How To Lose Those Last 10 Pounds, Part 4: Be Flexible

By Kari Baxter on Monday, September 14th, 2009 | View Comments

In this ongoing series about How To Lose Those Last 10 Pounds, this week we’re going to talk about staying flexible. If you haven’t read the first 3 parts of this post, the links are at the end of this post.

Be Flexible

When you’re first starting out, keep your plans fairly flexible. See what can be realistically achieved with your workouts or your meals. If you are preparing meals for your family, you cannot isolate yourself from what everyone is eating. Stay flexible. Try to stick to your schedule and try to have as many healthy meals as you can.

For the best results, gradually switch your family over to healthier options, like whole wheat bread and pasta and more vegetables. At times, other work takes priority or your family eating needs come first. Do not let that get you down – get back to your schedule or your diet at the earliest available opportunity.

Remember these are changes for life–not just a couple weeks.

Keep It Simple

If your commitments do not allow you to make major changes in your eating pattern or take up longer workouts, start with simple plans. Do not take the car if you are just heading to the local grocery store or dropping kids to school – walk when you can.

Similarly, start with small changes to your diet. Instead of white bread, try whole wheat bread. By just switching from drinking soda at mealtimes to water you can lose up to 5 pounds in a week! You have made a change that you can continue with no matter where you are and with whom you are having your meals.

Stay Focused

Your most important reason for losing weight should be the assurance of good health that it brings and not merely for fitting into a ten year old swimsuit or for making your neighbors jealous. You should be following a fitness plan for the benefits that it brings you. By losing weight, you are improving your health.

With the help of a good healthy diet, you are reducing your risk for major diseases. Only when you work on a fitness plan for yourself, can you be motivated enough to lose weight and stay motivated enough to lose even those last ten pounds.

It’s not always easy to stay on a fitness plan especially when it takes time and efforts to lose even a little weight. However, I am hoping that through this blog and my weight loss program, I will be able to guide you to healthy and effective ways of losing even those stubborn, last 10 pounds.

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Read More “How To Lose The Last 10 Pounds”!

Part 1: Getting Started *

Part 2: Knowing Why Before How *

Part 3: Overcoming Obstacles

How To Lose Those Last 10 Pounds, Part 3: Obstacles

By Kari Baxter on Friday, August 21st, 2009 | View Comments

Invariably you will have obstacles, challenges, and questions when beginning a weight loss program. It’s smart if you address these before they come up.

When you know your challenges, it’s not as discouraging when they come up. You’re prepared. You’ll be mentally and physically ready to deal with the challenge and move past it–quickly!

Constraints At Work

The most often quoted excuse is after working all day in the office or at work, where will I find the energy or time to devote to a weight loss program?

It doesn’t really matter whether you have a hotshot career that keeps you on your toes all day long or have a job where you spend every day counting the minutes till closing hour; you are spending most of your time at work.

You may even have a job that involves constant physical work and you may be under the impression that this is an excellent way of making sure the calories never add up. It may surprise you to find that this is an illusion and true weight control or weight loss requires a proper diet and regular workouts.

Let’s see how your work can affect your fitness plans. No matter how much you love or hate your job, many people spend most of the day or night–or both– working on it. More time is lost in getting ready for work, commuting to and from work, maybe taking some work home.

Further, have you ever thought of how much time you spend thinking about work even if you’re not actually in the office? You may be thinking of upcoming presentations and deadlines or worrying about your new boss. Some people try to relieve themselves of work-related stress by turning to food or alcohol, all contributing to more weight gain.

For most people, work is a major factor that prevents them from sticking to a regular workout routine and from having well-balanced meals three times a day. In fact work may even make matters worse with stress causing weight gain in many.

Despite this, it is still possible to schedule workout plans and find recipes for nutritious meals that one can manage in whatever little time is available.

Constraints At Home

If you live alone, your time is entirely yours! You have great flexibility in deciding how you would like to spend your free time. You can decide what you would like to eat, when you would like to eat and when you would like to workout. With few constraints, you can devise an ideal weight control plan and make full use of your freedom!

On the other hand, for those with families and especially with little children, your time is seldom yours. You need to give consideration to everyone in the family. For example, forget about skipping a meal if you are not feeling hungry – almost everyone else will be ravenously hungry.

If you are all stepping out for dinner, no one is in the mood to go to a health bar. And you will have a tougher time taking some time out for yourself if you have kids.

In fact, most parents try to get up early, have more intense workouts and then get to work. The result is that they are short of sleep and the combined effect of less calories and more intense workouts leaves them very tired and with not enough energy to go through the day. This kind of schedule will certainly not lead to any true fitness and there are more chances that their health will suffer.

With these kinds of constraints it is never easy to stick to a regular schedule, be it for workouts or for planning meals. However, do not despair – there are some simple and straightforward solutions to the above dilemma.

In my next post, we’ll review some ways to deal with the above time/family/food issues to keep you on the right track.

