When it comes to dieting, most of us want to lose weight as quickly as possible. We draw on our disproportionately large short-term motivational reserves to embark on an ambitious weight loss campaign that promises big rewards in a short space of time.
It can work too. One can lose an awful lot of weight very quickly by following many popular commercial diets. However, it is often for naught, as the weight creeps back on over the succeeding weeks and months.
What most of us don’t consider is a diet that offers sustainable and controllable weight loss of just 1lb (or less) per week.
Does that sound like a slow death to you? It shouldn’t. You’re framing your opinion of such a diet based on your experience with fad diets – those that impose restrictive rules and require enormous amounts of willpower. But a diet that promotes gradual weight loss over a long period of time only involves relatively small sacrifices and simple adjustments in your mindset to produce positive results. Meanwhile, you can largely go on eating just as you were before.
Controllable weight loss and long-term weight management should be about small increments, not huge leaps. After all, huge leaps one way usually lead to huge leaps back in the opposite direction.