Diet Success or Failure - Destiny or Choice

By Mark Louis

Many people feel that it is not their fault that they cannot lose weight. They may feel as though they have been struggling with diet after diet without any consistent or long-term weight loss achievements. However, is their lack of weight loss success truly their destiny, or is it actually a choice that they have made?

Think about your own life and the way that your choices impact your weight loss success. Virtually everything that you do is an opportunity to make a more weight loss-friendly selection; and one choice will frequently impact the next one.

Consider the following scenario:

You've come home from work and you feel like a snack, so you eat an apple. You take your time eating it, peruse the headlines in the newspaper, and wind down from the day. Now you feel energized and although you'd considered playing plunking down on the couch to catch up on the soaps, you instead decide to take the dog to the park to toss a Frisbee around. When you get home, it's time to make dinner, and you discover that you're missing a key ingredient. Fortunately, you noticed before you started cooking, so you have a few extra moments and you take a quick walk to the corner store to pick up what you need. When you return home, you prepare and eat a healthy, home cooked meal and feel satisfied with your food intake, and with yourself. You then have enough time to catch your favorite television show before you head to bed and get a good rest.

Now consider this second, similar scenario:

You come home from work and you feel like a snack, so you pick up the half-eaten bag of potato chips that you broke into last night, and set to munching as you plunk down on the couch to catch up on the soaps. You feel comfortable and kind of beat, so instead of making dinner as you'd planned, you hop in the car and drive to the corner store to pick up a frozen pizza, which you nuke when you return home and eat in front of your favorite television show before you return to bed. Unfortunately, even though you went to bed at a good hour, you don't sleep well because you have restless legs and heartburn.

These two scenarios illustrate how a single choice - eating an apple versus eating chips - can alter all of the choices that you make after that point.

By choosing the apple, you ate a healthy, energizing snack that encouraged activity instead of couch-potatoism. The number of calories taken in were substantially lower due to a healthy snack and a good, home-prepared dinner, and the food was much more nutritious. Furthermore, the activity helped burn additional calories. The healthy food and activity encouraged a good sleep which is vital to proper weight loss.

By choosing the potato chips, you bog yourself down with fats and salts, discouraging activity. This leads to less desire to even perform regular everyday tasks such as cooking, and may mean an unhealthy, ready meal that is low in nutrients and again high in fat and salt. Without activity, and with such unhealthy foods, the body is restless and does not digest well, leading to broken or short sleep.

As you can see, it is vital that you pay attention to each choice that you make and never simply shrug off something as simple as a snack in the afternoon. It could be the difference between the success and the failure of your weight loss!