I believe you can't lose weight without a motivating factor, whether you do it for your family or yourself you need something to look forward to.
I never had a weight problem until I took on the stressful life of a designer, long days and fast food took their toll quickly and I found myself with a BMI of 30 and no idea how to lose weight with my lifestyle.
In January I was asked to join some friends skydiving, they were planning a trip in July to do a Tandem Free Fall, I had alook at the brochure and reading the fine print found out that they didn't offer tandem jumps to people over 275lbs. Now I wasn't quite that heavy, but close enough and I really wanted to do skydive. So I started to research different weight loss programs and that is how I came to be a part of the staff here at weight loss reviews. The first thing I had to do now was set my goal...
Setting your Goal
For a start you need to decide on a reasonable target weight for yourself. As a guideline, most diet and weight loss professionals use the Body Mass Index (BMI), which looks at a person’s weight in relation to their height. It's not a perfect system as bone structure is not taken into account but it is a good basis to start on. A BMI of less than 20 is considered to be underweight, 20-24.9 is normal weight, 25-29.9 is overweight and 30 or more is obese. Quite simply, the higher your BMI, the greater your risk of health problems. Find out your BMI with the BMI Calculator.
Ideally, you should aim for a target weight that puts your BMI in the normal weight category (20-24.9), but if you have a considerable amount of weight to lose, this may seem extremely difficult and unachievable. Instead, we recommend setting an initial weight loss that moves you down a couple of BMI notches, or perhaps shifts you from the obese category (BMI more than 30) to the overweight category (BMI 25-29.9). Research shows that losing just 10 percent of excess weight will improve health – and you can always modify your goals along the way.
While many of us might like to slim down to the weight we were on our 18th birthday or on our wedding day, it’s important to be realistic about whether you can really achieve this. For most of us, it’s likely to be impractical – as teenagers we probably played sport every single day, while we perhaps starved ourselves to get into our wedding dress! Instead, it’s better to focus on reaching a target weight that leaves you looking and feeling slim, fit and healthy – rather than skinny.
Once you’ve set a realistic weight goal, you’ll be able to work out how long it will take you to achieve it.
How long will it take you to reach your target?
While it might be tempting to be aggressive in your weight loss efforts, a consistant pace is safer and more liekely to succeed. If your BMI is under 27 a weekly weight loss of around 2lbs is great, if you are over BMI of 27 you can probably lose more safely. Although you may lose slightly more than that when you first start dieting as your body gets rid of water as well as fat. In the long term though, a weight loss of more than 2lb a week means you’ll have to cut calories excessively – and ultimately, this will make it even harder to lose those pounds. Effectively, very low calorie intakes simply push the body into ‘starvation mode’ so that it becomes super efficient at making the most of the calories it actually gets from food and drink. It does this by protecting its fat stores and instead using lean tissue or muscle to provide it with some of the calories it needs to keep functioning. This leads to a loss of muscle, which in turn lowers metabolism so that the body needs fewer calories to keep going and weight loss slows down – not ideal if you want to lose unwanted pounds!
There are a lot of positive reviews on this site for products and programs as well as insightful diet tips, have a look around and use the technique above to set your goals.