“Fail to plan and you can plan to fail.”

Think of your plan as a road map and your goal as your destination. Without a plan and a specific goal, you are left without focus and can easily get lost or side-tracked. This happens all the time to people who, without much thought, join a gym or start running. They end up just doing whatever — no activity plan and no nutritional plan. Soon, they wonder why they are not making progress.

Having a plan lets you take specific action each day. There is no wondering or guessing — you just do it. A proper plan can provide the necessary structure that not only keeps you moving forward, it also helps develop good habits for activity and nutrition that will benefit you long after you have reached your goal.

“Believe you can or believe you can’t. Choose one and you’ll be exactly right.”

Once you have started on your plan, you need to believe wholeheartedly in what you are doing. It is important to stay focused and avoid overly-critical people. If you have to, don’t discuss your plan with people who say things like “you can’t do that” or “you’re wasting time and money”. Basically, do not let anyone negatively influence your success. When you have reached your goals, those same people will likely be asking for your advice.

Modern guidelines state that normal weight adults need at least 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise on four or more days of the week. Adults focused on weight loss need 60 minutes of moderate intensity exercise four or more days per week. The same 60 minute requirement applies to all children, regardless of their weight. However, in all cases, the required activity time can be divided into two or three parts in different times of the day.

Commonly referred to as the Consensus Public Health Recommendation, these guidelines are supported by the U.S. Surgeon General, USDA, Dept. of Health and Human Service, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American Heart Association, National Institutes of Health, and American College of Sports Medicine.

Having said that, do not be discouraged by the amount of activity required. You can work up to the 30 or 60 minutes if you have been sedentary, pregnant, ill, injured or are significantly overweight. Furthermore, being active is not an all-or-nothing proposition. We need to simply accept the occasional lapse and just get back on track.

New muscle gained from a proper activity and nutrition plan can actually add body weight. So the bathroom scale does not necessarily make for a good measure of weight loss success. Monitoring your body composition is a better gauge, but it can get complicated. Using a measuring tape is a nice and simple tool for charting progress. However, for some people, the numbers can be more discouraging than motivating. So getting creative with your measurement methods can help you stick to your plan.

A spool of ribbon can make for no-stress measurements at home. Take the spool and use it to measure the circumference of your arms, waist, hips, thighs, and calves. After each measurement, cut the ribbon and label it with the body part measured. Once you have all your pieces of ribbon cut and labeled, store them away. After a month of following your activity and nutrition plan, take out the ribbons and re-measure yourself using the same length of ribbon you previously cut for that body part. Add a new mark on the ribbon at your new smaller size and date it. You will see from the marks that you have lost inches of fat fromall over your body, without ever having had to see potentially discouraging numbers the first time.