managed to change their attitude and eating habits, and who can explain how to overcome the problems involved. Above all, we need a safety-net if we fail. We need shoulders to cry on and “tough love” to help us win through. In short, we need the support of a real community.

Join An Online Community Forum

In my experience, dieters who join a good online community forum can expect to lose 400-500 percent more weight than those who go solo. In addition, if they maintain their community membership after achieving their goals, they have an excellent chance of maintaining their weight loss indefinitely.

This is because an online community can provide a number of specific benefits. First, as stated, it offers personal advice and encouragement. Secondly, it offers members the opportunity to help other people – something that typically works wonders for their self-esteem and understanding. Thirdly, most community forums are self-run. Members may progress to become moderators or resident experts. This too is a real confidence booster as well as a great incentive to maintain weight lost. But by far the major benefit is the fact that online forums are in action 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So support and human warmth is available whenever you need it. They are real 24/7 safety nets, especially WAVES forum which has members from all time zones of the world.

Features To Look For

The best forums are active, well-managed and provide quality advice and support. Activity is best judged by checking the number of “active” members, rather than total membership. And the greater the number of recent threads (topics) and posts (messages), the better. Assessing the management and quality of the forum is a bit more difficult.

To do this, open a recent thread, scan the posts and look for the following. First, how quickly do members and/or moderators reply to questions asked? Second, are the questions and answers reasonably serious, or more frivolous? Generally, a well-managed forum will have a higher percentage of serious posts. Other questions to ask yourself include: how “personal” does the forum appear to be? Do you feel a sense of warmth and caring? What age-groups are most active? Take a good look around, and don’t hurry. Finding the right forum for yourself is crucial to your weight loss success.

We hope you find all of the ingredients you are looking for on the WAVES weight loss forums. As well as in our one-on-one support. If you need something you don’t find, then contact us. We are always working on improving our site and services.

Summary: Focus On What Matters

The secret of successful weight loss is to focus on what matters. So don’t waste too much time or money trying to find the “perfect” diet, find a weight loss coach to guide you. What really matters is support – to help you cope with temptation and disruption during your journey. An excellent option is to join an online weight loss forum and be part of a real community. Because when you have tons of friendly people cheering you on, you can move mountains.

The secret to success, according to Biggest Loser is to get moving and these contestants get moving in ways they probably never have before. One contestant even mentioned how she would have never had cause to hit a tire with a sledge hammer in her life.

Yet, there are people that change tires and do similar physical movement everyday. Now, that may not be the activity for you, but search, find and get moving on an activity you like.

It takes regular, daily physical activity to get healthy and stay healthy.I make extra trips to the car, park farther away from the store, use restroom breaks as a reminder to do lunges or squats, and do exercises while watching TV. What have you done to be more active?

Almost all of us have been on a diet sometime in their life; I know I have.  It is hard to decide which diet plan to suffer through. The first question is, which one will work for you and how hard do you have to work to make it work? Basically most of us are lazy when it comes to losing weight and we want the fastest and easiest diet plan we can find.

Sticking to a diet is hard to do. On most ‘normal’ diets you won’t get hungry. By normal I mean you eat 3 meals a day with a couple of snacks during the day and you have to drink tons of water, that is what really fills you up. You may slush around all day but you won’t get hungry.

There are many diet plans. There are the 300 pages or more diet books and there are the diet groups that meet at least once a week. Then there are some that will have meals delivered right to your door. The basic plan in these diets is each day eat 3 healthy meals, have a couple of snacks, and drink lots of water. Next you have the diet pills that come with a diet plan, 3 meals, a couple of snacks, and lots of water, plus a pill or 2 each day.

Let us not forget the fad diets, the cabbage soup diet, the boiled egg diet, the grapefruit diet, just to name a few. These diets don’t last long, you either give up or pass out. Oh yeah, you do lose weight with these diets, but you also gain it back in a hurry, plus some.

So if you are thinking about starting a diet plan, choose carefully. Frankly in my opinion, one of the ones that meets once a week is the best. Like the challenges hosted by WAVES for Weight Loss. You get the support of all the rest of the group, you get to meet new people, and you get some new ideas for meals. These kinds of diets teach you how to live with a food plan, not a diet, but a way of life.

