Some Weight Loss Tips

The first thing to know about tips is that they might work for you, they might not. These are absolutely not rules on how to lose weight, just some pointers that may make the process easier to manage.

1) Exercise before eating. What I don't mean (necessarily) is get up first thing in the morning and train while fasted. I mean, at any time of the day, know when you're going to eat, and schedule your exercise to come before that.

Why?

When you exercise, you tend to undergo a state of appetite suppression. That's all well and good, but after exercise, your appetite will come back, and often with a vengeance. Anecdotally, a lot of people get really hungry about an hour after training. This can lead to over-eating in the context of a 24-hour period, thus countering the amount of calories burned. You can battle this by timing your workouts so that your peak appetite after training occurs at a time when you'd normally have a meal anyway. If you were going to eat it anyway, then it's not going to upset your weight loss plans.

2) Love food. That probably sounds like it would be counter-productive, but I genuinely believe the opposite to be true. The trick here is that when I say "love food," I mean love lots of different kinds of foods, not love a select food pyramid that has McDonald's at the bottom, other fast food chains up the sides, and desserts as the top third. It's easier to go without chocolate, for example, when there are a dozen other wholesome foods that you want just as dearly.

3) Get back on the horse. You will fall off the horse. As surely as the sun will set today and rise again tomorrow, you will lapse from your plan. It's going to happen. Accept that fact, and pick yourself back up when it does.

A lot of people approach weight loss goals with an all or nothing mentality. So, when the inevitable happens and they fall off their horse, not only do they fall off it, but they then roll around in its feces and play dead cocky with their arms in the air, because they aren't perfectly on the horse, so they may as well give up altogether.

Now, imagine if you were driving down to the store, but you had to stop at a red light. The sensible thing to do would be to wait for the light to turn green and continue driving. But instead, you unbuckle your seat belt, open the door, step out of the car and stomp back home. Because you couldn't get to the shops in one go, so why go at all?

You're going to reach red lights, and you're going to fall off your horse. Get over it. So you ate a cookie today -- your weight loss journey isn't over, and downing another 12 of them isn't going to do you any good. So you missed today's workout. Big deal. Make up for it. You will have setbacks. Get over it. Get back on the horse.

4) "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly." You don't need a perfect plan to make a change, much less a plan that goes perfectly. You need to do something. There are many right ways to do this, and many wrong ways to do this. If it sounds like it's going to be bad for your health, it probably is. If it sounds sensible, it probably is. Make gradual changes and learn as you go. Some things will work, others won't, some things will work better than others. Doesn't matter. If you're doing 100 things that are outright bad for you today and 0 things that are good for you, and tomorrow you do 99 things that are outright bad for you and 1 thing that's good for you, that's a step in the right direction. Take it. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good, and don't let good be the enemy of okay.