STAYING ON TRACK?

It’s time to address staying on track with your weight loss plan as this is the time of year when most people fall off track and start to neglect their health again.

If you’re not one of these people, then this article will simply help you be proactive and ensure that you get the most of your time.

Grab a piece of paper and a pen. This will be a quick exercise you can run through to make you aware of some things that you would not otherwise realize. The end goal is a game plan that keeps chipping away at your problem areas that are causing you so much grief.

Step 1

On your piece of paper, make two columns and label the headers as “What I liked this past month” and “What I didn’t like this past month”.

Now write down everything you liked and didn’t like about your exercise plan, as well as your nutrition plan.

Some ideas to think about include:

• Your weakest and strongest areas
• Exercises that you avoided the most
• Exercises that you enjoyed the most
• Foods that caused you to overeat
• Healthy foods you enjoyed the most

Good job, with this list you are now one step closer to coming to realization your weaknesses and strengths and areas you need to continue to improve on. But let’s take this further.

Step 2

Now take another piece of paper out and make two columns again. This time label the columns “What kept me back” and “What encouraged me to stay on track”.

This time you will need to think about stumbling blocks like:

• Not having enough sleep
• Having work or family get in the way
• Causes of you having low or high energy
• Causes of you having low or high motivation
• Any injuries or colds

The picture should be getting clearer for you on the causes of anything that has been keeping you back, as well as things that have been really pushing you through even on those days when you had to drag your butt to the gym.

We’re almost done, but let’s take it even one more level deep, this one will be the game changer!

Step 3

This time we’re going to do an exercise to allow you to focus on the positive. On another piece of paper write down some notes on:

• What body part you can improve on this month and exercises/workouts to help you achieve them
• Ways on improving your nutrition plan, what groceries you can buy to compliment your healthy diet
• Ways to keep your motivation level high, whether it be more sleep, better nutrition or better time management
• Nutritional supplements which can help you stay on track and achieve your goals

Conclusion: Staying on Track

The three steps will help you continue to challenge yourself and allow you to keep getting better no matter what age, sex or level of experience working out. Whatever you do, don’t skim right through them. Coming away with just one realization will make a huge impact on your training results and overall health.

WEIGHT LOSS JOURNALS AND VISUAL CUES

Step 1: Visual images can help you reach your weight loss goals and can be powerful tools in helping you reach your goals. There are lots of creative ways to use this motivation technique, such as posting an image of your goal where you’ll see it most—in your car, on a bathroom mirror, on the back of your cell phone, or on the refrigerator.

You can use visual images of your goals or you can use words, thoughts and feelings. Ideally you can use all of these elements to unleash the most powerful potential of imagery. Scientific studies show that the more senses you add to your imagery, the more powerful the results will be. The reason these techniques are so powerful is that they tap into both the left and right parts of your brain. For people who have trouble seeing things with their eyes closed, just use all the other senses to imagine what you want to create.

Visualize your goals as you work toward achieving them each day. Using visual techniques will help relax your mind, boost your self-esteem and draw you toward your goal faster.

Step 2: Write your goals into a calendar. Part of the reason people don't achieve their goals is their inability to put time and effort into achieving them. Hang the calendar near your desk in your home office or in a location where you can easily see the calendar and mark off milestones as you accomplish them.

Keep track of accomplishments each week. Reward yourself for sticking to goals each week. Decide upon a reward system that works for you. Reward yourself for each goal marked off or for each five marked off. You get to choose. Soon you will enjoy the feeling of simply marking off accomplished tasks.

These are good ways to constantly remind yourself of the commitment you’ve made. Studies show that people who keep food journals and use visual cues lose more weight and keep more of that weight off in the long run. The National Weight Control Registry–an ongoing research project tracking more than 3,000 people who’ve lost an average of 66 pounds and kept it off for five years–found that using these tips is the one strategy used by the majority of successful dieters. In fact, in a study of 1,685 dieters conducted by a health insurance company, the best predictor of weight loss throughout the first year was the number of food records kept per week. Another study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that dieters who tracked their food intake in a "food diary" lost twice as much weight as those who didn't track their food.

SETTING WEIGHT LOSS GOALS: THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING

The holidays are over and we find ourselves setting goals for the new year. The people who succeed at permanent weight loss are the ones who have chosen their goals wisely and pursued them vigorously.

