If you want to achieve your weight loss goals, be advised that they cannot be achieved overnight. You need professional advice to complement your efforts. A good weight loss program should be one that is healthy, logical, and flexible towards achieving realistic goals. There are thousands of people out there today who struggle with their body image, more specifically weight issues. The health and fitness market has provided them with thousands of materials on how to shed off those extra pounds. This means that someone can get confused on which is the right path to follow.

Despite all the ‘weight loss solutions’ out there in the market, the basics never change. One needs to have realistic achievable goals, which should be complemented with a good diet and exercise. Many people are made to believe that a good weight loss program should entail diet pills, fad diets and strenuous exercise. But it doesn’t have to be so; the approach needs to be rational.

The most fundamental step when it comes to weight loss is to set attainable goals. You ought to establish the reasons why you want to lose weight? What you will achieve after the weight reduction program is over, and the changes you are ready to make in your lifestyle, more particularly your diet. Such an analysis will help you have a positive approach towards the problem.  Your weight loss efforts ought to not only be reasonable but also gradual.

If for instance you have set a goal of shedding two pounds in one week, your next step of action would be to have a food journal that will review and monitor what you consume for that particular week. In the journal, you can even jot down what you feel towards any food you consume. A journal is good as it explains your eating habits and food patterns wherein the pattern allows you to substitute ‘bad foods’ with healthy ones. The key here is to be very consistent and you will record positive results after a while.

Conversely, water, the best natural hunger suppressant when taken in substantial quantities can help you in your weight loss process. When you complement your diet with great exercise e.g. by swimming, walking or aerobics you will have no choice but to burn calories. Just like eating habits, exercise is also best tracked in a journal. Your exercise should be fun-filled, something that interests you so that you can develop some passion in your weight loss program.

Most physicians prefer to look at body weight in relative, rather than absolute terms. In this way of look at things, body weight is looked against the height of the individual. And thinking about it seriously, it is a better way of looking at the whole issue of weight because what might be an ideal weight for a four foot person would surely not be ideal for a six foot person. Similarly, what is considered being overweight for a four foot person might be what will be considered the ideal weight for a six foot person.

The body mass index – which is a physician’s guide to understanding body weight, is obtained by dividing the weight of a person by the person height’s and the figure obtained this way is what a physicians use in advising people about their weight. This is why a person’s assertion that they are 90 kilograms won’t usually amaze a physician, until the person makes a revelation about their height, because 90 kilograms might not be too much for the tallest of people.

To make body mass index calculation simple and accurate, a standardized body mass index table has been developed, which is basically a schedule with height (measured in inches) on the vertical axis and the weight on the rows against the height, with the body mass index for each height and weight combination occurring on the first row – such that for every combination of body height and body weight, a body mass index is easily obtainable.

Since body mass index is a relative – rather than absolute measure, it becomes possible to make conclusions based on the figures it reveals, especially when the figures are in turn seen against the person’s waist size. For instance, where a person’s body mass index (BMI) happens to be 18.5 and less, such a person is said to be underweight – and driven to the extreme, this too can be considered an hazard, just as being overweight is. A body mass of between 18.5 and 24.9 is considered normal and optimal, especially when it happens to coincide with a waist size of 40 inches (and below) in men and 35 inches (and below) in women. A body mass index of between 25.0 and 29.9 is considered overweight and comes with an increased risk of diseases linked to weight and waist size whereas body mass indexes between 30.0 and 39.9 constitute obesity and come with a very high risk of diseases that come with being overweight, especially when they happen to coincide with a waist size that is greater than 40 inches in men and 35 inches in women. A body mass index that is greater than 40 – regardless of the person’s waist size is considered extremely high and needs to be treated as a serious health hazard.

Apart from the body mass index that is published in form of a table, various programs to calculate body mass index given an input of weight and height have also been developed and if you prefer to make use of one of these, you can enter the Internet search term ‘body mass index’ on your favorite search engine and it will lead you to at least one of these.

There is a consensus in the weight loss community that a ‘one size fits all’ approach to weight loss simply does not work. Our bodies are very unique and what works for me in terms of weight loss might not work for another person. Furthermore, the resources – both in terms of money time – that various individuals have to put into their weight loss programs differ greatly – hence the need for a personalized approach to weight loss.

Unfortunately, most of the weight loss programs we have in the market seem to be made with the philosophy that ‘one size fits all’ – and the participants are all subjected to basically the same diet and exercise regimes, with a supplement thrown in here and there, their body types and life circumstances notwithstanding.

Perhaps the administrators of these weight loss programs that take a ‘one size fits all’ approach do so in order to minimize on both the costs of developing the programs and keeping them running. This is because most of the people who are looking for weight loss programs are looking for the cheapest solutions and a small weight loss program administrator who offers a customized weight loss program (at the considerably higher cost it takes) risks being pushed out of business by the others who offer generalized weight loss programs at a lower cost.

Thankfully, though, there are still (albeit a few) customized weight loss programs for the person who is really keen to loss weight. Enrolling on such a customized weight loss program greatly increases the chances of success in your endeavor to shed the extra pounds.

