You need a plan that works for you, a plan that blends into your lifestyle. A plan that you can live with. Forever. A plan that is so easy to follow that it easily becomes your automatic daily routine without fuss or stress. That’s the real secret to permanent weight-loss, you know, having an automatic daily routine. No thinking required.

Most people go on train wreck diets. They follow the latest fads. They start the diet, lose some weight, then go off of it and the scale starts creeping back up. Sometimes they gain even more. It’s a nightmare. It’s called yo-yo- dieting. Up and down and back up. You don’t want to do that, it’s bad for your health.

Permanent weight loss requires changes in your lifestyle. Changes in your behaviors. You can’t expect to lose weight by doing the same things like overeating, sitting around watching hours and hours of television and not exercising.

You can’t expect to lose weight and keep it off by ignoring good nutrition and eating foods that are bad for you. Junk food leads to a junked and tired body that ages fast. Diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, stroke and arthritis are just a few of the health problems associated with obesity.

When I say “junk food" I don’t mean just fast food, donuts, or candy, I mean all the foods that don’t seem so bad but are full of sugar, starches and fats. Foods like fruit juice are full of sugar. You’re better off to eat the fruit and drink some water. Foods like pasta, rice and french fries are full of empty calories that cause the release of insulin and puts your body into fat storage mode.

Permanent weight loss requires you to be informed about what foods have good nutritional value and what ones don’t. You don’t need to take a college nutrition course but you do need to know some basic “nutrition 101" principles.

To be successful with your weight loss and management you need to know the difference between proteins, fats and carbohydrates. You need to know how much protein you should be eating, how many carbohydrates and what kinds of fats. You can easily reach your weight-loss goals by just knowing what, when and how much to eat.

People get confused about dieting and weight-loss. They make it way too complicated and stressful. Who needs more stress when you’re trying to lose weight?

It doesn’t have to be that way. You just need some sound nutrition principles, a list of the right foods that you like, an organized and efficient way to shop and cook meals, and an automatic daily routine that includes exercise.

Here’s a life changing tip; instead of being a creature of bad habits just decide to become a creature of good habits. Don’t waste your time trying to break bad habits just put a good one over the top of the bad one. I call that the replacement behavior trick. I’ve developed many of those tricks for my own weight loss battle.

The goal is to lose weight not stress and fuss. Make weight loss simple by developing an automatic daily routine. It’s as simple as that.

Copyright © 2005 Sheri Graber. All rights reserved.

You may reprint this article as long as the authors bio and the links are included.