Use Both Body and Mind to Overcome Difficulties in Weight Loss

Many people wish to lose weight, but many of them become only victims in the battle of the bulge. There are several reasons why it is so difficult to lose weight:

If you want to lose 10 pounds, consider this: 3,500 calories equal one pound of your body weight; to lose 10 pounds of body weight, you have to expend 35,000 more calories than you consume. Mathematically, to lose 10 pounds in two weeks, you need to burn 2,500 more calories a day. You know this is not a piece of cake! So forget it!

There is no magic bullet to weight loss. If you want a quick fix to your weight problem, forget it!

If you want to jump from one diet to another, your body weight will only “yo-yo” more, creating more frustration, and many more health problems down the road. Forget about fad diets!

Low-calorie foods are generally disagreeable and unpleasant to the palate. To use low-calorie foods to lose weight is an ordeal. Food is to be enjoyed. Nobody has the perseverance for sustained self-denial. Forget it!

You are living in a difficult environment—an environment that promotes overweight, if not obesity.

As a baby, you are stuffed, and your parents want you to look plump, so you would look cute.

As a child, you are told to clean up your plate, so as not to waste your food. Often times, you parents bribe you with a candy, so you would behave yourself. When you are a guest in someone's house for dinner, you never turn down a desert, so you would look appreciative of hospitality.

As an adult, you are bombarded with coupons for cheap junk food.

As an American, you are pressurized into taking the Standard American Diet (SAD). The typical Standard American Diet (SAD) is loaded with fat—unhealthy saturated and even hydrogenated fats (now they are trying to ban this from the fast food industry).

A typical fast-food burger has over 500 calories and over 30 grams of saturated fat.

Even the healthy-looking salads touted as health food in some fast-food restaurants are nothing short of calories and fat: with the fattening dressing, some may even exceed those of a burger.

Everyday about one quarter of the U.S. population eats fast food.

Twenty years ago, the average American consumed less than 2,000 calories a day, but today the average calorie consumption has increased by a staggering 60 percent.

The billion-dollar food industry is forever creating new products to allure you into eating more and gaining more. Maybe you are meant to be obese!

Effective weight management is to use both the body and the mind. That is, you must have internal body cleansing to get rid of all toxins that are responsible for food cravings, as well as harness your mind power to exercise discipline and perseverance in your fight against obesity.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau