Sally Symonds is one of the few people in the world who has lost over 50% of their original body weight and kept it off for over a decade! She gives Thefoodlife.org the top 5 steps to reaching your goals

 5 Steps to Weightloss from Sally Symonds a motivational speaker, author of several weight loss books and director of the online weightloss system Love Your Weight Loss

1. Forget the ‘all or nothing’ approach to weight loss. You can’t change your whole lifestyle overnight. Push your willpower too hard and too fast and you’ll soon confront the equivalent of a pulled muscle – one that you won’t be able to use until it heals.

2. Be flexible in your approach to weight loss, because life rarely follows a set script or timetable. Forget what you should do, and think about what you can do instead. Perfect diets aren’t real and real diets are perfect – and the same applies to exercise regimes. Forget trying to be perfect, just try to be a little bit better than you were yesterday, or last week, and build on that.

3. Take action. Nothing happens if you stand still, but everything can happen if you make an effort. It doesn’t really matter what you do. Everyone knows at least ten or twenty things they could integrate into their life every day in order to help them lose weight – eat breakfast, eat more veggies, eat less sugar, eat less fat, drink more water, do some exercise, do a bit more exercise, incorporate some incidental exercise, etc. Focus on one thing, master the art of making this a regular part of your life, and then focus on something else.

4. Remember that the ABC of weight loss is always CDE: Consistent Daily Effort.

5. Finally and, most importantly, enjoy your weight-loss journey. Make healthy life choices that are easy on both your mind and body, not unpleasant and unrealistic. When most people reflect upon losing weight they think of the actual process itself in really negative terms: deprivation, discomfort, torture, hell, more pain than simultaneously being in labour and passing a kidney stone. But it wasn’t like that for me, and it doesn’t have to be for you, either.