Golden tip for Weight Loss: Make It Easy

[tadpole25]

As someone who lost 125 lbs, a big mistake I see is that people make it harder for themselves, and they do a program that's unsustainable.

They have restrictive diets or restrictive eating periods. They eat foods they don't really love. They eat foods that are expensive, take a long time to cook and take serious thought into mealprepping.

The first month or 2 on a "diet", people are in the honeymoon phase where they're really passionate and give up everything to focus on losing weight:
* They go on some restrictive diet, with a very specific meal plans
* They mealprep, spend hours a week at the grocery store carefully picking the foods.
* They spend hundreds of dollars more a month on higher quality foods, and they don't mind at first because they're passionate
* They homecook most of their meals, they spend at least an hour a day cooking
* They spend 2 hours a day on fitness related youtubes, social medias and communities to gain information and keep themselves motivated
* They spend an hour a day on the treadmill or whatever other cardio exercise that they don't really like, but they're okay with it because they're super motivated.

But then, 1-3 months rolls around.
* They get bored of doing all this nonsense. They miss having freetime.
* They have work/family/life obligations to attend to, and find their weight loss routine too demanding
* They feel really deprived eating just these very specific mealplans.
* They're exhausted from cooking every single day.
* They didn't mind spending more money on quality foods at first, over the period of months, the cost is adding up and it's getting very expensive.

Yeah, maybe they lost a decent amount of weight at first. But they're exhausted, deprived and BORED.

There's nothing wrong with spending a bit more on food, but there are also plenty of less expensive foods that can fit your nutritional requirements. Calorie-dense foods like nuts, oils, pasta, etc. aren't inherently bad. You just have to track the calories and eat smaller portions of them.

There's nothing wrong with cooking, but you don't always have to cook. There are lots of snacks you can make that can be prepped within minutes. And there's nothing wrong with having some pre-packaged meals or prepared foods as long as you log it in your calorie journal. There are lots of easy to make snacks you can have: whey protein shakes, protein bars, fruits, baby carrots, hardboiled egg, yogurt, nuts, oatmeal, peanutbutter sandwich, etc.

You don't have to exercise a ton, if you just eat less. And it's more sustainable if you pick a physical activity you like (i.e. a walk in the park, a sport, swimming) than just treadmill 30-60 mins a day if you find that boring.

You also don't need to spend hours everyday consuming fitness or health related content to stay motivated, because simply just spending 10 mins a day tracking calories is such a quick thing to do, that you don't need a massive boost in motivation to pump yourself into doing it.