So until you decide which diet plan you think you can best follow, try to eat 3 healthy meals, a couple of snacks, and drink a lot of water each day. Get the support you need and find out what programs worked for those in the challenge. I have had great success with both My Herbal Plan and the WAVES Take Shape Plan. The wonderful thing is at WAVES, you are taught how to lose weight and then transition to a whole foods diet that will keep you slim for life!

As someone who helps people lose weight and improve fitness by changing their habits and behaviors, I’d like to take a closer look at the subject of attitude. After all, it’s attitude that determines whether you drag yourself off the couch and out the door for an invigorating walk, or spend the afternoon watching TV. Whether it’s to enhance your life, or save your life, to a very large degree, it is attitude that determines where you end up.

If you would like a good example of how attitude can overcome a real downer of an experience, consider Kelly Luckett of Decatur, Georgia.  She ran 26.2 miles, as the third ever female amputee to compete in the Boston Marathon. That’s 26.2 miles folks…in six hours, twenty minutes and two seconds. Ms. Luckett had the choice to either succumb to her disability or live life fully.  She chose to not only live, but to strive for excellence and the result was outstanding.

With the list of things I have to do today, I have a “pretty good reason” to stay hunched over my desk until dinnertime, but I guess I have just motivated myself to haul up the anchor and take my protesting body out for a run. It’s all about living!

Most of us understand the reasons for our poor physical fitness and the answer to losing weight.  We have read volumes on diet and exercise, but it is our attitude that prevents us from doing what needs to be done.

Tips to “Boost” Your Attitude:

1.  One way to develop a powerfully positive attitude, even if you don’t feel that way, is to behave as if you do.  To that end, planning your actions and anticipating setbacks, in advance, is essential. Schedule workouts on your calendar.  Making an important appointment with yourself, in writing, carries more weight than just the vague intention to do something.  Schedule for first thing in the morning because research shows that people who exercise before the business day begins are most likely to stick with it.

2.  A little bit of something is better than nothing.  Regardless of how short you are on time or how blah you’re feeling, commit to just five or ten minutes.  Every little bit helps and, almost always, once you get going, your energy picks up and you have a great workout.

3.  Be flexible.  A change of plans is not an excuse to do nothing.   If you usually exercise in the gym, and you’re out of town, go for a jog.  If you forgot your running shoes, go for a brisk walk. Honor your commitment to your exercise appointment.

4.  When possible, join your spouse or a workout partner.  It’s a lot less easy to cop out if someone else is depending on you.

5.  Know that God wants you to succeed!

“Be Strong… Be Lean” ~ Howard McGarity

Many people get their water from fruits, such as apples, watermelons and berries. One piece of fruit, depending on the size, can count for as much as half of a glass of water. The added benefit of fruit is that in addition to helping to hydrate you, fruit can add healthy amounts of vitamins and minerals to your core diet.

Fruit also fills the stomach and energizes you. Because fruit contains very few calories, it is a good food to fill up on. However, fruit does contain fructose, which is a type of sugar. Fructose will spike the level of sugar in your blood stream, which will give you energy. Yet, if that energy is not consumed readily, the fructose will turn to fat (if only a small amount of it.)

So, enjoy your fruits, just do it in moderation!

 

Guess what time it is, it’s measure time! Grab that tape measure and see how many inches have disappeared.

If this is your first time measuring your progress in inches lost, then please check out our previous article on How to Measure. It is important to be consistent with how and where we measure to get accurate results. Record your progress and note the changes you see.

When you are done, take a moment to reflect on the progress you have made and share with us!

Having healthy, glowing skin is important to most of us. I love the skin care line I use to take care of my skin. However, healthy skin starts with our diet.

Some foods recommended for healthy skin include:

• olive oil
• fresh fruits
• fresh vegetables, especially
• cucumbers
• radish
• sprouts

In addition, aloe is recommended for healthier skin. Also look for foods that add sulfur and manganese to your diet.

At the same time, avoid fried foods, excess condiments, and sodium laurel sulfate. Of course, drinking plenty of water is important. So here’s to great looking skin!