There are four plain and simple facts about weight loss. Being overweight can be unhealthy. Extra body fat contributes to your cellulite. You can manage your weight if you really want to. Healthy, sustained weight loss is not easy. That last one is the trickiest to deal with. It doesn’t matter what the ads in the tabloids or on the internet tell you there are no fast, easy ways to healthily lose weight and keep it off. We live in an amazing time of quick, convenient and effective solutions to almost all our day-to-day problems. If you have a headache, take some aspirin. If your clothes are dirty, throw them in the washing machine. If you need a gift for the birthday party that starts in an hour, you can order it online and pick it up on your way. Unfortunately, that expectation of almost instant solution to a problem carries over to your weight. If you need to lose 10 pounds for your cousin’s wedding, it seems so easy to just go on the latest crash diet. But your body, health and weight loss are far too complex for quick solutions. It’s why only 5% of Americans who lose weight on a diet keep it off for longer than five years. And many dieters end up putting on more weight afterward than they carried before the diet.

Weight Loss Excuses & How to Deal with Them

The facts about dieting are discouraging. And the downside of that is, without really knowing it, you start making excuses for not losing weight to avoid the discouragement. But, as soon as you realize that your reasons for not losing weight really are just excuses, you will also realize that you really can reduce your weight, make your cellulite less noticeable and maintain both for the long term. Here are some of the most common excuses for not losing weight and suggestions for how to deal with them.

1. I don’t have time

This one seems so true. With the demands of work, family, friends, and just plain life, who has the time to go to a gym or make healthy meals? Among the many myths of weight loss, one that causes the most excuses to pop up is that you need to go flat out towards your weight loss goal. In fact, you don’t need to completely change your eating habits overnight, get expensive club memberships, buy embarrassing exercise outfits and workout five times a week. Who really does have the time for all that? If you begin your weight loss journey with a single step instead of a giant leap, you’ll have a better chance of success and it’ll probably take much less time than you think. Here’s the first step you should take if time really is an issue: do only those things that will help you lose weight using little or no time. Try some of the following:

• Stop drinking sugary drinks and their diet substitutes – One can of Coke has 10 teaspoons of sugar. The same size of vegetable juice has just 2.5 teaspoons. And putting lemon slices into a glass of sparkling water delivers almost no sugar. One simple action that takes no time at all and you drastically cut down your sugar intake. And diet sodas can fool your body into thinking it got the energy hit it was craving, which can make you eat even more.
• Wear shapewear - Anti-cellulite shapewear is proven to reduce the appearance of cellulite. And all you have to do is wear them instead of something else – in other words, you get all the benefits without using any more time.
• Eat healthy snacks – Bad snacking causes more weight and health damage than you think. In addition to being enemies of your weight, processed snacks like chips are loaded with salt, which can upset the fluid levels in your body, potentially leading to water retention.If you snack on whole foods instead, including nuts, vegetables and fruit, you will not only eliminate the extra calories and salt of processed snacks, but you’ll get the more fibre and the nutrition your body needs to stay strong and healthy while you shed the pounds.Again, healthy snacking will help you lose weight without any adding any extra time to your busy schedule.

2. ‘Nothing I Do Works’

This one really is true. Again, you have a 5% chance of keeping off the weight you lose in a diet for more than 5 years. So why bother? Clearly nothing will work. But what does it really mean when something doesn’t work? It usually means something’s wrong with it. It might be broken or simply not the right tool for the job. What do you do when something doesn’t work? If your car is broken, you fix it. If the screw driver isn’t the right fit, you switch to one that is. But what if you’ve tried lots of different diets and none worked? Then it’s the dieting that isn’t working, not that you can’t lose weight. Fad diets don’t work because they take the wrong approach. Healthy, sustained weight loss can’t be had with a straight-line “eat-less, lose weight” approach. Your body is a complex machine and it treasures its survival more than anything else. When you cut calories the wrong way, it triggers powerful self-preservation mechanisms in your body that can actually cause you to put on weight even with a calorie reduced diet. If that sounds unbelievable or crazy, that’s how messed up dieting can make your system. If whatever you’ve done to try to lose weight hasn’t worked, fix it. Dieting doesn’t work, so find out what does. In a nutshell, you need to make sure your body gets the energy and nutrition it needs to stay healthy during the stress it goes through during weight loss.

3. “My metabolism is too slow to lose weight”

This one is really popular because it creates the impression that it’s physically impossible for you to lose weight. Nice try, but when you look at how your metabolism works, that excuse doesn’t make sense. Metabolism is the process your body uses to convert the energy in food into the energy your body needs. Everyone has a basal (or base) metabolic rate, which is the amount of energy your body needs to carry out its basic functions while you are at rest, like breathing and keeping your heart beating. Everyone’s basal metabolic rate is different depending on a number of factors, including the size of your body, your age and whether you are a woman or a man. Yes, a lower basal metabolic rate burns fewer calories. But the idea that your rate is so low that you can’t lose weight is false because, regardless of your basal rate, your body adjusts to it. Whether you have a high or low rate, your body balances its energy requirements to suit that rate. While all of the suggestions above sound like great ways to lose weight and reduce your cellulite (and they are), they are not the complete answer. They are just one step. But they are a step in the right direction. Ultimately the answer is to not look at weight loss and cellulite reduction as a single task but as an ongoing part of who you are.