From the movie, “Cool Hand Luke” you “gotta get your mind right”. When I quit smoking many of my friends said, “You’re going to put on a lot of weight now.” I listened to them. Without realizing it, I accepted that fate and put on a lot of weight. If you have ever read any of my articles, you know that I am a strong proponent of the Nike trademark phrase “Do it!” and I believe in mind over matter. I once heard Doc Sevrinsen say, when asked how he stayed thin all his life, “I never though about getting fat.”

I apparently agreed to get fat, so I had no choice. I thought about getting fat and I achieved it. I got fat. Once I became aware that I had created the fat, I made up my mind to change what I was thinking. It took a lot of concentration but eventually the weight began to melt off.

Will that work for you? Not likely! You probably are so used to having a weight problem that you won’t be able to clear it from your thinking. It will always be like an elephant in the room. For instance, do you ever visualize yourself in a petite? Do you see yourself shopping for clothes that are half the size you are wearing today? Do you have a picture in your mind of the person inside you that you want to let out? Can you make 15 minutes available for exercise? Every day? Can you change what you eat? Can you change what you drink?

If these things don’t matter, then I can promise you that you won’t be able to lose weight and keep it off. It just won’t work for you. Know that your thoughts become your reality, and as long as you see yourself at your current weight, your mind will direct your body to make it so. Look in your mirror. If you can find a slim person in there anywhere, you can let that visualization become who you truly are. If you can’t, you will always become what you see.

Many people have tried to lose weight unsuccessfully. Some couldn’t stick to their plan, some didn’t have a plan at all. To most, it was not the losing weight but the self-image they forgot to change. They still, after taking off pound after pound, thought of themselves as the mirror image that they looked at before the weight came off. If you see yourself as fat, all the nutrition and diet, all the exercise, all the metabolism work will not matter. You “gotta get your mind right”.

It is a known fact that 3500 calories is a pound of body weight and to lose one pound, you must reduce your intake of calories (or burn off) by 3,500. Given that information, if you want to lose five pounds in one week, you must reduce your calories by 17,500!

But the thing is, the average person only takes in about 2000 calories a day, or 14,000 per week, and that is pretty much what it takes to sustain your health. In other words, to diet away five pounds in one week you can’t eat anything, ANYTHING, for the whole entire week, PLUS one day before AND one day after the week. An average daily food intake of 2000 calories would need nine days of zero, zip, nada, none, no food whatsoever to lose 5 pounds. The problem should be obvious at this point: You can’t just diet fat off. It takes more than diet.

When you cut out food, your body will throw all of it’s protein under the bus trying to protect itself. Without food, your body makes a bunch of decisions. (This is your body, not you. It’s a physiology thing.) After it takes all of the protein out of your muscle, (I’ll come back to body builders in a minute) your body will start to live on carbohydrates and when that happens you will gain weight! Your body will go into hibernation mode. You have to change the way your body works to make fat go away. It’s called METABOLISM. Your metabolism slows down and you won’t lose any weight, you’ll gain more.

If you wish to lose fat you’ll be better off if you work at increasing your metabolism rather than switching from one diet to another. Most diets work by creating a way for you to take in fewer calories than you need, and you’ll lose weight in the beginning. Then there will be a time when more weight loss will NOT happen because your body has adapted to that new level of calorie intake. You are in hibernation mode, your metabolism has recognized that the food supply is diminished, so it slows the burn rate. Think about bears that sleep through the entire winter, with their body living off the fat. No food comes in, and they survive for months. However, when they start eating again, their body immediately starts storing FAT all over again, getting ready for the next winter.

You have to control the burn rate, not the caloric intake. I mentioned body builders a minute ago. They eat like they will never have another meal. For all the food they take in, they should weight 400 pounds, but they don’t. They have learned to speed up their metabolism, so what they eat is going into muscle building, not fat storing.

One thing is for sure: Body Builders don’t eat a lot of Big Macs and Whoppers. They have a totally different diet, and couple with some simple exercises, they control their metabolisms. If you like that sort of look, they are usually pretty hot, too.

