Are you ready to get serious?

The whole crux of successful weight loss is to make that loss gradual. Anyone who goes cold turkey - giving up allth eir favorite foods, etc., will succeed for perhaps a week or two, then be unable to resist it anymore and go on a binge. Then they'll think they lack willpower, and give up their attempts to lose weight alrogether.

IN my plan, that doesn't happen because you don't give up anything - you just eat smaller amounts of it.

Instead of five cookies for dessert, you have three. Instead of drinking a Pepsi after dinner, you drink half a Pepsi.  Instead of a huge hunk of meat and a ton of mashed potatoes, you eat only half the usual serving of meat and a third of the mashed potatoes...you get the idea.

And as the weeks go by you will start to lose weight. It will take TWO weeks to start with before anything happens, because you have to get your body into a state of caloric imbalance. That's another reason why dieters give up - they starve themselves for a week and step on the scale expecting to lose five pounds, only to find out that they haven't lost anything and in actual fact have gained a pound (which will happen because you're instituting weight training into your regime.)

But be patient, don't despair, after that two weeks, the weight will start to come off - gradually. A pound or two a week at the most.

And you don't want to speed that up by much - losing 2 pounds a week is generally considered the healthy way to do it.

But, you can ensure that you lose 2 pounds a week instead of 1 by deciding to implement a little willpower.

After about a month or two of an exercise regime and cutting back on your eating, you're going to look at those three cookies after dinner (which you had cut back from five) and think... "Do I really want to eat these? I've worked so hard, things are going so well...I think I won't have any dessert tonight."

And you won't feel deprived when you do this.

Similarly, if you are in the habit of working out or walking or biking, returning home and grabbing a Pepsi to reward yourself...you'll think to yourself...I just burned a few calories....I don't want to drink this... I'll have one tomorrow... and again, you wont feel deprived because you're seeing your success and you know it will continue.

What of course you do not want to do is give up on any of your three square meals a day, nor do you want to lessen them any more than you have already done. It's the desserts you're going to forego, not the necessary nutrients and ingredients you get from your food.

And once you give up those desserts for good - and are all right with that, not feeling deprived - the weight will come off faster. Still gradually, but faster.

Then, after you've reached the weight that you wanted to achieve, you can add those desserts back in. Not the full fledged desserts you used to have, but the one or two cookies a day, the one or two Pepsis, no more than that. And you body will be able to process those desserts and not trigger a desire to binge...

You will get there.