Planning to Stay with Your Plans

Congratulations, you’ve made it to the final lesson in this MOOC, designing your personal weight loss plan. You now have all the tools, goals and strategies needed to start implementing your weight loss plan. You’ve learned without a doubt that planning is essential for successful weight loss. Remember, failing to plan equals planning to fail. Before you start your personal weight loss plan, let’s take some time to consider how you are going to keep yourself on track when times get tough. The learning objective for this lesson is that learners will identify three key strategies for keeping themselves on track, for continued weight loss and adherence to goals. Staying on track with your weight loss plan will make or break you on your weight loss journey. Remember that you are in this for the long haul. There’s no quick fixes, there’s no magic pills in your plan. Consistent behaviors like planning meals, grocery shopping, self monitoring, and exercise are going to help you get to your goal week. Don’t deprive yourself of the food you’d like to eat, even the occasional sweet treat. You just have to eat smaller portions. And really take the time to savor and enjoy the flavor of those special foods. As you lose weight, you’ll start to notice changes and how your clothes fit after about ten pounds. You can use a tape measure to follow the changes in your waist, hip and thigh measurements if you like, but your clothes will really tell the truth. The scale will give you the numbers but the real deal is how you look in your clothes. Here is some strategies that can help you stay on track. First of all, get support from those three key people you named back in week three, lesson one. This is a very effective strategy. Talk to this people honestly about your goals, your successes even your slip ups. Their words of encouragement and advise will definitely be needed along the way. Reward yourself for reaching small goals, maybe plan a little reward for yourself after each ten pounds you lose. Of course, the reward should not be food. But a new pair of shoes, a massage, or a new music album can definitely help keep you focused and feeling positive. Self-monitoring has proven to help with weight loss, as we’ve discussed. Tracking your food groups and calorie intake along with your daily weight can help you stay on top of changes, and allow you to quickly make adjustments if needed. The same goes for tracking your exercise. Positive thinking is a skill that you can train yourself to correct your negative thoughts about your weight loss efforts. This is not about ignoring unpleasant feelings. It’s about trying to reframe or redirect your thoughts to take you in the direction of success. For example, if you’re thinking, this is too complicated, I just cannot do it. Try replacing that thought with, I’m going to keep trying because I want to improve my health. If you start thinking, I’m too lazy to exercise. Replace that thought with, I wasn’t able to fit it into my schedule today, but I can schedule exercise for the rest of the week on my calendar. And lastly, never stop exercising. There’s absolutely no question that it’s the key to keeping weight off once you lose it. Your last assignment is to watch the 22-minute video called, the quest to understand the biology of weight loss. This is one of the films in an HBO Center For Disease Control series of films about the obesity epidemic. This film follows a woman who has lost a significant amount of weight, and gives information about, why it’s so hard to keep weight off. It’s important that you have this information before you start implementing your weight loss plan. The intent is not to discourage you, but to show you how the panning and effort you’ve put forth in this five-week MOOC. Gives you the very best chance for weight loss success. Your assignment is to write a reflection paper for peer review and sharing, that describes your thoughts about the following questions after you’ve watched the video. You should submit your paper for peer review. Congratulations. We, at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio wish you the very best of health and great success in losing weight, and keeping it off. Thank you so much for your hard work. Good luck.