Focusing on Your Weight-Loss Progress

It is essential to focus on your own progress when trying to lose weight, as it is this which will keep you going through the tough times until, eventually, you reach your weight-loss goal. If you attend a slimming club or you and a few friends decide to try to lose weight together, it is easy to get distracted by what other people are doing. If you have a bad week and fail to lose anything whilst everyone else manages to lose a few pounds, you can become rather disheartened. That is why you really need to focus on your progress and remember that everyone is different when it comes to losing weight.

Just because your partner or friend or slimming buddy is able to lose four or five pounds every week, this may not necessarily be the case for you and so it helps to recognise what you're capable of and concentrate on the positive steps you have been taking to reach your goal. It might take you longer to reach your goal than you would like, but the main thing is that you get there in the end. The only way to keep on track is to focus on what you want to achieve and to find ways to deal with your food issues and to motivate yourself to exercise more.

It is worth remembering that there is more to weight loss than what the scales say, anyway, because losing weight gives you an opportunity to improve your diet and get fitter, which is clearly beneficial for your health. Although you may be inclined to focus on achieving rapid weight loss, at the end of the day it is more important to lose weight at a sustainable rate, so that once you have reached your weight-loss goal you will have a better chance of keeping it off. Even though your partner or friends may be losing weight quicker than you, it doesn't mean they're going to succeed in maintaining their lower weight.

Losing weight shouldn't be a competition, because it's about improving yourself, so that you can look and feel healthier and grow in confidence. If you start being distracted by what other people are doing, you may end up sabotaging your own efforts, because you convince yourself that whatever you do is never enough and that you may as well give in. On the other hand, you might become obsessed with losing more weight than anyone else, so that you try to take short cuts, which ultimately backfire, as you end up extremely hungry and depressed, so that your health begins to suffer and you find yourself bingeing.

Whether you're trying to lose weight by yourself or alongside other people, you really need to focus on your progress, rather than worrying what other people are doing. You need to set yourself realistic goals that you know you have a good chance of achieving, rather than striving for something unrealistic that when you fail to achieve will leave you feeling disappointed. It is often when you feel as though you have failed that food becomes a source of comfort and you binge to take away your negative feelings. This clearly won't help you achieve your long-term weight-loss goals, which is why you have to focus on your progress, rather than the occasional slip-up.