Leading experts now recommend that people who want to lose weight should start increasing their physical activity. Just being more active in general such as climbing stairs instead of taking elevator, moving around instead of sitting still, sitting up instead of lying down as well as showing some excitement and enthusiasm instead of boredom are things that more effectively burn calories and reduce body fat.

Generally these days people are more aware and accepting of fact that they need to be exercising and a lot of people do commence exercising when they want to do something about their weight. But what they don’t do, is change their eating and drinking habits. They still eat same bad foods and probably more of it under illusion that everything will be fine because of amount of exercising they are doing.

At beginning of a new exercise and dieting campaign people may take to streets by walking slowly around in hope of losing weight. They exercise like this for a few weeks, they don’t lose any weight and then they quit. And reason they quit is a very simple one; they become frustrated and disillusioned about not having lost any weight.

Quitting is inevitable because only thing that changed for these people in those few short weeks is that they started walking. However it’s very unlikely anybody is going to lose weight by just by walking slowly around street and not changing any other aspects of their lifestyle.

People do right thing as far as starting to exercise is concerned but they want instant gratification, it’s quick fix syndrome. Instead of looking at long-term picture and working on changing their overall lifestyle habits to accommodate gradual weight loss, it’s same old thinking of I want it now. And because it doesn’t happen now, they quit and any weight that has been lost goes straight back on.

Though what’s been written to this point are some of main areas where people and diets going wrong, biggest mistake people tend to make when starting a diet is to restrict what it is they eat to such a degree that body doesn’t get enough of essential vitamins and minerals, nutrients, fibre, carbohydrates and protein to support weight loss. When people do this, what they eventually end up doing is put body into survival mode and slow down their metabolism.

Weight loss will occur initially but generally it’s only excess water weight that is lost and because bodies metabolism has slowed down, most of what’s eaten is then stored as fat because body is storing it for later use (survival). When people then give up on their diet and go back to eating what they were having before, they put weight back on as quickly as they lost it and gain more weight because their metabolism is still working as slow as when they stopped dieting.

So where people and diets go wrong is through lack of planning, not having any goals, lack of inspiration to stay motivated, not eating sensibly, skipping meals, restricting what they eat, making bad rather than common sense choices, having wrong mindset, acting on a whim, not exercising or not enough vigorous exercise, lack of commitment and not being mentally prepared to handle bad days that come along.

If people sat down and mapped out a plan of what it is they wanted from a change of lifestyle just as they would if they were going on a holiday or building dream home they always wanted, then majority of people wouldn’t fail. A point to remember is that more a person knows about themselves in terms of what they’re doing before starting a weight loss plan, can make a huge difference to their long term success.

When it comes to losing weight and being able to maintain it there are no shortcuts. People need to focus on long-term health benefits of a change of lifestyle rather than wasting their time on unhealthy quick fix diets.

Successful long-term weight loss comes from a combination of all things that have been mentioned in this article. The chances of success for those people who implement any of ideas contained here are going to be far greater than for those people who decide do something about their weight problem based on a whim.

Copyright © 2005 Mark Allan. All rights reserved.

This article may be freely distributed electronically or in print as long as author’s bio and links are included.