If one of your new year’s resolutions is going to be ‘to lose weight’, then I would urge you to get started now instead of waiting till January.

Successful weight loss is all about momentum, right? I’m sure you can all hark back to a time when you were dieting consistently and actually felt quite good, even excited about the process. But getting started is the really hard part, so why leave it till January when you are feeling bloated, hungover, and are facing a return to work?

I truly believe that if you want to lose weight in 2012, you will increase your chances of success dramatically if you get started now, and roll into the new year with much of the hard work done.

Imagine if you started the weight loss journey now, at the beginning of November. It wouldn’t have to be perfect, you could perhaps just focus on cutting down on the alcohol or eliminating the sweet stuff on weekdays. If you stuck at it, it’s quite possible you could lose 10 lbs or more by the time the new year comes around. And then when you do hit January, you will have momentum, a real headstart, some nicely formed habits, and your resolution will have real sincerity behind it.

Compare that to beginning in January – you’ll feel awful with all that excess holiday weight, you will have to create a new habit from scratch (“starting cold”), and that’s on top of any other commitments you may have. Generating weight loss motivation at that point is much, much harder.

I know that some may say that it’s harder to diet in November and December because of the holiday season, but I’d argue that the holiday season makes it easier to diet.

Remember, we’re not looking to hit a very low calorie diet here in order to shed 30 lbs in two months. All we’re looking to do is get an ‘edge’ in before the new year by shedding up to 10 lbs of fat and getting our minds and bodies used to the idea of dieting. What the holiday season allows you to do is diet more easily because you know you’ll have regular rewards along the way. How tough is it to lay off the sweet stuff from Monday to Friday if you know you have a big Thanksgiving dinner on the Saturday?

So give it a try. Don’t attempt to scorch the earth or anything here…just get into some good habits and look to go into January lighter than you are now.

“The beginning is the hardest part of the work” – Plato

It is such a simple statement that contains so much truth; yet it has been pounded into us so many times that its meaning has been lost.

There is nothing harder than beginning. Nothing.

Imagine that you are the person who has rock-hard abs, has just finished a session with the steel at the gym, and is about to go for a 10 mile run before settling down with a healthy dinner. Sounds like a lot of hard work, right?

But I will bet that it is considerably easier to be that person than it is to be that same person at the beginning of their quest. At the beginning, just trying to make one simple change, such as jogging in place for a few minutes, can be an incredibly stressful experience. The person with momentum and feedback, like the fit person mentioned above, has no such issues.

So throw away those motivation books that are designed to ‘pump you up’, because nothing can prepare you for just how hard even the ‘simple’ things will feel in those first few days and weeks. The only thing that can make you somewhat resilient to them is an understanding and awareness that they will be hard.

To that extent, try not to make too many sacrifices at once. Whether you’re planning to start exercising, or dieting, or making other tweaks to your life, they will all feel like sacrifices at the beginning. So start with one small change you can get on top of, whether it’s limiting your calories, or ditching junk food until a blow-out Friday, or doing session one of a fitness DVD a couple of times a week.

Just get started. You will be amazed at how a little success, a little momentum, a little feedback can leave you feeling so much more confident and optimistic. Then you’ll want to do things more intensely, and you’ll want more sacrifices in order to get more of this wondrous sense of momentum and rewarding feedback.

Keep your beginnings humble, and see how exhilarating it can feel in a short period of time…

Here is the ultimate irony for anybody in search of weight loss motivation: you already have it in buckets. Here’s a quick dictionary definition of ‘motivation’:

noun
the reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a certain way

I’m sure that the average person is not short on such reasons for weight loss:

• living longer
• a healthier body
• better sex life
• more attractive
• greater self-confidence
• more energy
• saving money on food (heh)

There is something to be said for simplicity.

Have you ever heard of Jared Fogle, ‘The Subway Guy’? He was a 425-lb man who decided to do something radical to lose fat.

He went to Subway twice a day and would eat a 6″ turkey sub for lunch with a packet of baked chips, and a 12″ vegetable sub for dinner. Additionally, he started walking from location to location instead of taking a bus, adding 1.5 miles of daily exercise to his regimen.

He did this every day for a year.

Super-simple, super-repetitive…and he lost 245 lbs during the process.

In a recent book called The Paradox of Choice, the author, Barry Schwartz, suggested that the staggering amount of choice we have in our lives is actually dragging us down to a large extent. When there is less choice, our minds are clearer, more focused.

Clearly Jared is a poster boy for this philosophy (as well as for Subway!) Even in a place with as much choice as Subway, he stuck to the same food every day. That removed the distraction of choice, and kept his results consistent.

