99Tangents

Copyright © 2008 Craig Pepin-Donat

How many times have you proclaimed, "I need to go on a diet"? How many of those diets resulted in long-term success? Not many. Millions of people are looking for the answer to improved health and fitness, and spend billions of dollars every year on diets and weight loss. Diets continually fail to deliver results because no matter how compelling the underlying principles for any diet may seem, no one can stay on a diet forever. Eventually, you will drop the diet and go back to your normal eating habits. Typically, you not only gain back the weight you lost, but statistics show that you will also gain additional weight.

Anything built on a faulty foundation has little chance for success, and most weight loss programs are riddled with pitfalls and over inflated promises. Weight loss and weight management are lifelong commitments. Until you accept the reality that they are a learning process that takes ongoing work and focus, you will continue to look for the fast and simple solutions that are nothing more than a bunch of big, fat lies.

Long-term success with health and weight loss requires significant changes not just in how you eat, but in the way you live. Attaining results must be achieved in a way that enhances your life and allows your body to reach its optimal weight naturally. This is in sharp contrast to the quick-fix mentality, which attempts to trick the body into short-term weight loss with diets and other rapid results formulas.

There are six basic principles that allow long-term positive change to occur. Each plays an integral role in achieving health and fitness success:

1. Understand how addictions can negatively impact your lifestyle choices. There are many forms of addiction that go unrecognized or fly under the radar of conventional thinking, negatively impacting our health. In our stressed-out society, we search for escape from the harsh realities of life. We smoke, drink alcohol, take drugs and overeat. The number one reason people give for not exercising is time, yet the average American watches more than 4 hours of television every day. All of these activities make us fat, lazy and out of shape. They prevent us from obtaining optimal health.

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