Five Easy Steps to Lose the Tonnage

I was thinking the other dayabout the actual process I’ve gone through to lose the weight. (And if the pop-tart queen can lose it, you can, too!)

It’s odd when you get down to it, considering how much people struggle to lose weight, because it's honestly NOT hard to lose weight. People struggle needlessly. If you put out effort in the right ways, you can avoid the struggles and reap the rewards instead. Let's skip the danger zones and zero right in on the rewards, shall we?

So in the hopes of helping youget started on the right foot, fere are five simple steps that got me there!

1. Believing it was possible. THIS had to come before anything else. If you don’t think it’s possible, there’s no drive to try, right? Now, I got there by starting to read success stories. I read a bunch of them. But more than that, it was the before and after pictures that did this for me. I saw person after person after person after person, many many that were as big or bigger than me, who lost the weight. After about 5,002 pictures, something clicked in that brain of mine…“Hey! Just maybe I could do this, too!”
2. Preparation. This is not the code word for “avoidance” like it’s so often used. I mean real preparation. Read up! Get informed! And figure out what you need. In other words, get the book Sparky! Anybody who asks me what to eat on a “low-carb” or worse, “no-carb plan,” tells me they’re on “intro-duction” or something like that is going to get slapped in the face with a copy of DANDR. Like and quick! This phase will last anywhere from a few days to a week or two. You’re not trying to split the atom, man. But know what you’re doing.
3. Now: Do something! This is where, for me at least, it was critical that I didn’t judge my efforts at all. To begin with, while I was still prepping, I simply started cutting down on my sugar. Tapering off my Dr. Pepper habit. I went from buying 12-packs to buying a 2-liter to buying a 1-liter, and drinking less all the time. Was I “low-carbing”? Hell no! Was I making important changes and improving my odds for success? You bet your butt! It also kept me from experiencing the common crash of withdrawal this time around. The thing was, I was making relatively painless but VERY important changes in my behaviors that would start leading me down the right path.
4. Be positive! This is a MAJOR and vastly underrated component of success. Why? I have no idea. It’s odd that people don’t take full advantage of this, really, because it’s probably the easiest way to get the best results in the shortest time, AND it feels great to boot. EXPECT to succeed. Talk about succeeding. Be positive. Hang out with supportive, positive people. Visualize yourself thinner every day. Really FEEL every accomplishment and relish it. In fact, celebrate every accomplishment, even if it’s silently. I can promise you this: if you sit around saying, “I can’t pass up cookies, I can’t control myself, I am weak, I can’t lose, blah blah blah freakin’ blah,” well, you know what? You are programming your mind for failure. However, if you say, “Wow, I’m doing great! I’ve improved this and this and that, and I feel great, and I look better every day and I’m amazing!”…Well, that, my friends, has a much different effect. Say what you want, but this component alone can make or break your success.
5. Build on your success and keep doing it. See, you’re not even starting from scratch here! You already have success to work with, from your getting prepared phase, and you know it’s success and feel good about it, since you’ve been positive and hanging out with positive people. And when you feel like you’ve made a poor food choice for some reason, so the Hell what? That means NOTHING in the face of your obvious progress and success. It means you may decide to cut down for a day or two in order to compensate. But heck, who cares? That’s reasonable anyway, right?

And that, my friends, is the overview of how I’ve lost over a hundred pounds. It ain’t hard, man! You just have to want it enough to work on it some. It’s effort, but it shouldn’t be struggle. There’s a difference, as in huge! But really, it’s not even bad work. After you get started, it feel so great and there are SO MANY positive payouts, it’s hard to think of it as anything but pure joy.