How to Recover From a Weight Loss Setback

Have you fallen off the weight loss bandwagon?

Nothing seems more discouraging than experiencing setbacks during a weight loss journey. After days, weeks, even months of adhering to a weight loss program; something happens to set off a tail-spin of bad eating habits. Before you knew it, you'd spent the entire day indulging in junk foods and sweets!

Here's how you can make sure that one bad day doesn't turn into a down-ward spiral of consistent bad eating, drinking, and exercising habits leading to weight gain...

weight loss clinics, weight loss supplements, diet software programs,

1. Accept Your Human Nature

You are not perfect in everything that you do. You have weaknesses and sometimes you will not be strong enough avoid them. Embrace this fact about yourself. Expect that there will be times that you will stray away from your weight loss program.

2. Change Your Focus

After experiencing a setback, many people focus on all the bad things they did to sabotage their weight loss efforts. They seem to completely forget about all the good things they've done prior to that one bad day.

Instead of thinking about how bad you've been that day; think about how good you have been all the days before!

3. Change Your Perception

Believe it or not, one bad day will not hurt your weight loss efforts as long as you are able to pick yourself back up and keep going. A common misconception is that one bad day will set a person right back to square one. This is simply not true. The weight loss journey may have been temporarily set on pause, but it was not set back to square one.

Let me put it into perspective for you. Say you've been really good for a couple of weeks and you've managed to safely lose five pounds of body fat. You're really feeling good about yourself.

Then a bad day comes. From morning until late in the evening, you've been eating every bad thing that you could possibly get your hands on. After taking an inventory of everything you've had to eat that day, you assess that your past weight loss efforts are now negated. Certainly you've gained back those five pounds after all the crap you've just eaten!

Here's where you need to check your perspective and logic. The simple truth is that, in order for you to have gained back all five pounds that you have lost in that single day, you would've had to consume 17,500 calories worth of food. That doesn't even include the amount of calories your body burns while it's at rest!

Not even a sumo wrestler or body-builder could eat 17,500 calories in one day! At best, one bad day of the worst eating habits may yield a total daily caloric intake of about 3,000 calories (not even enough to gain a pound!).

4. Learn the Lesson

If there was a trigger that set the day into a tail-spin of bad eating and exercising habits; identify it and then figure out a way to avoid it. At best, find out a way to deal with it in a manner that does not involve eating food.

A trigger can be anything. A sink full of dirty dishes can be a trigger! I hate cooking in a kitchen with a sink full of dirty dishes. Instead of taking the time to first do the dishes and then cook, I would instead opt for fast food. I realized that dirty dishes was a trigger and now I make sure to get them washed before I get too hungry to wait.

5. Keep Going!

No matter the brilliance of your "bad day", you must keep going! You must pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and continue on your journey! The longer you stay paused on the journey, the longer your journey will last. Stay paused long enough, and you will have to start back on square one!

You deserve to live a life in a healthy, energetic, and active body; and the sooner you achieve your goal, the more time you will be able to spend enjoying your body instead of despising it!