For most Americans weight loss and being thin is a constant subject of worry and frustration. There are an ever-growing number of diets promising fast results that either wreak havoc on your body to get you to drop a few pounds or don’t work at all. The worst part is that most people end up heaver than they started a month or two after they finished or gave up on their program. There is, however, hope for those millions of Americans trying achieve fat loss.

There are a number of things you can do when taking on this challenge that can greatly improve your chances of losing the weight and keeping it off. They have been around long before America’s battle with obesity and they have been proven by decades of studies and consistent results. Below are the top five most effective ways to increase your chances for weight loss and your chances of keeping it off.


1 – “The Seafood Diet; I see food and I eat it!”
Putting yourself on a calorie-restricted diet is cruel and unusual punishment to the highest degree. Your body needs food to survive but you are actually going to starve yourself for an undetermined period of time until you have shed the calories you body has taken effort to store in case of famine. The problem is there is no food shortage and thanks to our industrial food production we have more food than we have ever had.

So how do you get around your body’s genetic programming that avoids losing fat content? Well part of it is just sheer will, but you cannot rely on will power alone. You need to minimize your body’s response to fat loss as much as you can. You can do this by making the changes to your diet small and slow so you don’t send up any red flags to your system. Slowly lower overall calorie content by replacing high calorie foods with lower calorie fruits and veggies. But start the slow change by eating more often. You can increase your metabolism and burn off more of the calories that you take in by eating smaller meals more frequently.

Everyone should be eating a minimum of 3 meals a day to keep from suppressing their metabolism, but 4 to 6 small meals a day would be ideal. This can actually make you less hungry overall and that goes a long way in improving your ability to maintain consistent weight loss.


2 – “Wow, who knew exercise was so much work?”
Adding exercise to your routine will not only increase your overall health but it will increase your metabolism, which effectively shortens the time it will take you to get to your goal weight. Most people think that you have to go get a gym membership and workout for hours on a cardio machine to get results but that is not true. The key is to just start moving, no matter what that looks like. Simply walking for 30 min 5 days a week at 3mph is enough to burn an extra 815 calories per week for a 165lb person. That is a almost a third of a pound a week just by itself, not including the overall increase in metabolism it will cause.

The real key with physical activity is it has to be something you enjoy. If you don’t like what you are doing then you will have to rely on pure willpower to keep you going and that will only last for so long. If you enjoy what you are doing, you can easily make it a lifelong addition that will greatly increase your chance of keeping the weight off.


3 – “Can I get a little help?”
Everyone has good days and bad days and another key to successful weight loss is having a support group set up to keep you on track when those bad days roll around. Whether you recruit your friends and family, join a support group, hire a personal trainer or nutrition counselor, you need backup for when your own willpower fades, because it will. No one is perfect and no one can be on top of their game all of the time and that is why having a support group is so important. Not only can you use them as a source of motivation when you can’t motivate yourself, they can also offer encouragement and a place to vent when things get frustrating.

Just make sure you pick the right people and places for support. You need people who will help you when the going gets tough, not point out where you failed. You need people with the same goals and ideals as you so they know where you are coming from and what that journey entails and how difficult it can be. But most of all your support needs to be there when you most need it, even if that means that they will hunt you down when you are hiding in self doubt to get you back on track.


4 – “Measure Twice, Cut Once”
Another important key to losing weight and keeping it off is knowing what you are starting with and keeping track of where you are along the way. You have to know what is happening with your body to know whether or not you need to make changes to your diet or exercise plan, and I am not talking about how much you weigh.

Stepping on a scale is only one way of tracking progress. BMI, Body Fat percentage, circumference measurements, and even how you feel in your clothes can all be used as tracking tools to measure the changes in your body. You also need to be conscious of tracking (or at least being aware of) the number of calories that you are taking in and the amount of exercise you are getting. Using a notebook to keep track of these numbers is fine, or you can use the hundreds of options online to track your information. Whatever you use, just make sure you do it and you are consistent with your methods.


5 - “Till death do you part”
Probably one of the most important things you can do to improve your chances of losing weight and keeping it off is to ask yourself, “is what I am doing, or about to do, something I can continue doing for the rest of my life?” Understand that fad diets and quick fixes do not work. They have never worked for prolonged, healthy weight management and they will only be a waste of time when it comes to losing weight, keeping it off, and being healthy. When getting ready to start a program be honest with yourself about whether or not you can live for the rest of your life with the changes you make.


These tips are meant to help improve your chances of weight loss and the more of these strategies that you implement in your own plan, the higher your chances for success. Remember, there will always be hard times when you’re trying to drop weight, but it is not if you have setbacks, it is how quickly you get back on track when they happen.