Perhaps the biggest mistake people make when making the decision to start losing weight is that their expectations don’t meet reality. This relates to total weight loss, time, method, and discipline. While all of these are important, perhaps the most important is that they expect their chosen strategy to be temporary.

Think about it: if living a particular lifestyle gave you the body you’re not happy with, it’s completely illogical to expect that, after losing weight, following that original lifestyle will lead to a different result.

Imagine the scenario of eating ice-cream for dessert every night. You gain 10kg over a number of years, so decide that you want to lose the excess. You start a diet, lose the 10kg, and then return to your old habit. What do you think will happen? Of course you’re going to regain the weight you lost.

The essential ingredient for most people is the expectations for making permanent change. Using the ice-cream scenario, eliminating ice-cream in order to lose weight means that you’ll need to continue with no (or only occasional) ice-cream as part of your on-going lifestyle.

The amount of weight you carry is a result of lifestyle, microbiota, hormones, genetics, and environmental influences. Your lifestyle is actually the easiest to change, and this in turn can affect your microbiota and hormones. While you can’t do much about genetics, your lifestyle, microbiota and hormones can all affect whether your genes express themselves in ways that are detrimental to your health and weight.

If losing weight is a priority, so must be your expectations to make permanent change. Stop the yo-yo syndrome of gaining then losing then gaining… Lose weight and keep it off.