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To Read Previous:

How To Lose Those Last 10 Pounds, Part 1: Getting Started *

How To Lose Those Last 10 Pounds, Part 2: Knowing Why Before How

Losing Those Last 10 Pounds, Part 2: Why Before How

By Kari Baxter on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 | View Comments

Knowing Why Before the How

Many people go through their weight-loss programs with great determination. They work on their diet and make sure they are eating the right foods and the right quantities. They diligently stick to their workout routines. And to their great happiness, they watch the pounds simply melting away. Then all of a sudden, the scale stops responding. They do not know what they did wrong. Their diet is the same and their workouts are the same but they seem unable to lose any more weight. And they are just 10 pounds away from that tantalizing goal they had set for themselves.

Many people give up at this point, thinking that they will never be able to lose those stubborn last pounds. However, the truth of the matter is that the last ten pounds are certainly more difficult to shed than say the first thirty.

Diet experts will explain that as you become slimmer, you will be burning lesser calories even while sticking with the same diet and exercises as before. In fact they claim that every time you lose a pound, your metabolism slows down and burns 20 calories less. That makes it difficult to burn away the remaining pounds by following the same diet and workouts. The good news is that you do not need to do anything drastic! All that is required is a slight tweaking of the weight loss program that you are already following and very soon you will be past your final weight loss goal.

It is however, very important that you be motivated enough to want to stick to your plan and follow it until the final goal is reached. And you can only stay motivated if you are doing this for the right reasons.

Many people quit their weight loss program halfway through or sometimes do not even get started because of sheer lack of self-confidence. They are not sure if they can manage with the kind of diet they will be expected to eat or have the time to spend in intense workout sessions.

Stay tuned for my next blog post and some typical reasons why many people don’t get started on their fitness plans or quit when they reach a plateau. Don’t let this be you! I’ll also give you some great solutions to blast past all your excuses.

How To Lose Those Last 10 Pounds: Getting Started

By Kari Baxter on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 | View Comments

This is the first in an ongoing series about “How To Lose Those Last 10 Pounds”. I’m going to cover getting started, if “the last 10 pounds” are a myth, how to overcome obstacles and make this work for your lifestyle, setting goals, exercise, eating, and more! Please subscribe to my RSS feed, so you don’t miss a post!

Know What You Want

When a local fitness club invited a diet expert to speak to members about weight loss programs, the question most people wanted answered was not about specific exercise routines or diet programs. It was, ‘Why is it so hard to lose the last 10 pounds?’

Why Is It So Hard to Lose The Last 10 Pounds?

You could consider this the most famous dieting complaint ever recorded. Many people can lose tens of pounds when they first start dieting but find it difficult when it comes to losing the last ten. Before you dismiss this as a myth, let us assure you it is not. There are practical reasons why it is indeed difficult to lose the last 10 pounds.

When you first start on a diet, you have many pounds to lose. Your body burns calories depending on your weight – the less the weight, the less the calories being burnt. In order to make sure that your body does lose those final 10 pounds, you need to make sure that you are consistently burning more calories. The best way of doing this is to reduce the number of calories from your diet and increase the intensity of your workouts.

Take Jill who weighs 200 pounds. With her workouts, she is able to burn up to 750 calories every hour. Take Jane who weighs only 140 pounds. With the same workout, Jane can only burn about 300 calories every hour. All this means is that while you will certainly lose weight by continuing with your weight-loss exercises, you will not lose it at the same rate as when you first started.

You now start to get the picture. At some point in your weight loss program, you will find that you are losing weight at a slower rate than before. This will mean making adjustments to both your diet and to your workout routines. For example, you may have to workout for longer periods or exercise more intensely. Anything that helps you burn more calories at that point.

If you were starting off when you were 300 pounds, by limiting yourself to around 1200 calories every day and exercising regularly, you could easily lose 5 pounds every week. After a few successful weeks of eating right and working out, you are down to 120 pounds. You will slowly notice that by continuing with the same kind of diet and workouts, you are not losing much weight at all. You then try to reduce your intake of calories. You keep reducing till you find some change in weight. However, you will be shocked to see that even if you are eating only 600-800 calories everyday you still do not manage to lose more than one pound per week. The other danger is that it is strongly recommended by medical experts that you do not eat less than 1200 calories every day.

Is it possible to cut calories and still get all the nutrition you need? Absolutely. My favorite way to do this is with protein shakes. I have one for breakfast and one for lunch and then a healthy, colorful dinner. I use soy milk, juice, or water, protein powder, and frozen fruit, like strawberries, bananas, and blueberries. I whip them up in my Magic Bullet. They are SO good! With vitamins, herbs, and minerals, and ranging from 180 – 250 calories a piece, they can’t be beat.

It therefore essentially comes down to this – when you have very little body weight there is not much weight to lose and this makes losing the last 10 pounds difficult. But remember, we said difficult – not impossible!

With the right combination of a proper, well-balanced diet and more intense workouts, you should still be able to lose those last 10 pounds and we are here to tell you exactly how!

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Click here for a FREE video revealing how I lost 35 pounds in 3 months & kept it off for 15 years!

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