The real deal is, you can’t just diet and make fat go away, so you have to make a choice, a complete lifestyle choice. You want to lose weight? Start with a little exercise. Get your metabolism kicked up. Once it starts to take off a little weight, THEN start your diet. After that, up your exercise. If you wait to start until you have increased your metabolism, all your work will be more effective. The pounds will come off faster and more easily. The weight loss is more likely to be permanent.

See, I’m not here trying to sell you a product. I want to talk about what will be good for you. You need to wrap your head around the fact that you put your weight on because you don’t burn everything that you eat. You store some of it, and over time, that weight becomes your weight. Problem is, storage is driven by consumption, and consumption is mostly about water. Protein is 75% water, and body builders have protein drinks, bars, and so on. When you go on a diet, after you clear out the water you burn protein from your storehouse.

You can’t just diet fat off because your body will give away all of it’s protein to protect itself, so you start to live on carbohydrates- and gain weight. When you lower your food intake, you lose protein, and this loss lowers your burn rate.

I’ll bet your body answers differently than you do!

If you have tried several times to lose weight, and it doesn’t seem to work as well as before, you might have a very different problem than you think.

Have you ever heard of hibernation mode? When a bear stores up fat for the winter, his body goes into a hibernation mode. It stops burning that fat at the normal rate. The bear’s metabolism says,”Hey, remember the last time when the food stopped coming for a couple months? It looks like that’s going to happen again. If there is going to be a food shortage for the next couple months, I won’t burn the calories.” The bear has a built-in system for not losing weight based on the food supply called the hibernation mode.

So do you.

This is a physiological instinct. It is as natural in your own body, or the bear’s, as a heartbeat. You can’t dictate to it or control it any more than you can make your heart change rhythm.

Here is what happens in a person.

When you decide to go on a diet for the very first time, your body doesn’t realize that this will be a temporary suspension of intake, so it just keeps on burning the calories at the normal rate which leads to a great weight loss. You slim right down, and everything is terrific. That happens the first time.

The problem is, and I’m sure you will recognize it, that as you lose whatever weight you wanted to take off and are very happy with the results, your body is asking what happened to the food supply. It starts to say “When the food comes back I’m going to have to store some of it, just in case this happens again.”

You are happy. So happy, in fact, that once you have achieved your weight loss goal, you revert to the same eating and exercise habits that led to the diet in the first place. You don’t know that your body is making plans to keep some extra weight in case it needs it in the future.

Then, after a while you look in the mirror and realize you put all the weight back on. You go back to that great diet that helped you lose all that weight, but something different happens this time: the weight doesn’t melt off.

Why?

Your body has activated the hibernation mode. Just like the bear going into the winter, your body recognizes that the food supply has just shut down so it takes an animal instinct function of “winterizing” the metabolism. “Hey, there’s no food coming in again! I remember this! It must be hibernation time! I won’t burn the calories.”

That is not a choice that you consciously make, it’s an animal reaction. Your body’s physiology accepts the food cutoff and responds to it. The diet takes longer and longer to get the job done, but eventually you reach your goal weight, and go off the diet and back to your old ways. You start piling on the pounds faster now, because your body, again, is making a survival decision: fatten up, because there will be more of these winter periods, and they may get a lot longer. You get into the well known “yo-yo” pattern: put a little on and fight to get it off, then put more on, then take that off, and over and over and over.

There you have it. The whole problem.

If you go on a diet with the intention of it being a quick fix for your weight situation, you have to be aware that part of your brain is not going to co-operate. It won’t let you lose weight time after time on the same plan.

Weight loss is truly not about a short term change in your food intake. Weight loss is about long term change in your self-destructive patterns (bad habits). If you eat too much for your body to burn, you will get fat. 3500 calories is a pound. You can’t change that. If you eat that much in one day, you have to burn that much to stay even. If you only burn 2500 calories but take in 3500, that extra 1000 calories a day will be an extra pound of weight in three and a half days.

