Healthy Weight Loss Plans: Cycle it!

Healthy weight loss plans need to have a strategy! That’s right, before you even start thinking about starting a weight loss plan; you have to strategies your approach! First thing first, set your goal. A healthy weight loss goal should be a reasonable one but for most people, the ideal weight is usually an unreasonable one.

Years of dieting or being overweight have the physiological effect of moving the body's concept of the 'ideal weight' from what is truly considered ideal. The 'set point' is the weight at which your body naturally feels most comfortable.

If you've been overweight for a very long time, or if you've consistently 'yo-yoed', your body may respond to your initial weight loss by lowering its metabolism because it believes that you are starving to death. This slowing leads to weight loss plateaus that often cause people to fail in their diet plans, and lead to regaining all or most of the weight loss.

In your healthy weight loss plans, experts recommend aiming for shorter-term attainable goals. Since the bulk of diet research shows that most dieters lose weight steadily for about 12 weeks, then hit a weight loss plateau, that's the number that they suggest you aim for.

The strategy that many have found works best for them is one of alternating periods of weight loss and maintenance, each lasting 8-12 weeks.

For healthy weight loss plans, its recommended that for the 8-12 weeks period, aim for a weight loss rate of 1-2 pounds per week, 30 pounds in three months is crazy and unreasonable. Diet until the goal is reached or for 12 weeks, and then switch to a maintenance diet.

The whole purpose of switching diets in healthy weight loss plans is to give you a breather, a rest from restrictive dieting. The other part, though, is that you're re-educating your body and letting it establish a new 'set point'.

When the new weight is maintained for 8-12 weeks, another weight loss goals are required and then hop back in the weight loss mode. This is what healthy weight loss plans should be, not stale and stagnant!

By switching the dieting modes, the body is prevented from “ starvation”; your body now can lose even more weight. Not only that, you are given the chance of practicing maintaining your new weight.

Its been found that many dieters cannot maintain their weight loss after getting of the diets, but with maintenance stages integrated and practiced in these healthy weight loss plans, you definitely can lose the weight and keep it off! So make sure you practice these dieting and maintenance stages for good healthy weight loss!

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