From Mark Louis, special to Christian Weight Control.com
Many people feel that it is not their fault that they cannot lose weight. They
may feel as though they have been struggling with diet after diet without any
consistent or long-term weight loss achievements. However, is their lack of
weight loss success truly their destiny, or is it actually a choice that they
have made?
Think about your own life and the way that your choices impact your weight
loss success. Virtually everything that you do is an opportunity to make a more
weight loss-friendly selection; and one choice will frequently impact the next
one.
Consider the following scenario:
You’ve come home from work and you feel like a snack, so you eat an apple.
You take your time eating it, peruse the headlines in the newspaper, and wind
down from the day. Now you feel energized and although you’d considered playing
plunking down on the couch to catch up on the soaps, you instead decide to take
the dog to the park to toss a Frisbee around. When you get home, it’s time to
make dinner, and you discover that you’re missing a key ingredient. Fortunately,
you noticed before you started cooking, so you have a few extra moments and
you take a quick walk to the corner store to pick up what you need. When you
return home, you prepare and eat a healthy, home cooked meal and feel satisfied
with your food intake, and with yourself. You then have enough time to catch
your favorite television show before you head to bed and get a good rest.
Now consider this second, similar scenario:
You come home from work and you feel like a snack, so you pick up the half-eaten
bag of potato chips that you broke into last night, and set to munching as you
plunk down on the couch to catch up on the soaps. You feel comfortable and kind
of beat, so instead of making dinner as you’d planned, you hop in the car and
drive to the corner store to pick up a frozen pizza, which you nuke when you
return home and eat in front of your favorite television show before you return
to bed. Unfortunately, even though you went to bed at a good hour, you don’t
sleep well because you have restless legs and heartburn.
These two scenarios illustrate how a single choice - eating an apple versus
eating chips - can alter all of the choices that you make after that point.
By choosing the apple, you ate a healthy, energizing snack that encouraged
activity instead of couch-potatoism. The number of calories taken in were substantially
lower due to a healthy snack and a good, home-prepared dinner, and the food
was much more nutritious. Furthermore, the activity helped burn additional calories.
The healthy food and activity encouraged a good sleep which is vital to proper
weight loss.
By choosing the potato chips, you bog yourself down with fats and salts, discouraging
activity. This leads to less desire to even perform regular everyday tasks such
as cooking, and may mean an unhealthy, ready meal that is low in nutrients and
again high in fat and salt. Without activity, and with such unhealthy foods,
the body is restless and does not digest well, leading to broken or short sleep.
As you can see, it is vital that you pay attention to each choice that you
make and never simply shrug off something as simple as a snack in the afternoon.
It could be the difference between the success and the failure of your weight
loss!
Mark Louis is the webmaster at http://www.whatsgoodforu22.info A site where visitors can see the latest information on weight loss, diet success as well as useful hints and tips for weight control and fat loss