But how do you know if the goals you set are "wise"—i.e., the right goals for you? Setting goals that don’t suit you can be the root of much avoidable suffering. You can determine whether your goals are helping you or hurting you in three easy steps:

Step 1: Take a close look at the words that express your goals.
Take a moment to read over your goals. If you keep them written in your head, jot them down on paper quickly before you read further. Done? Now look through your goals for any of the following words: NO, NOT, NEVER, STOP, LOSE, REDUCE, LIMIT, or QUIT. If these negative words (or similar ones) play an important role in the way you have stated your goals, you may be setting yourself up for problems. Here’s why.

Words are very powerful! They focus your attention in one area while other possibilities fade away. When words are negative (like those above), their results are negative. When you say, for example, that you will "Stop eating chocolate," what are you really doing? You are focusing your attention on the very thing you want to avoid—chocolate. IF going without something you want when it is always on your mind were easy, this might work. But, we all know that "out of sight, out of mind, out of reach" works a lot better.

Step 2: Do your goals deprive you of something you want (or think you want)?
If so, you’re just setting yourself up for feelings of deprivation, resentment, and rebelliousness. How many times have you gone a day, a week, or even longer without caving in to a food on your forbidden list, only to find yourself binging on it later, as if out of sheer spite? Contrary to belief, making something off-limits isn’t the best way to maintain control. It'll get that 2-year-old inside us really geared up to do battle.

Step 3: Do your goals set you up for failure?
Framing your goals in negative terms creates an all-or-nothing situation, where even one small slip means failure. And we all know where this leads—"Well, I’ve already blown it, I might as well enjoy it and start over tomorrow," which turns into next week, next month, or next year. Soon you feel like you can’t control your own behavior, but aren’t sure what to do about it. It all starts with the words.

The great thing about having the capacity for language is that we can use words to help ourselves want what it is best for us to have.

Framing your goals in positive terms makes reaching them that much easier. Positive words allow you to:

• Focus on what you really want, and on what is helpful and achievable. This creates positive energy and momentum instead of feelings of deprivation and resentment.
• Adjust your plans when you have the inevitable slip-up or bad day. Instead of giving up when you mess up, you can make small changes to balance things out.
• Check with yourself before you act. Ask yourself if what you are about to eat will help you reach your goals.
• Have true freedom of choice, rather than forcing yourself to rely on will power alone. We just aren’t designed to white-knuckle our way through life, always resisting what we think we really want.

So, go through your goals with a fine-toothed comb, and make sure they are positive. Focus on what you DO want to do and what you WILL accomplish—not just on how many pounds you want to lose. Keep track of your calories as a necessary tactical measure, but don’t confuse going over on any given day with "failure." There’s more going on than what happens on any single day, and well-framed goals can help you keep that in view.

MAKING NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS COUNT

If you're like most people, you've probably experienced the sudden burst of motivation that comes in early January, as holiday indulgences make their way to the waistline and New Year's resolutions force a new look at the figure we see in the mirror.

"This is the year," so the resolution goes, "that I vow to lose ten pounds and keep it off." Other common variations include goals to get back to one's "true" weight, to fit into a size ten, etc.

And worthy resolutions they are. Sadly, New Year's resolutions are notoriously short-lived, if not completely forgotten by February. The trick to making resolutions work is to follow the same steps required to make any goal work, as follows:

1. Choose the Right Resolution

For all too many resolutions, failure is virtually assured at the offset because the resolutions are not made with serious intent and deliberation. The first trick is to choose the right resolution, for the right reasons.

Give some thought to what you really want and why you want it. What direct benefits do you hope to receive? Is a weight-loss resolution meant to improve your self-esteem? Attractiveness? Vitality? Longevity? Identifying the "why" helps you avoid setting goals for the wrong reasons.

Next, decide how difficult to make your resolution. Aiming high generally makes people try harder. Optimal performance comes from goals that are difficult, but not so difficult that we don't believe they can be accomplished.

Finally, be specific about your resolution and make it official. Being specific means phrasing the goal in words that make it obvious whether or not the goal has been completed, by a specific date. A resolution "to lose 15 pounds by April 30th" is much more effective than the ambiguously phrased goal "to lose weight."

Once you've decided on the wording, formally commit. At a minimum, write the goal down on paper. For even more commitment, look yourself in the mirror and state the goal out loud. This may sound corny, but it works. The important thing to remember that a resolution is fundamentally a commitment to yourself. Make the commitment formal. The more ceremonious, the better.

2. Create a Plan

Most resolutions fail because people stop once they've made the resolution. It is crucial to harness New Year's temporary motivation into something that will carry you through an extended period of required effort.

