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It sounds simple enough doesn't it? You burn more calories than you take in in order to lose weight. To gain weight you burn fewer calories than you take in and to maintain weight you balance calories eaten with calories burned. If only weight management were that easy in real life. But it is not. So how do you find out how to lose weight fast?

Obesity On The Rise

Look around. What do you notice? Yes, there are a lot of fat people walking around. In fact, one-third of adults in the United States are considered obese. That amounts to 72 million people. Kids are fatter today than they were 20 years ago. Children are contending with high cholesterol, type II diabetes and other diseases formerly limited mostly to adults. A full 16% of children are obese. Today's kids are not expected to outlive their parents, something that has not happened in more than 100 years.

Smacking Ourselves Into Line

People basically understand that being overweight is bad for their health. Carrying around all of that extra fat is hard on your body. Death could come early, sickness is a real possibility. In an effort to keep fat burning under control, some people have resorted to equally unhealthy practices, such as laxative abuse or bulimia. If we know that being overweight is bad for our health, why do we have such a hard time with weight management?

Giving Up, Getting Fatter

Should we all resign ourselves to being fat, live as long as we can and enjoy it or should we keep up the struggle to be thin? The answer is somewhere in the middle. Before we go on one more diet program with expectations that we will be perfectly able to follow the diet 100%, stop. We are already setting ourselves up for failure and we have not even begun yet. Nobody does anything to the level of perfectly for 100% of the time. Would you expect your best friend to do that? No? Then why do you expect it of yourself?

Re-framing Expectations

What if we just accepted the fact that we are human and that humans do not do anything 100% of the time for very long? Let's look at the weight management issue differently than we have done in the past. Would it be possible for you to eat healthy foods 50% of your meals in a day or a week? Could you do it 60% of the time? How about 80% of the time? Do you think that you could eat healthy foods for 90% of your meals? What percentage of meals could you actually eat healthy foods without stirring up a lot of anxiety in yourself? That is where you need to begin. Gradually work your way up to eating 90% of your meals with only healthy food. This way you have 10% of your meals left for indulging yourself while still losing weight.

Now think about exercise in the same way. Could you see yourself actually doing some exercise for five minutes a day? What about 10 minutes or 30 minutes? Could you do this two or three times a week to begin with? Begin at the point you can physically and mentally handle and work your way up to exercising 30 minutes five days a week.

Paying Attention To Your Feelings

We probably would not chew out a friend who made poor food choices, someone who clearly doesn't recognize how to lose weight fast. Let's take the same approach with ourselves. Be understanding and kind. Part of you is very worried about not having unlimited access to your favorite food. Talk to this part of you and reassure yourself that you are not going to deprive yourself of anything, but that you will eat within certain limits. It is highly likely that this fearful part of you will decrease and your fat burning program will be much more successful and easier to live.