Shed The Flab- Top 10 Rules For Weight Loss That Lasts

When it comes to dropping kilos, you need to know the hard facts about how diets work – and why certain habits will help you in the long term while others will come back to haunt you. The obvious truth is, slimming down isn’t fun, but it doesn’t have to be hell either if you just stick to some smart, legit strategies. Learn these tenets and long-term success will follow. For real.

Before you even begin to attack a weight-loss plan, it pays to remember this: You are not fat. You have fat. Losing weight isn’t about blame or shame; it’s simply another achievement to accomplish, like training for a race or finally cranking out 10 push-ups.

Getting emotional about it or putting too much pressure on yourself makes the process even harder and ends up sabotaging your efforts. “Dieting is like any other skill – you have to buckle down and work at it,” says therapist Deborah Beck Busis, the diet programme coordinator at Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy in the US and co-author of The Diet Trap Solution: Train Your Brain to Lose Weight and Keep It Off for Good.

“As long as you act in a smart, reasonable way, you’ll ultimately get where you want to be,” Deborah advises.

So, once you stop beating yourself up about the extra kilos and ditch those unrealistic expectations, you can focus on getting the job done. To help you reach and maintain your goal weight, we examined the latest research and talked to top experts about the following weight-loss tenets that deliver results.

We promise they will work for you.

1 It’s not a diet. It’s a lifestyle.

“Thinking of a diet as something you’re suffering through only for the short term doesn’t work,” Deborah says. To shed and keep weight off, you need to make permanent changes to the way you eat. It’s okay to indulge occasionally, of course, but if you cut calories temporarily and then revert to your old way of eating, you’ll gain back the weight quicker than you can say yo-yo.