However, if your body sees the food supply shutting down it will tell your metabolism to burn calories more slowly, so you may only use 1500 calories the next day instead of 2500. Instead of losing weight, because your body doesn’t want to let you starve, you may go on a diet and gain weight.

In truth, the only way you can control weight loss is to study your own habits that are leading to weight gain and change them. That means food intake, diet, and exercise. Ugh, exercise! You know, like when you go to the gym and work out, and then stop on the way home for an ice cream. Your mind is thinking about losing weight, but your body is saying that you deserve the ice cream for having worked out, but actually your body is tricking you into adding more calories so it can keep itself going.

However, cravings and exercise are topics for other articles.

Unless this is your first diet, you’re going to need an ACTION PLAN. The key words are Action and Plan.
I once read
• Action without planning is futile
• Planning without action is worthless.
If this is not your first rodeo, cowboy, you know this true when it comes to weight loss.
Every professional diet service will give you a plan. Each will give you some kind of action. Some will provide a diet buddy system. Most will require charts and/or logins. Many will have meetings. Action and Plan, Plan and Action.
No matter which plan you choose, Follow the plan. Lose the weight. Become beautiful. Wear thin people clothes. Go on television as the person that lost all that weight. Be loved by millions. Get a sports car. Be admired. Be interviewed. Write a book. Let the exciting person inside of you out.
Or, do nothing, change nothing, and remain as you are.

We’ve just finished reading online reviews of about thirty weight loss plans, everything from NutriSystems and Weight Watchers to Fatloss4idiots to Jarrod’s Subway diet. They discussed health, calories, protein, diet pills, weight gain, carbs, grapefruit, and just about everything else that’s involved in being healthy. They reviewed how to lose weight with exercise, diet foods, and all forms of diet plans. You can get hypnosis. You can get diet pills. All of them have one objective- to help you if you really want to lose weight.

We were looking for the right plan for me. Some of the weight loss programs I considered are very good, some, not so much. One review really caught my eye. It was a testimonial on a major website from a woman that simply blew me away. She was asked about her current low calorie diet. Maybe she didn’t mean it as a testimonial, but here it is. You decide.
“Whenever I find that weight isn’t falling off of me based on reduced calories, I just go back to fatloss4idiots. I dropped just about 4 lbs by day 4. I’m always amazed at how this diet works for me.” – K. Jones (via email)
I can see where someone might could call that a testimonial. Would you? Testimonials are there to convince you that you can do it. You already know you can lose the weight, so the testimonials are just there to reinforce your own opinion. Heck, you could even become a spokesperson for the plan of your choice. You could be doing the testimonial! Look at all of them you see on TV. Any one of them COULD BE YOU! They want you to succeed and show others.
Remember this: If you agree to do something and don’t do it, it is no different than if you had not agreed to it in the first place.
We have done a lot of homework on this subject because it matters. We have written many reviews of many products, including several times about this lady’s particular plan.
The question becomes, “Why is it just a backup plan?”
Well, there are a couple of reasons, but mostly, she isn’t where she wants to be and she isn’t sticking to her plan to get there. She agreed to the plan but isn’t doing it. She isn’t sticking to her own plan to lose weight so she thinks that by adding a second plan to the works that everything will be okay. She may as well not have gone on diet #1 in the first place. Besides, mixing two different diet plans is not going to get her where she feels she has to be. It will probably cost her her health in the long run.

Sorry! If you don’t make a decision on what you want, set some goals, create a plan and work at it, you won’t lose much weight, and if you lose the weight without exercise, you won’t tone up at all.
The rest? It’s pretty simple, really.
Like I said at the outset, set up a plan. Follow the plan. Lose the weight. Become beautiful. Wear thin people clothes. Go on television as the person that lost all that weight. Be loved by millions. Get a sports car. Be admired. Be interviewed. Write a book. Let the exciting person inside of you out.
Or do nothing, change nothing, and remain as you are.
That’s my opinion. It’s really very simple. Make a choice and take the action that goes with it. It works for me, and it will work for you.
Look for some really great articles coming here shortly!
Ray