If you’re like most of us, you know the common weight loss mistakes. Perhaps you had to learn them the hard way like many.

Are you tired of failing to achieve your weight loss goals? Then you’ve come to the right place. Below are the three steps required to achieve the permanent fat loss you desire.

Step 1: Nourish Your Body; Eat Real Food

Real food is not stuff that doesn’t look like anything in nature. It’s not sweetened drinks. Real food doesn’t come in boxes or cans whose ingredients can’t be pronounced. Real food does not use artificial colors, sweeteners, texturizers, or preservatives.

Real foods include fresh fruits, vegetables, lean meats and poultry, fish, whole grains and good fats. When you eat real foods like these, your body can be nourished like it needs to be.

When you’re nourished, wonderful things can happen, including:

• You get full faster
• You eat less overall
• You eat fewer calories since the foods you’re eating are inherently lower in calories than the pizza, burgers, fries, chips or whatever other nutritionally dead foods you may have eaten in the past.
• You feel satisfied and fuller longer so your chances of hankering around the refrigerator for a late night snack have just been slashed.

All of which mean: You Iose weight and keep it off.  And you are extending your life by eating REAL food, not processed foods that are loaded with nothing but junk!

Step 2: Eat More Frequently

One of the biggest mistakes a person can make is going hours on end without eating. Not only does this slow down the metabolism (again, think starvation mode), it causes a severe drop in blood sugar causing “fog brain”  and fatigue.

Long gaps between eating can make you feel down right miserable, making it difficult to function throughout the day and doing nothing for weight loss. Slowing your metabolism induces fat storage rather then fat loss.

Step 3: Exercise

Exercise is absolutely imperative in maintaining a healthy weight and for overall health. We live in an extremely sedentary world sitting in front of computers, our phones, watching TV, etc. Sitting for hours day in and day out is killing us. It leads to not just weight gain, but to diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.

And the older we get the more we need to move. Lean tissue continues to decrease with age and that lean tissue is our metabolism. You lose that having minimal muscle and those pounds will continue to pack on!  The message is simple, you have got to move.

Find a training program that you will stick with and gives you results.  Make sure you are working up a sweat and not just going through the motions of a workout.  It is important to push yourself and challenge yourself – safely of course!

Achieve sustainable success and create healthy lifestyle habits that will not throw your body into a tailspin by destroying your metabolism and make you sick later on. (Fad diets, poor eating habits and no exercise, will ALL do this.) Stop sabotaging yourself and avoid the enduring negative consequences that can follow.

Simply eat clean and train smart. Your body will love you for it in more ways then one.

There’s a lot of buzz lately about detoxifying and/or cleansing the body in regards to weight loss. Is this weight loss worth the risk? What is actually happening when a detoxification or cleansing diet is implemented in trying to achieve weight loss?

What is Detoxing and/or Cleansing?

Detoxing and/or cleansing diets are diets consisting of basically juices, herbal teas and/or raw foods ingesting very few daily calories. The concept is that by only consuming these things the body will shed toxins and will function better, have better mental clarity and most of all…..lose weight!

Be aware that much of detoxification and cleansing theories are backed by people wanting to make money, pushing products that are not FDA approved nor backed by valid research of efficacy.

Claims of Clarity

Reports of mental clarity, intensified creativity and heightened concentration are only backed by anecdotal evidence. These reports in actuality are explainable by the very notion that one is paying attention to what one is consuming and making prudent and judicious choices therefore the “heightened mental awareness or clarity.”

Weight Loss – with Side Effects

What is actually happening when detox or cleansing diets are used for weight loss?

• The scale may go down, but in a very unsafe manner.
• Detoxification diets are very low in calories so the body will go into a conversion mode, meaning calories are burned more SLOWLY.
• Calories that are consumed will be stored primarily as fat as the body perceives starvation through such drastic caloric restriction. This will send the body into a downward spiral towards “survival mode” as the body clings to every calorie that is consumed not knowing when it will be nourished or fed again.
• Weight loss is primarily water weight and not true “fat loss”
• Muscle wasting will ensue destroying lean tissue which in turn destroys metabolism.
• No amount of exercise can counter the loss of lean tissue as it can only be sustained through the combination of BOTH proper nutrition and exercise.
• Malnutrition occurs by restricting nutrient dense foods and worse entire food groups.
• Lack of nutrients and severe calorie restriction will also compromise the immune system making the body more vulnerable to illness.
• Lack of energy with possible bouts of dizziness, nausea, and headaches will result.
• Inability to execute exercise to its fullest and most efficiently due to having no fuel in the machine.
• Glycogen stores are on empty making exercise pretty much a miserable experience.  And, making the body more susceptible in getting hurt or worse yet…injured!

The Reality of Weight Loss Gimmicks

These detox and cleansing diets are short term weight loss gimmicks which do nothing to promote healthy life long nutritional habits while wreaking havoc on the body’s metabolism preventing it from running strong and efficiently for a lifetime.

The bottom line is that the human body is one of the most complex machines on earth.  The fact that its sustainability has been going on for centuries is evidence that our bodies have evolved to perfection in many ways.

Keep healthy and strong. Ditch the detoxification, cleansing and fad diets.