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Weight management ought to be a simple, rational, and straightforward undertaking. After all, it is a simple formula. Eat more calories than you burn in a day and the extra calories get stored as fat. Eat the same amount of calories you burn and you maintain your weight. Eat fewer calories than you need each day and your fat gets used and you lose weight. That does not seem too hard. Does it? Unfortunately, humans have a complicated relationship with food and it is not that easy to get how to lose weight fast.

Obesity Epidemic

Look around. What do you notice? Yes, there are a lot of fat people walking around. In fact, one-third of adults in the United States are considered obese. That amounts to 72 million people. Kids are fatter today than they were 20 years ago. Children are contending with high cholesterol, type II diabetes and other diseases formerly limited mostly to adults. A full 16% of children are obese. Today's kids are not expected to outlive their parents, something that has not happened in more than 100 years.

Smacking Ourselves Into Line

People basically understand that being overweight is bad for their health. Carrying around all of that extra fat is hard on your body. Death could come early, sickness is a real possibility. In an effort to keep fat burning under control, some people have resorted to equally unhealthy practices, such as laxative abuse or bulimia. If we know that being overweight is bad for our health, why do we have such a hard time with weight management?

Resigning Ourselves To Our Fates

Is the struggle worth it? Should we just eat whatever we want, enjoy our food and accept the fact that we will probably go to an early grave or should we continue the battle with weight management? The answer lies on the middle ground. Stop for a moment and consider this before jumping on yet another diet plan. What are your expectations of yourself on your new diet? You expect to lose weight, right? You intend to be 100% faithful to your eating plan, exercise religiously and just lose weight once and for all. If that is your expectation of yourself, you are already dooming yourself to failure before you even start. Nobody can be perfect at anything.

Re-framing Expectations

What if we re-framed our expectations to something more reasonable? Let's look at the issue from another angle. Percentages. Could you eat healthy foods 50% of all of your meals in a day or a week? What about 60% of meals? 75%? Could you eat healthy for 90% of your meals? What is the highest percentage of meals you think you could reasonably achieve with a minimum of stress and anxiety? Start there. Increase that percentage over time until you are eating healthy 90% of your meals. That means you ultimately have 10% wiggle room built right into your eating plan.

To boost weight loss, approach exercise in the same manner. Would it be possible for you to exercise 10 minutes a day three times a week? Start there and work up to 30 minute sessions five days a week.

Take Care Of Yourself

Negative consequences and that critical little voice in our heads have not worked to help us manage our weight. Let's try something radically different: kindness and understanding towards that part of ourselves that is really afraid of being deprived. Let that part of yourself know that you will take the whole fat burning issue one step at a time and that, while you may not be able to indulge every food whim you have, you will make sure that deprivation does not become part of the plan. Then if you keep that promise, you will have truly recognized how to lose weight fast.