Losing Weight Isn't Easy

Excerpted from
The Take-Control Diet
By Ian K. Smith, M.D.

Bad habits are hard if break, and good ones are hard to form. If anyone tells you that weight loss is easy, walk away. It's true that some have an easier time than others, but losing weight will certainly not be the easiest thing you attempt in life. In fact, it's going to be downright difficult. You're going to be making demands on yourself to make lifestyle changes, which for some can be quite dramatic. If you've lived a life of eating three thousand calories a clay full of chocolate-chip cookies and potato-chip snacks, it's not going to be easy to reduce or eliminate these goodies from your diet. If you spend a majority of your time sitting on the couch watching television or using the computer, then incorporating more exercise and/or physical activity could come as a shock.

If losing weight were such an easy task, there'd be no need for this book or the thousands of others that have come before mine. Weight loss experts would be looking for another specialty and financial analysts wouldn't be calling it a multibillion-dollar industry. The truth, however, is that this industry has been built on the weaknesses, insecurities, and failures of decent human beings who find themselves eternally hopeless in the battle of the bulge.

My mother's numerous attempts and failures to lose weight have been the greatest confirmation for me about how difficult it is to lose weight and keep ii oil for an extended period of time. My mother is the strongest and most determined person I've ever met. A single mother in the late 1970s and 1980s, she persevered through miraculous hardships so that we could have opportunities to one day succeed in life. I remember as a teenager her constant battles to find a diet that could take off the pounds, satisfy her hunger and tastes, and not cost her a fortune. (The strangest thing about it all was that she, like many other women, really didn't need to be on a diet. She was in great physical shape and great looking as well. I can't count how many times strangers thought she was our sister.)

Even with her ironclad willpower, however, she never found that combination or special program that worked for her. Like millions of others, she also spent a small fortune on these gimmick diet books, miracle supplements, and specially prepared meals that she popped into the microwave. It took years of failures and disappointments before she finally realized that to lose weight successfully, she'd have to stop relying on a magical pill to burn the fat away or some strange eating regimen that eliminated sugar from her diet. Despite all my efforts to leach her the truth about weight loss, it look her failures to help her see the light. She threw away all of those diet books and complicated charts and tables and told me that it was going to take a personal commitment to herself and the same discipline that she had used in other aspects of her life. It took every ounce of willpower in her body to say "no" to foods packed in calories and "yes to invitations from her colleagues at work to walk a brisk mile during her lunch hour.

People who begin weight loss programs with the idea that it's going to be an easy endeavor have almost prematurely sealed their fate. Their mind-set is already programmed to see the pounds come off with little effort. The first three or four pounds might disappear easily, but when they're unable to go beyond that, they're stuck. They're not mentally prepared to make the necessary lifestyle adjustments that are required to lose more weight. They eventually abandon their weight loss plan, unaware that accepting its difficulty from the beginning would've given them a better chance of continuing on rather than turning around when they hit that first bump in the road.

Realistic Expectations

Most people who decide to lose weight fail before they even start because their expectations are completely unrealistic and they are soon defeated by disappointment. If you're twenty or thirty pounds overweight, you must realize that it's likely taken you years to accumulate these extra pounds. Yet, you post a New Year's resolution that says you'll shod these pounds in a matter of months. I think most will agree that it's much easier to gain weight than it is to lose it. This, then, begs the question Why would people think that they can lose weight faster than they gain it? The simple answer: Most dieters begin their weight loss programs committed to burning more pounds than they are capable of or more than what is considered a safe amount.

According to the National Institutes of Health and other professional organizations that address weight loss issues, weight loss should be gradual and should not exceed more than one to two pounds per week. While we think of losing weight as just shedding excess fat, it's important to remember that the internal mechanisms of weight loss are complicated and cause a disruption in the body's homeostasis, or environmental stability. Losing weight at faster rates might be more beneficial to achieving your personal goals of reaching a desired size faster, but the resulting cellular alterations can be unsafe and lead to health complications.

It's also important to understand the numbers of weight loss. One pound is equivalent to 3,500 calories. If you require a 2,500-calorie-per-day diet to maintain your current weight, then that means you'd have to reduce your calories by 500 a day to lose 3,500 at the end of seven clays. This, of course, doesn't take into account the added boost in calorie expenditure you'd receive by also increasing your level of physical activity, but it does demonstrate how difficult it can be to lose weight through strict calorie reduction. Someone trying to lose two pounds a week would need to reduce the week's caloric intake by 7.000, which means shifting from a 2,500 calorie-per-day diet to 1,500. For many people, a reduction of this size not only is difficult to achieve, but could result in the deprivation of important minerals, vitamins, and other nutrients.

It's important to be extremely careful and clear about the weight loss goals that you set. If you're trying to lose weight for health benefits, studies show that a loss of 10 percent is enough to see changes in certain health indicators such as blood pressure, diabetes risk, and heart disease risk. While it's optimal to attain a weight that's within normal range, the reality is that everyone isn't going to be able to achieve this. However, this 10 percent figure should be the absolute minimum that you strive to achieve.