Upon clarifying the exact goal that you are setting, next create a plan for how you intend to accomplish your goal. With any reasonably good plan, you are fairly likely to make significant progress or actually accomplish your goal. Without a plan, you are very unlikely to succeed.

The key to constructing a good plan is to identify the exact steps that you will take toward accomplishing your goal, and assigning due dates to those steps. Coming up with a comprehensive list of steps is not easy for everyone. If you encounter difficulty, the solution is to get help, such as hiring a personal trainer or seeking weight loss advise from the professionals at Kerisma. First identify all of the obstacles that stand between you and your desired goal. Once the obstacles have been identified, generate a comprehensive to-do list for accomplishing the goal.

3. Stay on Track

With a good plan in hand, making significant progress toward your goal may require very little discipline for those who live strictly by daily planners and love nothing more than checking off items on our to-do lists.

But for those of us who can use a little help with staying on top of details, the answer, once again, is to seek outside help. The idea is to find some external thing that keeps you motivated.

4. Remain Flexible and Keep on Going

A recent realization among goal-setting experts is the need to continually modify our approach—sometimes even changing or abandoning a goal altogether. The reason for this is that circumstances beyond our control frequently crop up at the most unexpected and inconvenient times. We can also expect our short-term and long-term priorities to change. So long as we build flexibility into our expectations, we can simply adjust things as we go.

It's therefore best to periodically reevaluate our goals and plans, perhaps once per quarter for a year-long goal such as a New Year's resolution. First, make certain that the goal itself still exactly reflects what you want to do. If it's not, adjust it. Next, go through your plan and identify any portions that aren't working well, even if it simply means giving yourself more time to complete a particular task or milestone. Keep in mind that missed due dates do not necessarily indicate a problem with your performance; it might simply mean that your plan was too aggressive, or that your environment has changed in some unexpected fashion. Either way, simply adjust your plan and continue onward.

Finally, the flip-side of setting difficult resolutions is that you must remember to acknowledge partial success. Losing 15 pounds is cause for celebration, even if your original goal was to lose 20 pounds. If you are just one step closer to your goal, then you are better off than before you began. Pat yourself on the back and keep on going.

WALK ANYWHERE AND FEEL BETTER

Take your walking program indoors during the colder months. You'll avoid weather interruptions and other challenges to regular exercising. Eliminating those stumbling blocks will help you maintain consistency and get closer to achieving the recommended 30 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity on most days.

Although "location, location, location" is the watchword of success in real estate, it doesn't matter for healthy walking. When you walk at a comfortably quick pace inside an office building, school, fitness center, shopping center or your own home (you'll learn how in a minute!), you get the same benefits as when you walk outdoors.

"Take a look at wherever your setting is and ask, 'How can I be active in this setting?'" There's good reason to get moving. Moderate-intensity physical activity, such as walking, reduces women's overall risk of death from all causes. Walking also lowers your risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease and breast cancer.

What about weight loss? In combination with diet, walking can take off excess pounds while also building your cardio-respiratory fitness. Even for obese individuals who don't attain their ideal weight, such activity—when done regularly—reduces the risk of health decline.

To make your in-home walks interesting and fun, check the library, video store or online for walking DVDs and tapes. When you pop these in, you get pace-setting music, advice on technique and timed walk routines with a variety of movements. Walking in your house is free, but you can also buy a home treadmill machine for about $500 and up.

Marching the mall

If you can resist the smell of warm cinnamon buns wafting through the air, you might enjoy mall walking. Many enclosed shopping centers open early just for walkers and some stay open a bit later for the same reason.

Malls attract walkers because the centers are temperature-controlled and have smooth floors, filtered air, security, bathrooms, easy parking and—yes—a place to get coffee or a snack afterwards. Those amenities might explain why research shows that, compared to men, women walk faster in mall settings than on traditional tracks. Some malls have organized walking clubs, although many mall walkers form their own social networks without the management's help.

Tips on indoor walking

• Add extra indoor walking opportunities. When you go to the supermarket, walk around the outer aisles of the store first before you begin shopping. Do the same at warehouse clubs or giant discount stores. Then walk up and down each aisle. At work, walk to speak with co-workers instead of sending email.
• Use a pedometer. These clip-on step counters help encourage you to walk. Keep a log of how many steps you're taking daily. Increase gradually.  Aim for 10,000 steps per day!
• Don't forget the stairs! Vary your walking workout by climbing the stairs at home or work. Even short amounts of extra stair-climbing improve cardiovascular health. Start out by adding just one or two extra trips up the stairs each day, then increase. Walk up escalators instead of standing and riding. Exercise at lunchtime with a friend by walking the stairwells at work.
• Practice inefficiency. Take one thing up the steps at a time. Make four trips instead of one.
• Walk while you talk. Use a cell phone or wireless headset and walk around the house as you carry on conversations.
• Call the mall. Check with the management office at your local mall to find out whether the shopping center opens early, or stays open late, for walkers. If you have a choice of malls, pick one with wide halls so you can move briskly even when shoppers are there.

