Once again, a recent commercial perked my interest. It was a about getting people to quit smoking, I can’t remember which one it was, because there are a ton of them out there right now. But one sentence caught my interest.
They had mentioned something to the effect of taking it one cigarette at a time. You can’t quit smoking all at one time, especially if you have been smoking for a long period of time. But you need to take it one craving, one cigarette at a time. You get the point.
But dieting is the same way. Ask yourself this, what are your fitness goals? Is it to lose 10 lbs? 20, 50, 100 lbs? Depending on which one it is, it will almost always seem like a daunting task.
If you have the last 10 pounds, that is usually the hardest 10 for your body to lose, it will fight you as hard as it can to not drop that last little bit. On the other hand, if you have 100 lbs to lose, it seems like forever until that goal will be finished. And when you look at it as the whole 100 lbs, it is overwhelming.
How will I ever be able to make it to that X amount? In all reality, with trying to drop 100 lbs, you are most likely looking at around 1 year hopefully, and that seems like a long ways off today.
This brings me to my point of 1 meal at a time. You can’t look at the entire weight loss goal, shrink it down to what you need to do today. Give yourself short term goals, so you can tell if you are on track. Don’t get me wrong, you still need that long term goal, that is obviously super important.
But you also need your short and intermediate goals. How will you know if you are on track after 2 weeks of dieting and working out when you know that you are 1 year away from your dream weight.
What can you do today to get you 1 step closer to your goals. That is where that smoking commercial related to this. All you can do is make your next meal a healthy meal. And don’t worry about the end goal so to speak.
If you can take it one meal at a time, eventually it will happen. And know this, you will fail from time to time. You need to know what ahead of time. Its not the end of the world. One bad meal will not ruin your overall weight loss goal, but 10 in a row will put you way behind.
Don’t compound that mistake by just throwing your hands up in the air and saying “oh well, I already screwed up, might as well keep eating.” You made a mistake, thats okay, just focus on how to get back on track with your next meal.
Its okay to make mistakes when trying to lose weight, nobody is perfect when it comes to this. If you are just starting out and you haven’t been eating healthy for a while, make your goals fairly easy… Like, I want to eat healthy for an entire day, when you accomplish that, try to make it an entire week, and so on.
Also, Map out how much weight you want to lose and how long you want it to take. If you want to lose 100 lbs in 1 year, it would look something like this. I need to lose about 8 lbs per month to be at my 100 lb goal in 1 year. So what can I do today, or this week, to get me closer to my 2 lb weight loss for this week, or my 8 lb weight loss for the month.
At the end of each day, look back and grade yourself. How did you do today, did you eat right, did you get your workout in? What did you do that made things easier? Or why did you fail at “such and such” today? What could I have done to get better prepared with my meals? Etc.
One thing that you must know. You will not be perfect forever, you may do it for a week, or a few weeks, but eventually you will fail on atleast 1 meal. And that’s okay, just get back on track with your next meal.
Don’t worry about what you did at lunch, just think about how your next meal is going to be better. Just 1 meal at a time, 1 day at a time, and eventually that year will pass.
