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Unrealistic expectations can be a real problem when you’re trying to lose weight, as no matter how fast you manage to lose weight it never seems to be quick enough. When you weigh over fifty more pounds than you should it is going to take quite awhile to shift the weight if you stick to the recommended weight loss of one to two pounds a week. This is a sensible amount of weight to lose, as it means you can still continue to eat enough food to meet your nutritional requirements and so you’re not permanently hungry. Consequently, it should be easier to avoid piling on the pounds once you reach your goal.

Losing weight at a gradual rate requires you to make some alterations to your diet, but these changes are not so drastic that you won’t be able to live with them for longer than a couple of weeks. Clearly, if you opt for rapid weight loss you will virtually have to starve yourself to achieve your aims, which may help you in the beginning, but won’t prepare you for the action you need to take to maintain a healthier weight. You may be able to live on cabbage soup while you’re losing weight, but soon your body will adjust to receiving so few calories and your weight loss will slow down. Plus, you will be sick to the back teeth of cabbage soup, anyway!

Any diet that gets you to concentrate on eating only certain foods while cutting out others completely probably isn’t going to help you manage your weight in the long run, as there is too much deprivation involved. If you feel as though you’re being deprived you are more likely to obsess about food until you can stand it no longer and go back to eating your regular old diet. Generally, this leads you to regain the weight you lost, if not more, and so this kind of approach is basically futile.

The only way to achieve weight-loss success is to modify your expectations about how much weight you should lose each week and how long it is going to take for you to reach your goal. If you give yourself a realistic targets to aim for you are more likely to take sensible steps to try to reach them, which should help you in the long term. It might take you a bit longer to reach your final goal, but at least you will have got into the habit of calorie counting and doing exercise, rather than having to adapt to a completely new diet plan.

Learn more about this author, Michelle Wilkinson.
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