If you’re struggling to lose as much weight as you’d like, as many people are these days, you may be wondering why.  Perhaps by correcting a few of the mistakes you’ve made along the way you can put yourself on the path to more success.  Read on to find four the most common reasons why people aren’t losing weight.

Skipping breakfast

It may seem to make sense: Generally, if you eat less, you lose weight, so why not skip one meal entirely?  But the truth is that trying to lose weight by skipping breakfast can be fatal to your whole plan.  Eating breakfast in the morning gets you off to a day full of energy, and makes it easier for you to skip temptation, like those donuts in the office, that you may encounter during the course of the day.  If you eat breakfast, you’re also less likely to be starving by lunchtime, which is when you tend to overdo it by eating more than you should.

Not confronting your emotional eating

Emotional eating is a much more widespread problem than many people realize.  If you, like many of us, eat when you’re tired, or sad, or bored, or lonely, or stressed, you may have a tendency to eat according to your emotions.  This is very common, as many of us find food a comfort from the days when our parents used to prepare us food to make us feel better.  But this can be a real problem when you’re trying to lose weight.  The healthiest way to approach eating is to eat when you are hungry, and only then.  Your body will let you know when it is ready to process more food, and if you give it any more than it can handle, that food will end up as extra fat that you don’t need.

Weighing yourself too often

When undergoing a new diet or weight loss plan, many people take to tracking their progress by weighing themselves every day.  This can pose a problem to your weight loss efforts, however, because your weight can fluctuate on a given day without regard to how hard you’ve been working.  The real measure of your weight change is your average weight over a longer period of time, like several weeks.  From day to day, your weight can change a great deal due only to how much water or salt you are retaining, and this has nothing to do with real weight loss.

If you can avoid these three common errors in your own weight loss plans, you will be one step closer to real weight loss!

The six pack of abs could easily be called the holy grail of losing weight and looking better.  Nothing is more attractive than a cut set of abdominal muscles, and that is why everyone wants their own.  But it can be a long and difficult process to build them, especially if you don’t know the best methods of going about it.  But exercising your abs to the point of having a six pack can be as simple as doing ten minutes of exercise a day, and if you couple these tips with a good diet and some dedication, you could find yourself with a set of six pack abs sooner than you think!

Our ten-minute exercise will consist of three different actions.

The first is the crunch.  Lay on a carpeted floor with your feet flat on the ground and your knees bent upward.  Lightly rest your hands behind your head and lift your head and shoulders up toward the ceiling.  Do not bend your waist like you would in a sit up, but rather push your shoulders straight upward.  Do as many of these as you can and then quickly transition into the next exercise.

The next exercise is the bicycle move.  You will want to stay in the same position as with the crunch, but raise your left elbow to meet your right knee, and then alternate with the remaining knee and elbow.  You should feel this in your abs.  Do as many of these bicycle moves as you can and then quickly move on to the next exercise.

Finally, move to the hanging leg bends.  For this exercise you will need some kind of pull up bar, perhaps the kind that goes over a doorframe without leaving a mark.  Grab a hold of this bar and raise your legs while bending at the waist.  For a beginner’s position, only raise your knees.  For a more advanced technique, lift your entire legs without bending your legs and with your toes pointed forward.  Now do as many of these leg bends as you can and then take a 60 second rest.

After your rest, immediately resume with more crunches and start the whole process over again.  Do three sets of these total, and that will be your ten minutes of exercise.  As you can see, it’s easy to pack a ton of work into those ten minutes, and with some persistence you’ll be in the six pack hall of fame in no time.

Losing weight can be an intimidating task, especially if you’re substantially overweight, if you’ve failed in the past at losing weight, or if you’ve never tried a weight loss program before.  The truth about losing weight is that the hardest part is getting started with your new lifestyle.  Many people simply cannot find the motivation to begin a weight loss program, and continue being overweight and unhappy.  But if you can just remove the mental block that’s keeping you from losing weight, you can stop procrastinating and get started today.

Realize that it’s possible

If you’ve been overweight for a long time, you may not believe that it’s really possible to lose weight at all.  You see ads on TV all the time featuring people who have lost a ton of weight, but they’re all trying to sell you something.  What about real life?  The fact is that people can and do lose significant amounts of weight all the time in real life.  They just know how to set realistic goals and stick to them.

Have patience

It’s certain that you’re eager to lose as much weight as possible right away, but it’s important to temper your expectations to make sure that you will stick to your weight loss plan in the long term.  The normal rate of successful weight loss for most people is 1 to 2 pounds per week.  That may seem slow, but it’s highly preferable to lose weight at such a slow rate, since that’s the most likely way to keep the weight off in the long term.  People who go on crash diets and lose a ton of weight quickly tend to also gain it back quickly.

Be positive

Many people struggle with weight loss because they associate eating and being overweight with feelings of guilt.  You may feel bad about yourself because you are overweight and turn to overeating to make yourself feel better.  You may even feel that you do not deserve to be thin.  The truth is that being overweight or not is simply a matter of deciding to do something to change your situation.  It’s not a matter of morals or judgment or who deserves what.  Rather, it’s a simple scientific equation that has nothing to do with morals.

So simply decide that you are going to work to be thin until you have results, and you will have successfully overcome your mental block enough to get started on your new life.

With all of the thousand of weight loss programs and products out there, it can be awfully confusing figuring out what is true, what is hype, and what is the most useful information.  Before getting lost on the internet with too much information, it can be useful to get back to basics on what exactly causes a person to lose weight.

Calories

The simple fact about calories is that they are the fuel that runs the engine of your body.  You use them just like a car uses gas, to get up in the morning, to walk around all day, and even to sleep.  But consume more calories than you burn, and the rest will be stored as fat.  Your body stores fat as a defense so that in case you run out of food one day, it could use all that stored energy.  But since you’re probably not going to run out of food, it just stays stored as fat.  What’s more is that many of the foods we love today in modern society contain way more calories than we need.  Anything that’s fried or that has a lot of corn syrup is generally high in calories.  And if we don’t burn those calories, they, too, will end up as fat.

So the most basic way to lose weight is to control your calorie balance.  You can do this either by consuming fewer calories or by burning more of them.  We obviously burn calories by exercising, but how can we consume less of them, when it’s so hard to find low calorie foods?

Much of controlling calorie intake is a matter of changing the way you eat.  Many people say that snacking in between meals is bad for weight loss.  This is true if you are snacking on potato chips and donuts, but the fact is that a healthy snack like some grapes or carrot sticks can help you control your cravings and prevent you from overeating when mealtime finally rolls around.

Another habit you can change to lower your calorie intake is by eating in smaller portions.  If you put a ton of food on your plate, you are likely to eat all of it simply because it is there.  If, however, you consciously decide to take a smaller portion of food at every meal, you can make a big dent in your calorie count simply by eating less.

In the end, the basics of weight loss are much simpler than they may appear.  By reducing your calorie intake and burning more of what you take in, you will be well on your way to losing weight.