3 Tips to Kepping Your Fat-Loss on Track

The biggest key to success in anything in life, especially weight loss, is consistency. Consistency in life is also one of the most difficult things to achieve, especially when it comes to diet and exercise. Building a consistent routine, a consistent plan, and a consistent schedule is not easy to do, but is essential to your success.

It’s always the same story: you start off the day with the best intentions—today is the day. Today is the day I am going to exercise, eat healthy and finally drop the weight. The beginning of the day goes off without a hitch, but then life happens. You get called into a lunch meeting. You’re running late for your kids soccer game so you grab fast food to hold you over. By the time you finally make it home you are too tired to move, let alone hit the gym. Before you know it, the day is gone, along with your promises of finally sticking to a plan.

When life hits, the first things that give are the newest habits. Preparing healthy meals gives way to what is fast and convenient, and hitting the gym is replaced by that endless to-do list. There are so many responsibilities that the ones to yourself get pushed to the wayside in favor of those that affect other people the most, leaving little time for you and what you want for yourself.

Is it selfish to make time to care for yourself? No. The only way to be the best you that you can be, for your kids, spouse, coworkers and friends, is to take care of yourself and your health. So how do you stop putting everyone else first, and build a consistent routine of eating right and exercising to lose weight?

These three simple steps, when followed properly, will make it easier for you to be consistent with your healthy eating and exercise—even on the most difficult of days.

Step #1: Recognize that you have a choice

When you don’t want to exercise, or want to eat ice cream for dinner instead of cooking a healthy meal, its not because you are lazy, unmotivated, or destined to be overweight. You can still be motivated to lose weight, and have a lapse of energy. It’s fine. It happens sometimes: you are busy and tired. Don’t beat yourself up, but most importantly, don’t give in to it.

Recognize that you have a choice. The failure or inconsistency doesn’t happen when you don’t want to exercise, it happens when you make the choice not to exercise. When you make that choice, you make the choice to engage in a behavior that is going to sabotage your ultimate weight loss goal.

You always have the choice to make a healthy decision, even if your body or brain is telling you that you don’t want to at that moment.

In the long run you’ll get better, faster results if you acknowledge that the choice is yours to make. You can choose either option you wish, one that will get you closer to your goal, or one that will get your further away from it, but either way, you are the one that is responsible for the consequences.

Step #2: Do the next right thing.

Being consistent does not mean being perfect all of the time. There are going to be situations, both in and out of your control, where you aren’t always doing to be able to make the right weight loss decision.

It’s never easy to change old habits, and during the time you are trying to change those habits, you’re going to have to work at it. It’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to be that magical light switch people so desperately look for where all of a sudden you are craving carrot sticks over cake and wake up early to go to the gym every morning without complaint. If you were that kind of person, you would be doing it already.

The trap is people look at progress in terms of days: good days and bad days. If you give into temptation and skip a workout, or eat a dough nut for breakfast, you think the whole day is shot, and you’ll have to start again tomorrow. Giving up, even just for the rest of the day, is giving up your choice.

Think of consistency as a long rope. You are travelling down your rope of life, and you eat a cheeseburger after a late night at the office. You don’t go back to the beginning and start all over again, like people often do with diets. You tie a nice little knot in the rope where you ate the cheeseburger and move on. If you slip up again a few days later, or even that night, tie another knot and move on. The goal isn’t to have a completely knotless rope, or you would never make it past the start line. The goal is get those knots fewer and farther between, and to learn something from each situation you had to tie a knot, to take with you.

Always do the next right thing. Building consistency is getting into the habit of recognizing you have a choice, and then making the best choice for your weight loss goal. You may make the wrong decision, but you still have the ability to choose every time, even if you do feel like your whole day is blown. There are no good days and bad days, just healthy and unhealthy decisions, and making one unhealthy decision does not give you license to continue to making unhealthy decisions. Take each choice as it comes to you.

Step #3: Always have a plan B.

Because life is often busy and complicated, you need to have plan B ready in case you can’t follow your original plan. Plan B is an alternative way to stay consistent with your goals when your regular choice doesn’t pan out. If you plan on going to the gym, and you don’t have enough time, you still have a choice. You can pull out your plan B and take the dog for a walk, or do a DVD in your living room. Remember that being consistent isn’t about being perfect, so if you can’t do what you originally planned on, no sweat, as long as you have a plan, because that is what is going to keep you consistent.

You can’t always predict what’s going to happen, but usually the things that trip you up are things that happen often: working overtime, carpooling, kids getting sick or days where just don’t feel like working out. Those surprises won't throw you off track if you plan for them ahead of time.

Take some time and identify your top 5 situations that get in the way of your healthy routine. Then write down a plan B for each of them and keep it with you for future reference. Then all you’ll have to do when you encounter a roadblock is refer to your plan B.

Following these three simple steps will help you overcome some common obstacles with consistency to achieve weight loss. You can lose weight, but you are going to have to make the effort: with these steps, it will be easier for you to consistently make healthy decisions to get you to your goals.