Choose Total Weight Loss Programs For A Beautiful Body

People often feel ashamed when they aren't seeing the scale budge. They blame their lack of will power. But many people fail when they choose a fad diet instead of total weight loss programs that take into account a person's mental and emotional state as well as their poor eating and exercise habits.

• Start with your emotions

In order to lose weight and keep it off you have to understand your emotional connection with food. As part of a college course, one dietician and diet expert asked people coming out of a college cafeteria why they eat. The fat people stood there for several minutes listing all of the emotional reasons they put food in their mouths. They had a bad day, felt sad, their friend died, felt happy and wanted to celebrate, felt frustrated, lonely, empty, tired or bored. Meanwhile, the skinny people had a puzzled look on their faces and gave the same blunt answer: "Because I'm hungry."

You need to learn to exercise emotional control if you are going to be thin for life. Total weight loss programs take into account the emotional reasons why some of us eat. They give us strategies for how to cope and how to change our behavior. Dr. Phil's book, The Ultimate Weight Solution, is a one example of a total weight loss plan that addresses emotional eating.

• Practice portion control

While Jenny Craig is not an ideal weight loss program, the company does promote portion control. Jenny Craig clients are encouraged to eat six small meals a day. Portion control is an important component of any long-term weight loss strategy. However, Jenny Craig clients often focus too much on their weight as opposed to their fitness level. Clients get weighed every week to measure progress.

A better way to measure your progress is to have your body fat monitored. Also, check to see how your clothes feel. Are they loose or are they tight? If you are gaining muscle, which weights more than fat, you may not notice a difference on the scale. But you won't see elastic band marks around your waist as your clothes begin to slip off.

• Exercise your body

Finally, the third and most important component of a total weight loss program is exercise. Any fad diet that does not mention exercise should be ignored.

When you exercise you experience a positive shift in your mood, which assists you in making wise eating choices. Also, exercise helps you burn fat including the dangerous visceral fat, which is located deep in your body between organs. Experts say people who have more visceral fat are at higher risk for heart attacks and other serious diseases. Some of the newer and high-tech scales can actually measure your visceral fat specifically and give you a rating of whether yours is within healthy range.

Finally, as part of your total weight loss program, look at your weight, body fat as well as your waist-to-hip ratio. You can measure your waist-to-hip ratio by taking your waist circumference divided by your hip circumference. You should ideally have a waist-to-hip ratio that is less than .80.

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