How many people do you know that have attempted to improve their health and wellbeing and failed?  

Most people attempt to make improvements to their health, in particular their weight, and are unsuccessful.  Many choose the beginning of a new year, 95 per cent of the time January 1, as the start date toward these goals.  Yes of course, why not set a New Years’ resolution to improve your weight?  Is there anything wrong with that?  Not at all!  But, the challenge with this is that the necessary psychology needed to achieve success is generally never truly there.

Every year, millions of people set out to lose weight, tone up and become healthier.  Unfortunately 90-95 per cent of the population that set New Years’ resolutions based on weight loss have broken these by mid-January. That’s right, at the end of just the second week 90 per cent of people have broken or even quit their resolution. For the very small percentage of people that do lose a few kilos, unfortunately it’s generally short-term success.  Why?  Because the goals or expectations they have given themselves are usually very high and, for most, not achievable long term.  Of course, some people will get short term results.  But, because of their rigorous training regime and/or stringent eating plan, these results can only be sustained for a certain time.

These exercise and eating plans are clearly not what most people are used to and would be challenging to stick with, even for the most disciplined and practiced person.

Many of these extremely driven people, after failing, will attempt their goal once again.  This may be in a matter of days, weeks, months or, for some people, years.  Once again, they attempt their goal with a similar strategy as the last time.  Often with the same vigorous exercise plan and strict eating practices their attempts are in vain.  After failing for the second, third, fourth and for however many more attempts made, people start to feel helpless and any hope of ever achieving their ideal bodies quickly fades.  After so many attempts to lose weight, and failing, a belief can start to build about being unable to lose weight.  That, even with the correct daily food intake and recommended amount of exercise, it just doesn’t not work for them.

This alone, I believe, is one of the biggest sabotages to most peoples’ health and weight loss goals. If you develop the belief that it will not work, it is very hard to convince yourself that it will work for you.  Henry Ford once said, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right!”

For the majority of people who set New Years’ resolutions, the time frame between starting and quitting is just two weeks.  For the really, committed people it is often double that, about four weeks.  The interesting thing here is that most people will start to see results at about three to six weeks, depending on their weight-loss strategy or “plan of attack” and discipline.  The sad thing is that most committed people give up just short of the time they will begin to see results, “90% of people give up within 10% of achieving results!”

Let’s look at this for a minute.  Why do most people either stop doing something or flat out quit?  It’s because they are not seeing any progress or results.  It is an incredible challenge to keep working really hard at something and continue give it everything you’ve got when you cannot see progress.  When we begin to see progress, we gain motivation and more importantly, especially for those that have previously attempted without success, belief!

Once we have belief that something is starting to work, we are not only more motivated, but even more committed.  The key is to ensure that our psychology is right in order to accept and stick to the weight-loss strategies that will get us to where we want to be.  For so many of us, until we learn to change our psychology and our beliefs about losing weight, it may never actually happen.  For many of us, if we do start to make gains we, either consciously or subconsciously sabotage ourselves due to our belief system.

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