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arms and thighs with a cloth tape measure. It's really important to do this and not "pretend". Have you heard that some companies are mis-sizing women's clothing? They are pretending that a size 14 is a size 12 or a size 18 is a size 16. Women feel better about buying their clothing from those companies because they get to believe that they are a size smaller than they really are! Companies that are accurate and tell the truth are being punished by lower sales. But, that doesn't change the truth. It only encourages these women to not live in the real world. No matter what we feel, the true measurements of our body show us real proof of what is really going on. If we are not honest with ourselves, this won't work and we won't become more healthy, which by the way, is what we should truly be after. We want to lose weight to be more healthy. And that means we want to lose fat to get to the proper Body Mass Index or BMI.

When we lose weight through exercise [which we are doing to be more healthy], here is an important thing to keep in mind - your weight may not "fly" off. Why? First, many people have gotten used to hearing about large amounts of weight loss during short periods of time because of diets like Atkins where you might actually lose 15 pounds or more during the first month [or three weeks!]. There is still debate about how healthy this is in both the short and long run. Dr. Atkins is gone now and his company is a big moneymaking machine, so it's possible that we won't get objective information from them. Do your own research or keep reading articles and books [like mine at Helium!]. Second, others have done even more radical things like stomach stapling surgery. I know someone who did this and he lost so much weight in a year that people thought he was sick with something serious. He's ok now. But, we're just talking about exercise today. When we've lost two to four pounds or so in a month, it might not seem like much when we hear about these big numbers from more radical methods, but we are doing something safer that we can continue to do for life.

Is there something we are not noticing? Yes. When you exercise, it's usually the case that you gain some muscle and muscle is denser than fat. Let's say we have actually lost five pounds in a month because each day we did a little more exercise. It's very possible that we have gained 1.5 lbs of muscle, which means we actually lost 6.5 pounds of fat [6.5 -1.5 = 5 net pounds lost]. Unless we cut our hair or

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