Essential Oils: Essential Oils (The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Uncovering the Healing Benefits of Aromatherapy) (25 page)

Step 6: Lifestyle Habits

How to Make This Process as Unobtrusive & Enjoyable As Possible, So You Maintain Your Results Forever

Losing weight is the first stage of this journey, but once complete it is just as important to ensure that you do not regain the weight and end up back where you started or worse, regaining additional weight. Unfortunately this is a common occurrence with many people who go on diets and try to lose weight.

Fitting Weight Loss Naturally in to Your Lifestyle

For this plan to work you must follow it as written, and to maintain the results over the long term you need to maintain consistency and make it a permanent fixture in your life.

My recommendation is to pre-plan when you are going to do things such as work out, food shopping, food preparation, measuring progress and put it in your diary. Once in the weekly schedule you don’t need to think about it all the time and instead just tick things off the list as the time comes around. This consistency will help you build a habit.

Habits

Almost everything you do is because of habit. You follow the same routines and do the same things without even realising it. This can be really powerful and if you can create the right kind of habits – healthy habits that lead to weight loss and a healthy lifestyle – it makes it so much easier to achieve and maintain amazing results.

Building new habits will create a long term lifestyle change that leads to better health, energy and a fitter body, for ever. To create a habit it takes around 30 days of consistent application. That means if you do something every day for just one month, it will become embedded in your brain as a natural part of your routine. At that point, you no longer need to think about it, it will just happen.

Prioritising

Of course, you will never be able to follow everything 100%, that is just not realistic. What you need to do, is prioritise the most important things and remain consistent
the majority
of the time.

If changing your body and losing weight is important to you, and I assume it is if you are reading this book, then it should be a priority in your schedule. You have to find the time to prepare healthy food, exercise and do the things that will lead to successful weight loss.

If you fail to organise it as a top priority, you are leaving it to chance whether you will achieve your goals or not. Often times you will see some success initially on the first wave of motivation after embarking on a journey and you will be pleased to lose some weight in the first week. If this is the case, that is great, but be aware that you need to ensure it is a priority that becomes a habit, so that after the initial burst of motivation, you can sustain your success on an ongoing basis. Other things will come in to your life and take over as the newest and most pressing thing in your day. This is when it is really important that you have made a habit out of healthy eating and exercise.

Your Action Plan from Step 6

Pre-plan workouts, food preparation, etc. to make it easy to schedule and fit in your lifestyle

Do things consistently for a period of 30 days to create lifelong healthy habits that will make it easy to maintain your progress

Prioritise your health and fitness, it must be an important part of your life to see the results that you want

Step 7: Additional Tips and Tricks

We have covered the majority of the plan in the previous 6 steps. You now know how to set your goals, make a commitment, the principles of natural weight loss, how to eat and how to exercise, and how to make this a habit that fits in your lifestyle.

This final section is packed full of additional tips and tricks that will help you lose up to 10 pounds in 7 days.

Drinking

Water, water, water!
You want to avoid drinking additional calories, because calories that you drink tend not to fill you up, so you are still hungry and it is very easy to overconsume. This means avoid alcohol, fizzy drinks, fruit juice and milk.

Additionally, water is great for flushing the system out and helping to remove fat from the body. It is essential for health and optimum brain function. You should aim to drink 3 litres of water per day. When exercising you may want to drink even more water, to replace what you lose through sweating.

Starting the day with iced water with fresh lemon squeezed in it, on an empty stomach, is a great trick to kick-start your metabolism and gets you energised for the day.

Caffeine

Caffeine will speed up your metabolism and help you to burn additional calories. However over consumption of coffee is bad for your health and will leave you wired and jittery. The best option is
green tea
.

Green tea will increase your metabolic rate and make you burn more calories, whilst being good for health and a cheap and easy option to drink throughout the day. I recommend drinking 2-3 cups of green tea throughout the day, between meals.

Sleep

Sleep is an overlooked but extremely important part of a healthy lifestyle. Ensuring you get high quality sleep is important for health, mental focus and recovery from exercise. When you have had insufficient sleep you are more likely to crave sugary and high calorie foods that give you quick energy. This makes it extremely hard to stick to a healthy eating diet if you are tired and having cravings for certain food that you are trying to avoid.

To get the best possible sleep follow these simple guidelines:

- go to bed at approximately the same time each night, and wake approximately the same time each morning

- aim for 7-9 hours of sleep

- keep your room dark, quiet and slightly cold

- wind down before going to bed with half an hour of relaxation and do not have mobile phones, tablets and other electronics on once you get in to bed

- do not eat immediately before going to bed. Have you last meal at least 2 hours before trying to sleep

Relaxation

Relaxation and recovery techniques are important to minimize stress, increase health and wellbeing and recover from exercise.

When you are stressed out or unhappy, you will probably crave unhealthy foods and want to eat sugar or drink alcohol. Using some of the relaxation techniques mentioned below will help you to lower your stress levels and maintain control of your eating habits.

- yoga/Pilates/tai chi are all great forms of relaxing exercise that lower stress, improve circulation and flexibility as well as building balance and co-ordination. I recommend doing these forms of exercise on a regular basis, in addition to the exercise program attached to this book

- meditation/mindfulness is a great way to ground yourself in the present and let the stress wash away. Check online for beginners instructions and guided meditations

- massage is a great way to help muscles recover from exercise and also increases lymphatic flow, which removes toxins from the body, improving health and energy

Supplements

Certain nutritional supplements can be a great addition to a healthy diet, to fill in any gaps and increase the amount of vitamins and minerals that you are eating. This author is not a doctor and strongly recommends that you speak to a qualified professional before taking any supplements or other substances.