GAINING POUNDS, LOSING YEARS

Current levels of obesity truncate American lives by four to nine months, report Jay Olshansky and his colleagues in the latest New England Journal of Medicine. If child and adolescent obesity continue to run rife, another two to five years will be lopped off our life span in the coming decades, dramatically reversing the rise in U.S. life expectancy seen over the past two centuries. Scientists previously expected average American life expectancy to reach 100 years by 2060. “Looking out the window, we see a threatening storm—obesity—that will, if unchecked, have a negative impact on life expectancy,” Olshansky and his colleagues write in their paper.

Today two-thirds of American adults are obese or overweight, as are a quarter to a third of American children. This adds up to a 3.3-fold increase in childhood obesity over the past 25 years, mostly due to couch-potato lifestyles and the surging sales of fast, fizzy, and junky food.

Obesity increases the risk of heart disease and cancer and is associated with hypertension, asthma, and gastrointestinal problems. It has sparked an epidemic of type 2 diabetes in children, which has increased tenfold over the past 20 years. Having diabetes in adulthood increases the risk of heart attack and shortens lives by about 13 years. Other diabetes-related complications include renal failure, limb amputation, stroke, and blindness. The cost of treating such medical problems will only go up as the age of onset drops.

Research suggests that obesity hits younger people harder than the old. “Among older people, being overweight has some protective things: It makes your bones stronger, makes you able to survive chronic illness better. That’s not so in young people,” says Douglas Passaro, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who worked with Olshansky. “In younger people, it’s almost all downside and no upside.

 Obesity increases the risk of diabetes and heart disease. It turns middle-aged people into really old people in terms of their mortality rate.”

There is hope for a turnaround. Passaro believes the same factors that help fuel the obesity epidemic in young people, like being impressionable and susceptible to advertising, could be used to shave weight off their generation: “To promote healthy eating habits and decrease the drive to go to the drive-through will have more of an effect on younger people, and that’s a good thing.”

By Discover Magazine

SINGLE BEST EXERCISE FOR WEIGHT LOSS

Often people will ask the best exercises for weight loss. They want to know what kind of cardio activity is going to help them lose weight faster than anything else. Even if they don't enjoy it, they are willing to try whatever is going to help them reach their goals more quickly. My response is always the same. So are you ready to hear what the magic exercise is? What's going to help you lose weight keep it off long-term, and get fit?

The answer is simple: Find the activities you enjoy doing and stick with them. It's true that some activities burn more calories than others. You'll burn more in 45 minutes of running than you will in 45 minutes of walking. But if you hate to run, chances are that you're not going to be able to keep it up forever. Exercise becomes a chore, something you dread instead of something that brings enjoyment to your life. I always cringe when people say, "I hate running and have no interest in doing it. But I feel like I have to run if I'm going to lose weight, so can you give me some tips for how to enjoy it?" My response is usually to try it if you haven't before, but don't be afraid to do something else instead of it's just not working for you. I've tried swimming before. It was a great workout, very challenging, but not something I enjoyed at all. So I decided that swimming just wasn't for me and moved on to other activities instead.

Putting personal preferences aside, if you look strictly at what exercises are considered "best", you'll get a wide variety of professional opinions. Exercise physiologists will give answers based on what exercises burn the most calories, which ones provide the most strength benefits, which ones increase power or flexibility. It just depends on your goals and your body. Everybody responds differently to different exercises, and everyone has different opinions about what activities we should be doing.

Regardless of the activity, the fact that you are exercising at all is most important.

You don't have to train for marathons and spend hours at the gym to be healthy. "A recent meta-analysis of studies about exercise and mortality showed that, in general, a sedentary person’s risk of dying prematurely from any cause plummeted by nearly 20 percent if he or she began brisk walking (or the equivalent) for 30 minutes five times a week. If he or she tripled that amount, for instance, to 90 minutes of exercise four or five times a week, his or her risk of premature death dropped by only another 4 percent."

So, find an activity and keep moving!