You see all the adds on TV. The infomercials. "Buy our supplement and lose 30, 40, 50, or more pounds! We'll guarantee you'll lose 5 lbs your first week or it free!" You see all the celebrity advertisements too. "Just look how I looked just a short six months ago! I was fat, miserable, and looked horrible, but look at me today! All I did was take these 10 pills a day! 2 in the morning, 2 at breakfast, 2 at lunch, 2 at dinner, and 2 before bed time? I lost 15 pounds in 6 months! Everywhere you look, there's some sort of weight loss gimmick. The newspaper, the Internet, on billboards, in the check out line at the grocery store, and even on menus in restaurants. I get phone calls every day. E-mails touting the latest and greatest weight loss solutions. There is somebody, somewhere at any given time going to try and get you to lose weight. They tell you stuff like, "Look fabulous like me! Fit in to those jeans you haven't wore since high school! Wear that bikini to the beach!" They always tell you to lose weight so you can look fabulous!
My question is, what happens after you lose the weight and it's time to stop that supplement? What happens when you stop eating those ready to eat meals and have to go back to regular food? Those people who didn't change a thing, but pop a pill, drink a shake, or ate a ready-to-eat meal. The answer is simple, but hard to take. You gain it all back and in most cases even more! Almost everyone of them gained the weight back! They were looking for an easy answer to a tough question. They want it all now, and not worry about what happens down the road. Forget about being healthy, I want to look good! I want people to drool over my good looks!
So how do you learn to be healthy AND lose weight when something else is doing all the work for you? In my opinion, you can't. You have to learn how to do it yourself. One of my favorite sayings is, "If you do what you always do, you'll get what you've always gotten!" I even put that in bold, italics, and even underlined it so you'll remember it. I've hung up on some telemarketers, and I even made a few friends and family members upset by not buying their supplements, but I choose the way I wanted to change my life, by changing my life. If you sit on a couch watching TV all day, and popping a pill, eating a meal, or drinking a shake, your not going to ever get healthy. You have to work at it. You have to learn how to get healthy. I didn't want to lose 200 lbs, and then say look at me, the turn around a year later and have gained my weight back. When I first started this journey, I wanted to lose all that weight, and keep it off. Is till want to, but along the way, I learned my health is so much more important. I still weigh over 400 lbs, but I am breathing better than I have in a long time. I'm getting around better than I have in a long time. Getting up and being active for at least an hour a day is really starting to help me. I chose Weight Watchers over other programs, because they teach me not only how to make better selections on food, they also are teaching on portion control. They teach me that I can still go to McDonalds and eat a cheeseburger and fries, but to eat a cheese burger and small fry, not a Big Mac, and super-sized fries. They encourage me to get off the couch, which is something I've been doing. I started working out. I chose Warrior's Den Health and Fitness because I've known Jared since he was a kid. I've been friends with his family for almost 20 years. Not only does he care about me and my health but he does about everyone at his gym. So I think I've got a great foundation set, now to start building on it!
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