It’s easy to become overwhelmed with your weight loss goals, whether you need to drop 100 lbs to reach a healthy weight, or 30 lbs. Besides the feeling of overwhelm when beginning the process of weight loss, change in itself is a challenge for many people. When you want to lose weight (in a healthy manner) by changing your lifestyle, you are considering changing your eating habits to exclude unhealthy, processed foods and replace them with healthy, whole foods. This can be a huge change for you if you’ve been living mainly on processed foods up to this point.
A solution that will help you with the feeling of overwhelm is to take things one day at a time. I’m a big fan of breaking down your weight loss goals into 5-pound increments, however beyond that, you can break it down to just today. Now, I am not suggesting that you weigh yourself every day, but rather suggest that you look only at today.
Just for today you will choose healthy meal options. Just for today you will take a 30-minute walk. Just for today, you will focus on keeping your thoughts positive. Instead of looking at “the rest of your life”, only think about today. Choosing the healthy options today is your only goal, your only concern.
Now, you do have something to look forward to, because taking it one day at a time is what will help you when you are just starting out with your lifestyle changes. After you have created new, healthy habits, you will hopefully get hooked on feeling great, on having more energy, and will want to continue living a healthy lifestyle. It’s simply that in the beginning, change can be difficult.
There is no need to overwhelm yourself by thinking that you must do “such and such” for the rest of your life. Even though it is important to choose lifestyle changes over short-term dieting in order to maintain your weight loss, you can still focus only on today and take some pressure off of yourself. By doing so, you will end up looking back at your daily successes, and see your weeks and months of success. You can get there by focusing on one day at a time.
This is a great blog! I found it while searching around the web trying to find weight loss articles for my girlfriends mom. Great post – thanks for the info. Ill be subscribing!
Hi, I hope your girlfriend’s mom can benefit from what I’m writing about here (and you, too! 😉 ), thanks for your kind words and for subscribing! 🙂