You’ve got your eye on the prize and a plan in place. You’re ready to conquer your weight-loss goals once and for all, or you’ve already started the battle and your game face hasn’t changed.
Motivation is a funny thing. It’s the driver of healthy change, sure, but when your aspirations for weight-loss are extremely high, it’s easy to let them overshadow the complex reality of the process. For example, how many times have you ever caught yourself thinking:
- “If I just try hard enough, I can take off the weight quickly.”
- “I’m determined to give this my all 100 percent of the time!”
- “I need to lose weight NOW. How fast can I do it?”
- “I’ll do whatever it takes to reach my goals as soon as possible.”
Dangers of Fast Weight-loss
If you’ve got weight to lose, weight-loss is generally a healthy goal to reach for. But without a healthy pace that gives your body time to adjust, fast weight-loss can result in:
- Chronic fatigue, headaches and dizziness
- Hypoglycemia and hypo-tension
- Gallstones and electrolyte imbalances
- Muscle loss and dehydration
- Constipation and digestive issues
Why all the consequences? Your body is a complex, detail-oriented system, and it’s severely affected by fast-pace changes in weight and homeostasis. There’s also the concern that fast weight-loss usually takes extraordinary efforts in diet and exercise — efforts that are likely short-lived because they’re unable to be sustained and usually result in more weight gain.
Finding a Healthy Balance
It’s tough to separate weight-loss from emotion, especially when (culturally speaking) there’s a stigma attached to issues with overweight and obesity. If we can be honest, most of has have probably jumped the gun a bit with our weight-loss efforts at some time or another.
The idea of a healthier, happier future can seem promising, but if our goals aren’t realistic, we’re likely to experience feelings of failure and discouragement. If our weight isn’t budging as fast as we’d like, it can feel like we’re doing all the wrong things — even if we’re doing things right.
Case in point, try to find content in making weight-loss a slow, ongoing journey. Most experts claim that healthy weight-loss sits at around 1-2 pounds per week, give or take a little. It depends on your current weight, health status, behaviors and specific goals.
So remember: losing weight doesn’t happened at the snap of your fingers. Your body needs time to reap the benefits of your hard, healthy work. And besides, all that hard work teaches you a few life lessons along the way! Ride the wave and enjoy the process.