Imagine if you could only eat the same calorie-controlled diet every single day. Imagine that there was no choice in the matter. Do you have any doubt whatsoever that you’d lose all the weight you wanted to over the course of time?

How you can simplify your dieting

Try giving yourself six meal choices – two for breakfast, two for lunch, two for dinner. Ensure that even if you had the most calorie-rich of each of the meal choices, you would still end the day in a calorie deficit.

For example, your breakfast choices could be between a bowl of cereal or perhaps a couple of pieces of fruit and a slice of toast. Here is an excellent article that both embraces the principle of simplicity I’m talking about, as well as providing ideas for meal plans: how to lose 20 lbs in a month.

Stock up on all the ingredients/foodstuffs that the six meal choices demand. Each day select one dish from your breakfast menu, lunch menu, and dinner menu. Mix them up once in a while for a little variety.

You may actually find this technique very liberating. Keep thing simple like Jared did, and you too can see exceptional results without a loss of focus.

He that can have Patience can have what he will
- Benjamin Franklin

You can immediately reduce the stress you feel about dieting if you decide to be patient about the weight loss process. I’ll bet that you are thinking in terms of one week goals, or perhaps two weeks, a month, six weeks tops.

I don’t blame you – we live in a quick fix culture. Come May we’ll be seeing magazine covers saying “get a beach-ready body in six weeks!”

But if you are prepared to think in terms of a one year plan, then your mind will instantly be at much greater peace. Suddenly all of your goals are viable. Even if you only lost 5 lbs a month, that would still be a loss of 60 lbs over the course of a year

Then imagine that you threw in a little exercise. Just, say, one set of push-ups a day. You start at one repetition, with the aim of increasing by one rep every two weeks and one set every month. After 12 months, as well as being at least 60 lbs lighter, you would also be doing 12 sets of 26 push-ups every day.

Think about the person you could be in a year’s time, because if you have that kind of patience, then that person will be there to stay.

Take it slowly. Design your destiny. Then execute it slowly, surely and progressively.

“By endurance we conquer.”
- Sir Ernest Shackleton

The difference between success and failure at dieting can be boiled down to one, essential point: how you view the process.

Most people fail at dieting. It can be reasonably assumed, then, that they see dieting as a hard, painful task. Or to put it more precisely, they have an entirely negative view of the experience.

Unfortunately, if you feel this way about dieting, then you are almost certainly doomed to fail. The key to success is to view the experience optimistically, regardless of the symptoms.

Look at the US Navy SEALs. They have an infamous selection process known as ‘Hell Week’ – a week in which prospective SEALs must do countless thousands of calisthenics, undergo surf torture, and be pushed to their mental and physical limit practically non-stop. They get barely any sleep during this process, they are always cold, and get meagre rations.

Now, those prospective candidates are hard men. They come from other branches of the military, and have already proved themselves to be outstanding soldiers and athletes by just qualifying for the selection process. And yet, only a small minority actually make it through.

What is the difference? Well, it could be many things, but my feeling is that it is all to do with mindset. Those who just see the suffering in a negative light are doomed to quit. I recommend reading Richard Machowicz’s book “Unleash the Warrior Within” for an insight into how he qualified as a SEAL using a positive mindset.

Another example…

I used to smoke pretty heavily. I tried quitting on many occasions, but always found myself reaching for a cigarette sooner or later.

Then I came across a book by a man called Allen Carr (a miracle book – get it if you’re a smoker!) He had a reputation for making even the most die-hard of smokers manage to quit their habit easily and effortlessly.

I read the book and did exactly that. Here are two examples of how he changed my negative mindset into a positive one:

1.  He said that it is not ‘giving up’, but rather stopping smoking. There was nothing to “give up”. That every time we extinguished a cigarette we had “stopped smoking” and become “non-smokers”. The only difference this time is to not light up again…to stay stopped.

2.  He said that the ‘itch’ that smokers feel is like a monster in the stomach. The more you deprive this monster of nicotine (ie by not smoking), the smaller it will get and will eventually die. Suddenly, that ‘itch’ was no longer so terrible to me – it became a very nice feeling.

Can you see how this applies to dieting?

If you have stuck to your diet for the day, but you feel that ‘itch’ to eat a chocolate bar, or to snack on some junk food, then choose instead to revel in the feeling. Tell yourself that the itch represents your weight burning off, that it is the feeling of progress in action.

This is endurance. And it doesn’t have to be hard – it can be enormous fun, and immensely liberating.