Top 7 Tips on how to stick to your weight loss plan

1. Know your motivation. To start, you need to know your ‘WHY’. You need to want your goal, need your goal, live sleep and eat your goal! Many peoples motivation comes from simple places, such as clothes getting tighter, seeing themselves in a photograph. Others have medical reasons to lose weight, or certain events they need/want to lose the weight for. What ever it is…. Write it down, here NOW …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

So now you do have a goal, lets set out an action plan to get you there. It usually comes down to two simple things. What you eat and how much and what type of exercise you are going to do.

2. Take it in gradual steps. You don’t have to overhaul your diet overnight. I highly recommend changing your diet in small steps — just drink water instead of fizzy drinks, for example, or eat fruit instead of crisps and chocolate. Once you adjust to this small change, make another a week or two later, and so on until you’re eating much healthier a few months later. This small and gradual process makes it much easier to stick with a healthy diet. Likewise with your exercise plans. Don’t over do it to start with, you will get bored/injured/to busy to continue, instead find some activities you enjoy and start slowly, building up the intensity to a programme that will fit into your lifestyle for life.

3. Choose foods you love. This is incredibly important. If you hate eating salads, don’t make salads a key to your new diet. I happen to love salads, but everyone has different tastes. Don’t eat foods just because they’re good for you — eat them because they’re healthy AND you love them. For me, that means eggs and almonds and avocados and salads and vegetable juices and rye bread, but for others it might be salmon and lean grass-fed beef and asparagus and walnuts. Find the foods you love that are healthy, and you’ll stick with the diet much longer.

4. Have your snacks at the ready. Always bring healthy food with you, wherever you go. Sometimes this just means packing snacks if you’re going on a few errands (I like almonds and fruit). Focus on filling foods with little or no sugar. (ie: nuts, seeds, almond butter on organic oatcakes)

5. Don’t get hungry. When you allow yourself to starve, you will often binge, because your blood-sugar levels are so low that you crave instant sugar (or refined flour). When you’re starving, you are more likely to indulge in donuts or cake. So eat snacks throughout the day, or small meals, so that you never get really hungry.

6. Clear your kitchen of unhealthy foods. If you have junk food in your home, you’re more likely to give in at some point and eat it. But if you clear your home of these foods, you won’t have that temptation. Clear your fridge and cabinets of cakes, fried foods, foods made with refined flour, fatty and greasy things like crisps and chips, and so on. If you can’t throw them out, give them away or at least move them to another place in your kitchen, fridge, freezer. That way you are mindfully removing them, making a conscious effort to remove them from your intake.

7. Slip ups. Sometimes all of the strategies above will fail. That’s OK. Don’t beat yourself up about it — just get back on the wagon, back on track. Look at it as a small bump in the road. And better yet, get outside and burn off the calories by running, walking briskly, playing sports, whatever it takes. Refocus on that goal you set (and wrote down) at the beginning of this block. Then start eating healthy again.

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