Low Calorie Dieting - Beginner's Guide

In addition to your weight goals (see the previous section), several other types of goals are essential to the long-term success of a low-calorie lifestyle plan. They include your

Food goals: These goals are the changes you want to make to your diet, such as how much you eat, the types of food you choose to eat, and the amount of calories you consume.

One benefit of using a self-help weight-loss method like the plan in this blog is that you have plenty of flexibility within the plan, and you don’t have to answer to a nutritionist, a group leader, or a weight-loss counselor. But because you’re going it alone, you have to do a little more thinking for yourself. You have to set yourself up on a personalized program and to do that, you need to use the same tools any professional would use to set that plan up for you. These tools include goal setting, journaling with a food diary, and keeping track of your weight.

You don’t have to use every tool in the blog or answer every question in every quiz, but the more you discover about yourself and your eating habits, the better your chances of developing a plan that works for you.

The amount of weight you want to lose, the lifestyle changes you’re willing to make to help you lose it, and all the little steps you’ll take along the way make up your long-term, intermediate-term, and short-term goals. (Before you settle on your goals, you can use the formulas in Chapter 2 to figure out how much weight you want to lose.)

When following a low calorie diet and controlling your weight, attitude is everything. Well, almost everything. To succeed, you definitely need a positive attitude and a good, steady supply of resolve. That means paying as much attention to what’s in your head as you do to what’s on your plate. In the following sections, you find tips you can use to help keep your attitude happy, healthy, and in check.

Finding and maintaining your motivation

The more you know about who you are as an individual and the better you identify your habits, the easier making those necessary changes and committing to a lifelong plan of healthier eating and living will be. The following sections help you start a low-calorie lifestyle today.

When you’re clear about which aspects of your life actually need to be changed, you can begin taking real steps to enact those changes.

The best place to start is with a commitment to yourself. Promise yourself that you’re never going to give up on yourself. Acknowledge now that cutting back on the amount of food you’re used to eating won’t be easy. At the same time, keep telling yourself you can do it! Be your own cheerleader. Promise yourself that you won’t kick yourself when you fall off the food wagon. Successful dieters don’t scold themselves or give up. They give themselves a pep talk and jump right back on.