Slow and Steady Wins the Race

(c) Aleutie Fotosearch_k33582378

You want to lose weight.

You want it to be easy.

You want it to be fast.

You wish you could just wake up one day and the extra weight would be gone.

You may be tired of having to keep focusing on weight loss.

You may be bored with working on your weight goals.

And you might even convince yourself that you’re not really quitting; you’re just going to take a “self-care” break.

There’s no such thing as “taking a break” when it comes to the NECESSITY of losing weight.

And the main reason this thinking starts taking hold is because you think your progress is too slow.

You want your weight loss to be fast because:

😮  You may have expectations from the media and advertisements which tell us all kinds of unrealistic things like . . . lose 10 lbs. in 10 days.

😮  Or might hear about a radical, extreme diet that you know you can only do for a few days, but you tell yourself that if you can just hold on, it will be worth it.

It’s ideas like these that create unrealistic expectations that weight loss should be happening fast.

You might think the more extreme the better. And the faster the better.

In fact, weight loss should never happen fast.

In fact, slow weight loss is better for your health and proven more sustainable.

When you lose large amounts of weight, your resting metabolic rate – the energy you burn at rest – will lower. Keeping your resting metabolic rate high is essential for keeping the weight off.

Unfortunately, once it slows down, your resting metabolic rate doesn’t recover to the level it was pre-dieting even after you regain weight . . . and you will regain weight each time you fad diet.

However, research confirms that slow weight loss preserves your resting metabolic rate compared with rapid weight loss.

Losing weight slowly is an indicator of two important things:

(1)  That you’re losing fat, not muscle.

(2)  That you’re making slow and steady changes to your behaviors that are likely to stick for life.

Regardless of whether you have 10 pounds to lose or 110 pounds to lose, the best strategy is to start building healthy lifestyle habits—not just for a short-term fix, but for good. And that means making peace with slow because slow leads to permanent. And permanent weight loss is what you really want.

As I tell clients in the office every day:

Slim is a life management skill.

We’ve got to do it every day. Like brushing our teeth.