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Losing weight and keeping fit and healthy means more than arriving at your local gym or sports club. The ability to lose weight is a state of mind and one that you have to maintain. Diet plans and exercise programs are only a tool which you can use to get rid of surplus weight and get fit, but by themselves, unused, they do nothing.

There is always a boom in the membership of health clubs and gyms, at the beginning of January. It is so easy to start the New Year with a new resolution to get fit after stuffing themselves over the festive period. Every year the gyms try to understand why they have such a hard time holding on to members and then to make sure that they keep returning after the muscles first start to ache. The secret can be found in appreciating what makes a member to sign up to a fitness club in the first instance.

The answer is plain to see, you join a health club or gym to lose weight and make yourself fitter. You don't become a member of the gym to buy a diet, or to be sold any other health services or products. Health is about individuals and their aspirations and not about taking a profit.

Ok, you will benefit from some direction on what to do and you need a schedule of how to approach it. You may benefit from a particular diet type and you may benefit from vitamins and healthy food types, but it is all too easy to get burdened down with all of the number-crunching calculations of an exercise or diet program. It is possible that focusing too much on the numbers can and will result in forgetting your original motivation andas a result, set you up for failure.

In place of thinking positively about losing weight and getting fit, which is the mind set that you started with, you may begin to consider that all of the calorie counting, reps, and heart rate tracking are too much to cope with. The detail starts to take over and you begin to lose sight of your goals. Now it becomes more of a hassle than a hobby and instead of being a means of stress release the whole thing becomes very stressful! You may even be tempted to stop exercising and dieting as a result.

Yes, you are going to have some tough days, it would be silly to think otherwise. It's not easy losing weight. It takes determination and discipline. But most of all, you need to be able to see through those dark days when it all seems pointless, and remember what you are trying to achieve. Whatever you do, you should not get too worried about hitting all the numbers on the charts all of the time.

The toughest challenge for anyone who is going to lose weight or get fit is to be able to follow through. In order to keep on going, you have to be a Weight Loss LIFER!

The phrase 'lifer' comes from the military where it is a term for 'a person who has been in the military a long time or plans to stay in long enough to retire'. These are individuals who are in it for the long haul. If you are serious about losing weight or improving your fitness, then you have to be Weight Loss Lifer. Are you a Weight Loss Lifer?

A Weight Loss Lifer has a mindset that knows that there will be hard times to go through; that there may even be really bleak times up ahead, but they get through them or they go around them. It may take support from others, but whatever is required, it gets done. They understand that losing weight is so much more than the measurements of a single day, or a single week. It is the summation of everything that you have done to date.

You may not be a lifer today, but you won't ever become one if you don't make changes now! New Year's Resolutions are good because they are a great reason for deciding upon a lifestyle change. On the other hand they are bad because few individuals expect to stick to their resolutions for very long and give up at the first sign of failure. If you didn't give up on your weight loss promises to yourself then you would still be loosing weight. You would already be a Weight Loss Lifer.

We are all individual. Each one of us is different. You cannot just buy a diet plan or an exercise regime and "guarantee the results." It just doesn't happen like that. Each one of us needs to fit the diet or exercise plan to match our own requirements. You can buy different diet types and plans or exercise plans but what you can't buy, is the determination of a Lifer.

Do not get bogged down with the details of losing weight or getting fit. Make exercising and healthy eating a true priority in your life but make sure that it is not the only thing in your life. Be aware of the long term picture and make sure that you keep focused. Bad days happen, but they are much easier to deal with if you are a real Weight Loss Lifer.