The successful fat loss mindset “One sucker is born every minute” – old American saying. The global weight loss industry is an incredible 586 billion US dollars. I tried converting that to rupees, and failed – it is uncountable! Now, think if this – if what they sold to us worked while they (the corporations) got richer, we would all be thinner, if not thin, right? Statistics is clear that we are all getting fatter across the world, and so is the bank balance of each of those companies that is selling us the latest miracle cure for obesity. Obviously, this is a loud example not dissimilar to a bald man buying an expensive comb with magical hair growth properties! As a person who is neck-deep in obesity management, I can see clearly what separates the successful and the total failure in the weight loss game.
They are the Four P’s of Fat Loss:
Priority: if weight loss is important to you, then make it a priority. Don’t crib about your busy life, your children needing attention, your thyroid, and other things, if you wish to lose weight. If a soldier needs to get to a safe base camp 10 miles away, he can’t complain of feeling hot, shoes too tight, or the backpack he is carrying being too heavy. Own your goals. You have to give importance to meal planning, and setting aside time for your walks or exercise or yoga sessions. If you are smart, or have a coach, you can do this with the minimal time involvement possible.
Perspective: you need to get real – if you are 45 and overweight, perhaps it is not a great idea to compare your physique with a Kareena or a Priyanka Chopra. Nor is it wise to want to become like them. You will always loathe yourself and your body with that mindset. You need to get comfortable with your body, accept its flaws, and get to work to improve it. If you don’t like the look of your living room in your Tollygunge home, you don’t just buy a Manhattan apartment, do you? Improve the looks, work to a plan. Keep a reasonable deadline. Another perspective is to understand that your strategy for weight loss may be wrong: you may be focusing on exercise and jogging while your diet is making you fat. You may be focusing on diet, yoga, pills and exercise when you actually need weight loss surgery.
Persistence: people go on diets and lifestyle changes, pushing their tolerance to the limits. Eating only leaves and drinking raw veggie juices, they pound the treadmill for hours wearing sweatbands around their heads. After a while, their sense of deprivation leads them on to one celebratory cheat meal, and that opens the door to a wild binge trip. Once there is one mistake, they tend to give up the entire weight loss journey. It is as if anything less than perfect would be reason to trash it. Here is a key tip – don’t keep stressing on perfection. Keep at your strategy persistently, and give yourself room to make mistakes. If you buy a phone and drop it on the floor, do you keep throwing the phone down repeatedly because it is no longer the perfect, shiny new phone? No?? Why would you do that on a diet then, if you slipped up once? Keep at it, telling yourself that consistency would give you results, not slam-bam approaches.
Patience: Most people want to lose 10 kilos by yesterday. With that kind of deadline, any strategy would fail! The key to successful weight loss results is to focus on long term weight loss. Ask yourself how many kilos you lost over the last ten years (or five). If you haven’t done much, then why would you expect to lose it in weeks? Get real (again) and keep a longer time frame, and go slower. This is less stressful as well.