Want Motivation While on Your Diet - Throw Out The Scale!

People who are on a diet continually look for ways to stay motivated.  One of the most common and self–destructive ways that is used both for accountability and motivation is to get on the scale daily or every other day.  Although it seems like a good way to measure progress, it couldn’t be farther from the truth, this is what this article will be focusing on.  But, first here is a leading question.

Do you want to be successful?

 Do you want to have a stress free experience with weight loss or are you into frustration and obsessing over every fluctuation in your weight? Your weight can change day to day based upon many variables, the smallest of which being your weight. The scale literally creates the opportunity for you to become demoralized and sabotage your weight loss efforts each and every day. Each and every day you step on a scale you create the anxiety surrounding success or failure based upon the numbers. Just so you know, stress creates cortisol and cortisol is a hormone that increases the amount of fat in your belly…so how does getting stressed every time you approach the scale help? It doesn't, it helps you gain weight!

The scale also has you evaluating your health, self-image, how you look and feel, based solely on what the scale says. In the blink of an eye you can go from looking at yourself in the mirror, thinking “wow, I am really looking leaner, I am wearing clothes that I have not been able to get into for years. I feel good and even a little sexy….let’s go see what that scale says” POW you're two pounds heavier and now you feel like crap!  In a second your thoughts shift to, "What’s the point, I give up?"  Where is your motivation now?

Here is another example of how the scale doesn’t create a clear picture of your body composition.  Do you know that every year as you get older you lose 1 pound of muscle and gain 1 pound of fat?

As a result, many people look at the scale each year and inaccurately feel that because their weight has not changed, that their health and body has not changed either.  Yet they are weaker and fatter every year.

The scale is toxic for people who are trying to lose weight if you obsess on the daily fluctuations that the scale tells you. The problem is that the scale doesn’t take into consideration muscle increases, water retention, menstrual cycles, body fat changes, etc.   A simple evening meal that has more salt in it could change the scale 2-3 pounds the following morning due to water weight and destroy your motivation in the process.  Weighing yourself first thing in the morning can be off as much as 5-7 pounds compared to the rest of the day.

The Scale is NOT your friend!

You love it when it tells you what you want to hear and hate it when it tells you otherwise.  A number should not dictate your self-esteem or effect your motivation. If you are to be successful in weight loss, you must remove things that would create a negative emotional response that could lead to binge eating or self-sabotage! How you look, how you feel, your diminishing waistline, your level of cardiovascular fitness, your body fat measurement, your resting heart rate, blood pressure, a full blood panel and how your clothes fit; these are indicators for health and weight loss..   The scale should only be used in conjunction with evaluating all these other indicators.

So, throw out your scale or at least put it away! Do yourself a favor, if you must weigh yourself do it only once or twice a month.   You have a better chance for success, if you always create a weight loss environment that promotes positive feedback and makes it easy to stay motivated.

About:  Michael Mountain is a transformational author on health, weight loss & personal growth and is featured on Amazon.com. He is the author of the Ultimate Fat Loss Solution Diet which is available presently free of charge at http://www.michael-mountain.com/.   He is also the author of Mindset for Weight Loss transformational program - a revolutionary step-by-step program designed to provide the “inner-strength strategies” to take any diet and make it effective for

Diet and Weight Loss – Confused Yet!?

Don’t you get tired of all of the conflicting information out there about diet and weight loss? 

Some people recommend a low fat diet, some recommend low carb, some high protein, some high fiber, some cabbage soup and the folks that like to make things easy - boil it down to a simple formula; calories in vs. calories out i.e. eating less than your body burns each day.  Then, there is the question of when to eat; eat every 2-3 hours, eat the normal 3 times a day, fast during the day and eat one big dinner….I mean there are a never ending number of options.  Then there are the quick fix solutions like all the diet pills that are available or the option of lap bands, liposuction and other surgical procedures. 

It would appear that it would be easy for someone to get caught up in over- analysis paralysis…..or said differently, getting so confused with conflicting information that you end up doing nothing.  But, here is the reality from a different perspective: they are all right and they are all wrong. You can lose weight on any of these approaches and of course some are healthier than others, but what should also be pointed out is that they are all missing very important information.  None of these options address the entire problem and are therefore an incomplete solution.

Wouldn’t you agree that the problem is in part, knowing what food is healthy for your body, and the other part is knowing how to make and follow through with the healthy choice!
The problem in reality, is our own internal struggle with sticking with and following through with healthy choices, eating the right foods in the right amounts, for life.  We struggle with our own feelings, habits, desires, motivations and will power to not stray from the healthy food choices each and every time! 
The weight and health you have now is a result of all those struggles. If you don’t like what you see and you truly want to lose the weight permanently then you need more information, you must make some internal changes.

Unfortunately, all of the options listed above only address an option for physical change – diet, pills or surgery.  They might change how you look and feel temporarily but, none of these options will change you!
This is the number one reason that 95% of all people on a diet, taking a pill or after surgery fail to keep the weight off!  You haven’t changed on the inside. 

The only way for a fat loss and diet solution to truly be just that…a solution, is for that program to address all aspects.  Diet, nutrition and exercise information is the beginning, but most importantly that information must include; how to stay motivated, committed and focused on achieving your goal.   A true solution must show you how to break free of your negative beliefs, emotional relationships and unhealthy habits surrounding food!

A complete weight loss solution will self-empower you by providing not just the nutritional and dietary information you need but also the inner-strength strategies that lead to certain permanent weight loss! 