The Weight Loss Centers program, though portrayed as controversial by some people, is an example of a popular weight loss program that takes a personalized approach to weight loss – creating a customized weight loss program for every client who seeks their services. To this end, every person who goes to a weight loss center has to undergo a consultation session with a weight loss specialist (as weight loss centers call the people who administer the programs), from which the weight loss expert is able to work out a customized weight loss program for the person in question. Factors such as the client’s current body weight, the client’s current state of health as well as the client’s goal in terms of weight loss are some of the things that are explored during this first weight loss consultation program.

Of course, as one goes looking for a customized weight loss program, they can reasonably expect such a program to be more expensive than a generalized weight loss program, but with higher chances of success. And if you live in a place where there is no weight loss center nearby, or if you don’t subscribe to the weight loss approach pursued by the weight loss centers, you might just enter the term ‘customized weight loss’ alongside the name of your city into your favorite search engine and see what you get out of it.

There is only so much you can conclude from your body weight figures. While the body weight, for instance, as seen against your height in body mass index can give us some sort of a picture of your state of health as far as body weight is concerned, the information that we get in this way is far from complete. The body weight does not, for one, reveal what the components that make it up are – and these could be more important than anything else in determining your state of health. It could, for instance, be true that you weigh so much, alright, but if your high weight is composed largely of muscle tissue rather than fat, then you are better off than another person of a similar weight and even height, but whose weight is composed more of fat than muscle tissue. Obviously, there is a need for a way going deeper and working out what the specific components of body weight are – so that we can make more informed decision based on it.

Enter the body fat monitors.

Body fat monitors are bioelectrical devices that conveniently work out the percentage of your body weight that is fat – which is a very useful revelation, because in fighting excessive body weight, the thing you need to target is this excessive fat – rather than the other components of body weight like muscle tissue which truly serve a useful purpose. If you have been in a certain diet or exercise weight-reduction effort, and have indeed lost weight, but the body fat monitor shows that your fat percentage has remained constant, then it might be that your weight loss effort has not been entirely successful. In a similar manner, if you have been in a weight loss effort where you have not lost very much in terms of overall body weight, but have lost significantly in terms of body fat percentage, then chances are that you are being successful with your weight loss effort (in spite of the relatively low overall weight loss achievement) because it is body fat that is generally targeted in weight loss efforts.

And contrary to what you might fear, the use of body fat monitors is not intrusive. All you have to do to get a body fat monitor reading could be as simple as taking some three pinches at your skin (it is not painful – just an ordinary pinch like what you would make on your skin to look keenly at a mysterious pimple) or just stand on a body fat monitors that works like any bathroom scale.

The body fat monitors that require you to take three pinches at three different locations on the body work through electronic calipers which take the fat components at the three points where you take the pinches as samples, and from them work out a reasonably accurate body fat percentage figure. The body fat monitors that you stand on as a bathroom scale, on the other hand use a method called bioelectrical impedance analysis to work out the percentage of fat in your body and this can give highly accurate and consistent results. Bioelectrical impedance is obviously slightly more intrusive than the use of electronic calipers but the former (bioelectrical impedance) tends to be largely safe and anyone, expect a person using a pacemaker, can use it, with added advantage of consistency it comes with, at least as compared to electronic clippers which work through sampling.

There is a school of thought that argues that the ‘body is the self.’ What this means is that if you are uncomfortable with your body, then it is extremely hard for you to have high self esteem or to be happy.

Unfortunately, we have been conditioned to believe that we have other ‘selfs’ beyond our bodies, and that we can be happy even if we are uncomfortable with our bodies, which in many cases turns out to be self-delusion because experience has shown that many self-esteem issues which rob many people of their happiness can be traced back to the people not being happy with the bodies they have.

Meanwhile the media continues to bombard us with extremely exaggerated images of what the ideal body should be like. In the case of ladies, we are shown, the ideal body is ultra-thin, with just small curves at the right places. In the case of men, we are shown the ideal body as being bully and muscular – yet not fat. People who don’t conform to this image are portrayed as ugly, and as people whose bodies could do with a bit of fixing here and there, ‘knocking into shape’ in a way of speaking.

Unfortunately, our bodies are not the same. Anybody who has your best interests at heart will tell you that you are unique, and attempting to be an imitation of anybody else will only result in a very poor replica. And while many people assume that this wise saying applies only in things to do with mannerisms, the truth of the matter is that it applies in the physical aspects too – and trying to forge your body to be like the body of such and such a model you saw on the TV is only likely to leave you broken. The people whose bodies are shown as perfect – the ultra-thin models and their ilk – represent only one extreme of the spectrum into which body types fall.

Another truth is that you should love the body you have – and the way to do this is to dispel the notion that there is an ideal body out there you should be living in. The nature of the human spirit is that it is never quite satisfied – which is why the people with the thin bodies so many of us admire wish they had more padding on their body, even as the people with the ‘padding’ wish they were thinner.

In getting to love the body you have, you also need to give up the notion that getting the ‘ideal’ body will solve all your issues, as it simply won’t. It is naïve to imagine that the reason you don’t have many friends is your body, and that having the ideal body will get people flocking to you, as you are bound to get frustrated even if you happen to get the ideal body, whatever that is.

Even if your body genuinely requires fixing – like if you are dangerously overweight – you should first love the body you already love, and then pursue weight loss from a point of loving yourself, as a simple self improvement project.