The Truth About Weight Loss

As you embark on your journey to lose weight and improve your health, you’re going to have to make decisions about your nutrition plan, your exercise regimen, and even whether or not to use medications or have surgery. 

Before you make any of these decisions, I want to tell you something very important:

Whatever you do to lose weight or improve your health, you’ll need to continue in order to maintain those changes. 

Because this is so important for weight loss, I’m going to say it again:

The truth about successful, sustainable weight loss is that whatever you do to lose weight or improve your health, you’ll need to continue in order to keep those changes long-term.

When you’re making decisions about your health or weight loss plans, I want you to use that phrase to help you decide if the thing you’re planning on doing is sustainable long-term…

If it’s not something that you can realistically do forever – then you may need to reconsider it. Now, any change is going to be hard at first, but what I’m talking about here is reconsidering extreme diet changes, weight loss strategies that won’t fit into your everyday life, or weight loss hacks that aren’t safe long-term. 

For example, if your goal is to lose weight and you plan on eating a very low-calorie diet of less than 800 calories a day – which I do NOT recommend unless it’s been medically prescribed to you by a healthcare provider – you will lose a lot of weight. 

However, this is NOT something that’s sustainable to keep weight off for the long term. 

Likewise, if you thru-hike the Appalachian Trail, you will lose a lot of weight. However, when you finish your thru-hike and return home, it’s going to be very hard to maintain that extremely high level of physical activity (i.e. walking 20-30 miles a day) and you might regain some – if not all – of the weight you lost (ask me know I know). 

So, when you’re deciding what changes to make when improving your weight and health, make sure it’s something that you can safely sustain for a long time. This may mean slower initial progress, but it also means that you’re creating better habits for the future. Just remember, “slow and steady wins the race” or maybe even the three S’s: slow, steady, sustainable.  

This principle of creating and maintaining sustainable changes doesn’t only apply to losing weight. You can also use it when trying to manage or prevent other chronic health issues. 

Take some time to re-evaluate your health and weight loss plans and see how many of your changes or action items are truly sustainable for your life and values.