So how can you make sure you stick with your goals?

The simple answer is to make sure you want it bad enough.  No one ever achieved anything without wanting it badly.  The reason most people fail to lose weight for their New Year’s resolution is that they don’t truly want to change their lifestyle to do it.  They try diets, pills and other junk that works for a little while but then they gain everything they’ve lost right back.  Here is the bad news for anyone on a fad diet…

Fat diets don’t work and you must change your lifestyle if you want to make real progress.

Of course, who wants to change their lifestyle?  Isn’t life too short to have to eat healthy and spend time exercising?  Sure it is if your health isn’t important to you.  On the other hand, if you care about the way you feel and look, why wouldn’t you change your lifestyle for the better?

If you are interested in making some real changes and meeting or exceeding your fitness goals, here are a few tips that will help.

Health & fitness is a lifestyle

Don’t think that getting in shape or losing weight is a one-time deal and then you’re done.  You must continue the process throughout your life if you want to see the benefits.  An active lifestyle and healthy nutritional choices are required on a long term basis.

The way you live your daily life will determine your overall health.  Continually missing exercise sessions and making the wrong food choices will bring disastrous results over time.  On the other hand, if you continually make great health choices and live your life daily as though your health is the most important part of your life, you will be greatly rewarded.

Write your goals down and look at them often

Don’t simply set a goal in your mind and say “I’d like to achieve that.”  Instead, write your goal down and give it a firm date.  Once you have set that date, make sure you look at it often and make sure you are on track.  If you want to lose weight, set a goal to lose a certain number of pounds by a certain day.  Doing this will give you something to strive for and something to hold you accountable.

In fact, if you really want to make it more effective, give your goals to a friend or family member and have them hold you accountable.

Don’t stop once you’ve achieved your goal

As stated earlier, fitness is a lifelong journey so just because you have reached a goal doesn’t mean you need to stop.  It’s true that you can reward yourself but just don’t go overboard and sabotage any success that you have achieved.

This should be easy to do since you’ll have momentum on your side.

Inspire others

If you find yourself slacking on your weight loss goals, you may need to change your reasons for wanting the goal in the first place.  Inspire your children or others in your family that may be depending on your success in order to get started on theirs.  If you have successfully lost weight, people will flock to you wanting to know how you’ve done it.  This is your chance to be an inspiration and help others along your journey.

On the other hand, if you give up, others may assume that it’s too difficult and so also give up on their dreams to become thinner or healthier.

Whatever your goals or New Year’s resolutions, be sure and write them down and hold yourself accountable to them.  Likewise, once you achieve them, you need to reward yourself for all your efforts.  The rewards are part of the fun so be sure and recognize every achievement you make along the way.

Lastly, have fun and know that being healthy is easy if you simply stick to a program.  Just stay active and focus on eating healthy foods and you’ll naturally reach your goals.

[highlight color="yellow"]Nutrition[/highlight]

You can perform hundreds of sit-ups and other ab exercises all day, everyday but until you change your eating habits, you will not see the results you are looking for.  The foods you put into your body are absolutely critical if you are trying to get ripped.  I learned this the hard way many years ago when I was under the impression that six pack abs should automatically appear as long as I just worked out hard enough.  It wasn’t until I completely changed my eating habits that I was able to achieve what I was looking for.

There are a few things that you can do to make sure you see speedy results.

1. Cut down or reduce sugar

My goal is to keep my sugar intake to under 25 grams per day (not including fruit).  Sometimes this can be a difficult task especially when you have a family like mine that loves to eat sweets.  It seems that there is always a family gathering where sugar dishes are screaming your name.  Beyond this, the daily foods we eat can add up higher than you think if you don’t keep a mental note of what you are eating.  The best way to avoid eating too much sugar is to stay away from sodas, sports drinks, candies, white breads, pastas and other processed foods that may contain high levels of added sugar.

2. Stop eating out

Eating out is a really simple way to ensure that you are reducing your fat and sugar intake.  Fix all your meals yourself so that you know all the ingredients used.  Of course, you’ll need to use fresh ingredients and create healthy meals when choosing to cook yourself.  Processed meals just won’t cut it.  Fresh veggies, fruits and lean protein sources should be used instead of the “healthy” packaged meals that you may be used to seeing at the grocery.

 3. Don’t drink calories

Unless you are drinking fresh pressed fruit and vegetable juices, you should never get calories from a drink.  Water should be your primary source of hydration.  Sodas, sports drinks and other sugary concoctions should be off limits when you are working towards ripped abs.  These things will slow your progress tremendously.

4. Add intensity to your workouts in order to burn more fat

Gaining six pack abs is really a full body approach.  You cannot “spot reduce” meaning that you cannot just shed fat from your stomach.  When you shed fat, you shed it from all over your body.  Adding intensity to your workouts will help you to burn more fat.  This is especially true if you are combining all types of workout strategies including weight-lifting, cardio, interval training and circuit training.

Don’t get caught up in thinking that you have to solely focus on ab workouts in order to get six pack abs.  You already have six pack abs, you just can’t see them because the fat may be covering them.  Work on eliminating the fat from your body and you will eventually see the six pack shining through.  It’s a great feeling when you finally start to see the outline of a six pack coming through when you look in the mirror.