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Let me ask you a question. When you successfully achieve your weight loss goal (and I know that losing weight is not the difficult bit) what should you do next? Celebrate? Buy a whole new wardrobe or book a holiday? Of course, it's very important to reward yourself on your impressive accomplishment and I would be the first to encourage you to do so. However, the most crucial action that you must take next is to set yourself another goal. People who do this are much more likely to successfully maintain their new, slimmer figure. The end of the diet is a dangerous place. Perhaps you could now train for a 5K fun race or aim to secure a new job or learn a whole new skill. The nature of the goal is not too important - the value lies in the fact that you are creating something new to strive towards. A new purpose.
Of course, if you failed to address the habits and behaviours that caused you to gain weight in the first pace then they will be lurking beneath the surface ready to sabotage all your efforts. Whilst these behaviours ought to be well and truly quashed at the outset of your weight loss programme it's never too late to get to grips with them so your new goal could simply be to identify your top 3 self defeating habits and to put plans in place to conquer them once and for all.
But what if you can vividly remember the arrival of January 1st year after tear and with it comes the realisation that, yet again, you didn't quite succeed with your weight loss goal? Then it's time to revise your goal. Remember - if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. So if every January 2nd sees you newly kitted out at the gym then it's time to acknowledge that as a way to achieve your goal, the gym simply doesn't do it for you. How could you approach it differently this time around? You could follow one of the hundreds of healthy eating plans online and how about designing for yourself a walking for weight loss programme? Again, there's plenty of advice to be had at the click of a button. Just do something different.
If you do regularly fall short of reaching your goals then understanding why you want to achieve them will greatly improve your chances of success. Ensure that your goal to lose weight is your own i.e. that you're not losing weight because someone else thinks that you should. Even if that person is your doctor, you must dig deep and find your own 'whys'.
Mid December is a great time to be mentally preparing for the new year. Many folks declare that it's ludicrous to allow the dawning of a simple day in the calendar (January 1st) to be such a big deal. I personally think that revising our lives is a powerful and positive action and the dawning of a whole fresh new year does seem to provide us with the perfect opportunity for a shake up. Won't you even admit to feeling a vague stirring of excitement by the huge sense of potential offered to us by each approaching new year? Grasp the opportunity this week BEFORE the chaos of the festivities descends - Happy goal setting! |
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