I recommend that you do your own research regarding supplements and find the ones that are most beneficial for you and your unique goals. Please note that supplements are just that – a supplement – to an otherwise healthy diet and are in no way essential. They are an additional little bonus that can help you to achieve your goals but should not be a foundation of a healthy diet.

Your Action Plan from Step 7

Drink 3+ litres of water per day and optionally drink 2-3 cups of green tea for good health and to speed the metabolism

Ensure good rest and relaxation by getting good quality sleep, doing relaxing exercise such as yoga or Pilates and looking after yourself with meditation and massage

Supplements can be a great addition to a healthy diet, but are not a requirement. Do your own research and find the supplements that work for you

Recap & Conclusion

The 7 Steps

The 7 steps are:

1. Set your goals
   
2. Commitment to the plan and what you will need to do to be successful
   
3.                  
   Principles of natural weight loss
   
4.                  
   How to eat
   
5.                  
   How to exercise
   
6.                  
   Lifestyle habits and how to make this process as unobtrusive and enjoyable as possible so you maintain your results forever
   
7.                  
   Improve health, have more energy and lose weight naturally – additional tips and tricks
   

Implement these 7 steps from Weight Loss Naturally and you can lose up to 10 pounds in the first 7 days. With the information from step 6 you will be able to build long term habits and maintain this progress permanently.

You have already taken the first steps toward natural weight loss, improved health and increased energy by reading this book. Take the information and the plan outlined in the 7 steps and implement it in to your life today.

Proven Strategies to Lose Weight and Live Your Healthiest Life Now

By: Abigail Cruise

Who is this book for?

If any of these apply to you, then you will find the contents of this book helpful:

• Have you been trying to lose weight and have yet to find success?
  
• Have you lost weight but only ended up gaining it all right back?
  
• Are you one of those people that have tried all diets but never seem to find one that works for you?
  
• Are you looking for a natural way to lose weight and keep it off?
  
• Are you one of those people who know how to lose weight but struggle with actually doing it?
  

Don’t feel alone because I have been there; these steps have helped me lose the weight and keep off.

What will you learn?

This book will teach you how to jump start your weight loss, increasing your energy, clear your mind, and improve your overall health. You will learn:

• Strategies to feel the healthiest you have ever felt and have the most energy you have ever had
  
• How to begin burning that dreaded hard to loss fat (especially belly fat, thigh fat and arm fat), and keep it off
  
• How to lose inches off your waist and other hard-to-lose areas
  
• Why these habits work, along with an action plan to push you to your ideal body!
  

Introduction

Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to feel great? Do you want to live healthy?

Of course, you want to. Who doesn’t? But you have tried many things—diets, exercises, pills, therapy and so on—yet, you haven’t had any success. Is that right?

Well, if you are looking for a lifelong, sure fire and extremely simple way to lose weight, then this book is for you.

I will show you how you can achieve success not only in your weight-loss efforts but also gain a lifelong appreciation for healthy habits that will continue to energize you.

Do you know why despite trying very hard to lose weight many people fail? It’s because most weight-loss programs offer quick and easy solutions but have a short-term view of why anyone should lose weight.

Weight-loss diets work but only for a while. No sooner than you start seeing some positive results in terms of weight-loss, many other negative health problems come up. Then you give up or give in and all the weight you lost, you regain back and gain some more.

Exercise regimens are no better. They make you sweat and strain. Then you find that you cannot keep it up and pack the pounds back. Why? They don’t work simply because you don’t enjoy doing it.

What about pills or therapy? The less said about these the better. After all, if there’s a magic pill or a miracle therapy, then why are they not working for you or for anyone for that matter? Just look in the mirror or look around you.

If you still believe there’s a quick-fix solution to lose weight, I hate to break it to you. There isn’t. But don’t despair, there is hope. In fact, there is a simple yet powerful way to lose weight and best of all, it works for a lifetime. This book shows you how you can lose weight, permanently, and enjoy a lifetime of health.

How? The key to losing weight lies in your lifestyle. It begins in the morning and it begins with you, when you wake up.

Acquire a series of healthy habits and instil these habits into your daily routine, and you will soon see remarkable results, not only reflected in your mirror, but in the weighing scale and in your general outlook on life.

You will feel energized and you will find plenty of reasons to feel happy and healthy.

It all starts with some simple steps aimed at acquiring a series of healthy morning habits into your lifestyle.

While the steps that I have described in this book are a result of my own experiments, research and experience, they are also based on proven research and studies conducted variously on what causes weight loss.

Over the years, I made some deliberate changes in my morning routine. I identified the habits that were causing stress and making me unhealthy and eliminated them. I introduced habits that brought me joy and happiness, made me feel energized and in the long run, transformed my life.

I suddenly found that not only did I start losing weight, but my overall health improved and also my performance at work, and at play. I had a more positive outlook. I also found myself succeeding in my endeavours, seemingly easily and effortlessly.

I want to share with you these proven habits which contributed enormously to change my life from dreading every new day to looking forward with eagerness and enthusiasm, every morning.

These habits are not in any way extraordinary. In fact, they are extremely simple or so they will seem. However, do not underestimate the power of simplicity. Take these seemingly insignificant steps and incorporate the habits into your morning routine and you will start to experience significantly extraordinary results.

One last piece of advice; there is no need to start practicing all the habits, immediately nor is it necessary to do them in the order in which it is mentioned. In fact, choose one habit at a time and introduce it till it becomes an indispensable part of your morning ritual. Take the ones which appeal to you the most.

I hope you find these habits as inspiring and transformational as I did.