About:  Michael Mountain is a transformational author on health, weight loss & personal growth and is featured on Amazon.com. He is the author of the Ultimate Fat Loss Solution Diet which is available presently free of charge at http://www.michael-mountain.com/.   He is also the author of Mindset for Weight Loss transformational program - a revolutionary step-by-step program designed to provide the “inner-strength strategies” to take any diet and make it effective for permanent weight loss.  This program allowed him to end his own personal 20 year struggle with weight and poor health! 

Learning to Re-Condition

You can re-condition your beliefs and habits by accessing your sub-conscious mind

We are self-reflective. We can actually choose what we put into our brain and what habits we would like to have. So you see, you really are the driver of your destiny. You can change any belief or create any habit you want and make it a part of your sub-conscious... If you know how.

How long does it take to change a bad-eating habit and replace it with a good one?

NASA conducted an experiment on its astronaut trainees. It took the astronauts and fitted them with glasses that flipped their field of vision 180 degrees, quite literally everything was upside down. They had to wear the glasses 24hrs a day, 7 days a week. The trainees struggled along seeing things flipped and feeling disoriented. On the 26th day one of the trainees found himself able to see normally again and the others also found that they were seeing normal by the 30th day. Their brains had corrected for the changed external environment (glasses) by re-wiring some of the nerves or neural pathways. We call the development of new neural tissue or networks - neuroplasticity.

That tells us that it will take approximately 30 days to create new habits! Not by just eating differently but by an actual daily process that deals with your mindset. It is not as simple as replacing one for another, you need to actively condition the mind to change the programs that are creating your habits. As you recall, your eating habits are a product of a lot of different learned "bad" programs. It is these programs that the re-conditioning process will change by creating new programs and strengthening them through neuroplasticity.

You will re-condition to the point that anytime you are hungry or whenever you are going to exercise, your new programs will run or play and make the choice of going to the gym or eating healthy completely effortless. No need for willpower and no presence of an internal battle. Can you see how this is VERY different from just forcing yourself to follow a diet or exercise program?!?!

The above is an excerpt from Michael Mountain's book Mindset for Weight Loss which is currently available on Amazon.

The Best Belly Fat Burners

Belly fat, also known as “visceral fat”, is associated with increased risks of heart disease.  It presents us with abdominal distention that is commonly referred to as a Beer belly, even if the affected person doesn’t drink beer.

To understand how to get rid of it quickly requires a little bit of understanding about what is happening below the surface of your tummy.  What you should know is that not all of a big belly is fat! A lot of it is fluid retention, that is why it gushes around.

Let’s get right into it, so it all makes sense and then I will give you a list of how to burn the belly fat as fast as possible.

When you are gaining weight, the first place that the fat goes is of course into your fat cells all over the body.  As the fat cells begin to expand with fat and toxins (there are toxins in most fat) then the amount of inflammation in the fat cells starts to increase.  It will increase until the fat cell is so engorged that the inflammation will start to spill out into the circulation, raising the overall inflammation in the body.
This inflammation can lead to other health problems, but it will also raise the amount of cortisol (a hormone) in your body and start increasing the accumulation of fat specifically in the belly.   As cortisol elevates it shuts off your HES1 protein in the liver, that turns off the liver from being able to process fat and leads to fat accumulating in the liver.

The struggling fat cells will send the fat storage problem back to the liver, the liver then begins to become further congested with fat and toxins and stops functioning properly.   As a result you start to spill triglycerides or fat into the digestive track and you begin to retain fluid in the abdomen and produce more inflammation in the gut.  This situation is made worse by eating high carbohydrate meals.

The fat cells have something called leptin and as it rises, the amount of Adiponectin inversely decreases.  A low level of Adiponectin causes insulin resistance in your liver!

Now your blood sugars start to rise, raising the release of insulin… unfortunately, practically all carbohydrates that you eat will be converted into belly fat.  A fatty liver raises your chance for type 2 diabetes by 500%.

If you have ever had a weekend when you drank too much alcohol and ate a lot of unhealthy carbohydrates, you have experienced this at least temporarily.  The alcohol shuts down the liver, you start retaining water and it is made worse because likewise carbohydrates makes you retain water and you can’t process the carbohydrates properly.

So what do we do about all of this?

The following are some simple steps to reverse this process quickly.

• Decrease your carbohydrate intake dramatically until the liver is de-greased.  Eat nothing white or processed.
• Eat smaller meals to decrease the effort on the liver.
• Limit your calorie intake.
• Increase your intake of lean healthy proteins; it will accelerate the healing within the liver.
• Increase your intake of nutrient-rich fibrous vegetables.  Fiber will absorb excess fat, toxins and cholesterol out of the body at a faster rate; vitamins and minerals will promote healing.
• Stay away from high fat diets so that the liver can detoxify and de-grease!
• Exercise at least 30 minutes a day.  Burst training or high intensity interval training are shown to be best for belly fat.  Hot-box yoga is great for dumping toxins as well.
• Take at least 500mg of green tea extract – decreases belly fat.
• Take 900-1200mg of DHA – it de-greases the liver.
• Take 200mg Resveratrol and 200mg Turmeric – as anti-oxidants to combat the inflammation.
• Take a Probiotic 8-12 billion active cultures – heals inflammatory effects on the gut.

I recommend doing much of the above as a lifestyle, but especially at the very beginning of a belly fat burning program – because it will virtually guarantee that you will lose the belly fat, very quickly.