Naturally thin people do not understand why overweight people struggle so much with weight management. After all, it seems pretty straightforward. If you eat too many calories your body will store what you do not use as fat. If you want to lose weight, just make sure that you are burning more calories than you eat. To stay at the same weight, eat and burn the same number of calories. If "how to lose weight fast" was that simple, nobody would be fat.

Obesity On The News

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.

Beating Ourselves Up

Even with those glaring statistics and the fact that we know we need to get healthy, that being obese may shorten our lives, so many people still struggle with weight management. Some people develop bulimia, anorexia, or laxative abuse problems in an effort to maintain fat loss. Why is it so hard to keep our weight at a reasonable level? The answer to that question is complicated.

Giving Up, Getting Fatter

Should we all resign ourselves to being fat, live as long as we can and enjoy it or should we keep up the struggle to be thin? The answer is somewhere in the middle. Before we go on one more diet program with expectations that we will be perfectly able to follow the diet 100%, stop. We are already setting ourselves up for failure and we have not even begun yet. Nobody does anything to the level of perfectly for 100% of the time. Would you expect your best friend to do that? No? Then why do you expect it of yourself?

Looking At Things Differently

What if we just accepted the fact that we are human and that humans do not do anything 100% of the time for very long? Let's look at the weight management issue differently than we have done in the past. Would it be possible for you to eat healthy foods 50% of your meals in a day or a week? Could you do it 60% of the time? How about 80% of the time? Do you think that you could eat healthy foods for 90% of your meals? What percentage of meals could you actually eat healthy foods without stirring up a lot of anxiety in yourself? That is where you need to begin. Gradually work your way up to eating 90% of your meals with only healthy food. This way you have 10% of your meals left for indulging yourself while still losing weight.

Now do the same thing with exercise. Could you exercise for five minutes, 10 minutes, an entire half hour one or two days a week? Find what works for you without provoking a huge anxiety response and build from there until you are working out 30 minutes for at least five days per week.

Acknowledging The Fear Of Being Deprived