Getting Started with Permanent Weight Loss

The purpose of OneMoreBite-Weightloss is to provide you with a set of tools to help you make small changes that will impact your life and health forever. It's not about losing 10 lb. to fit into a dress before a wedding or reunion, then regaining the 10 lbs. and more the day after. It is not about crash diets, which produce temporary results at best, and at worse cause you to gain more weight than you lost, time after time.

If you're ready for permanent results, then you're ready for OneMoreBite-Weight Loss. The Boot camp metaphor is used in the sense of "getting down to it." Getting the job done.

What You Do Day-to-day Determines How you Look and Feel

Once and for all, it is critical to understand and accept this one premise: What you do on a day-to-day basis will determine how you look and how you feel. As long as you believe that a temporary fix will produce a permanent result, you'll continue to experience the same disappointing results. Struggling to lose weight by deprivation diets, only to watch all the weight you lost quickly return, is not only psychologically damaging, it is physically brutal. Studies prove that yo-yo dieting is much more harmful to your health than simply being overweight or even obese.

If you overfeed your pets, they'll get fat (I had a friend with a 30 lb. cat!), and if you feed them a diet in line with their natural requirements, they'll melt back to their natural size. It's the same for you. Feed yourself well, and you'll be healthy. Feed yourself poorly, with junk food and deep fried goodies as your primary diet, and you'll probably have less energy, be heavier, and won't feel as well as you could. Do you eat fast food more than three times a week? If you said yes, then you know what I'm talking about. You're probably tired, sluggish, and sick of being over weight, yet nothing you do seems to work. You lose weight, only to gain it right back. What is going on?

Lifestyle is What Matters

If you end your diet by returning right back to your usual eating habits, then It's not difficult to see why you haven't been successful with your weight loss efforts. It's your lifestyle that matters in your quest for change. Your day-to-day habits, those foods you choose more often than not, the quantity you eat, and the quality, that is what shapes your body, and your health. If you truly believe you are a larger size than you want to be, start watching for small changes you can make, permanent changes in your lifestyle. That will make the difference.

Small Changes that Made a Difference

Recently I decided to improve my health by making a few changes. I first stopped drinking my nightly one or two glasses of wine, and lost about three pounds by that one change alone. I next added consistent exercise, building from five minutes to 50 minutes a day on my exercise bike, started a light weight lifting program in my home gym, and even started taking Pilates classes. All of this activity added muscle to my frame, while at the same time helped to reduce my body fat level. The exercise gives my legs a nicer shape, my stomach is flatter, my hips, smaller. I stand taller, my back doesn't ache in the morning when I get out of bed. I feel great, and I believe I look great. I may not look like a teenager, but guess what? I'm over 40, and I'm not in competition with any 18-year olds. I just want to be healthy and feel good about myself.

Other changes I made over time included cutting back on fast foods. I now have fast food once a week or less. I started eating more soups, and carrying healthier snacks such as tiny carrots, and cherry tomatoes. I eat a lot of fruit, low-fat bagels and yogurt, low-fat granola, whole grains, brown rice, beans. I eat when I'm hungry and have the majority of my food early in the day, starting with breakfast, snacking on food (not chips, not crackers, just ordinary real food like fruit) midmorning, eat lunch (instead of a huge cookie), an early dinner, and rarely am I hungry at night.

I didn't make all these changes overnight, but slowly incorporated healthier living and it works! I'm now back to the size and shape I want to be.

I can easily skip the donuts at the office because they aren't special, they're just plain, store bought donuts. Why waste my food choices on food that isn't even special?

My favorite saying is, "I'd rather have cheesecake," which to me means, if the food being offered is high in calories or fat, I'd rather wait and have something I really like later, like cheesecake or a piece of chocolate cake from Rose's bakery. I love sweets, but I want them to be special, not ordinary. Our stores are full of more than 30,000 food items and most are not special at all.

I eat anything I want but I usually choose to stay away from manmade foods such as chips, saturated fats, hydrogenated oils (found in all fast foods and snack products), and high fat, salt and sugared snacks. I love to eat and never deprive myself -- never! Ask anyone that knows me.

These small lifestyle changes (dropping some bad food choices, giving up an alcohol habit, and adding exercise) have reduced my body fat substantially, added healthy muscle, increased my health, made me fitter and trimmer, and are all easy to maintain because they were done slowly over time. If I slowly return to my previous habits, the weight and fat will slowly return.

Lifestyle change is the only permanent way to change your weight, health or level of fitness. If you'd like to learn how you too can make better choices, while still eating what you truly want, and eliminating all your emotional reasons for eating when you're not hungry, then read on ...