Losing weight and keeping fit and healthy means more than arriving at your local fitness centre or health club. Losing weight is a particular mindset and one that you have to persevere with. Diet plans and fitness programs are only a device which you can use to get rid of surplus weight and become healthier, but by themselves, unused, they are pointless.

There is always a dramatic growth in the membership of health clubs and gyms, at the start of January. Everyone starts the New Year with a new resolution to lose a few pounds after over-eating over the Christmas period. Each year the gyms try to find out why they have such a hard time retaining new recruits and then to ensure that they keep coming back after the muscles first start to ache. The answer lies in appreciating what triggers a member to sign up to a health club in the first place.

The answer is easy, you join a health club or gym to lose weight and make yourself healthier. You don't join the gym to buy a diet, or to be sold any other fitness services or products. Health is about individuals and their dreams and not about putting cash into the till.

Ok, you will benefit from some advice on what to do and you require 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 become seduced by all of the details planning of an exercise or diet routine. Sometimes focusing too much on the details can and will result in losing sight of 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 start to think that all of the calorie counting, reps, and heart rate tracking are too much to deal with. The detail starts to take over and you start to lose sight of your goals. At this stage it becomes more of a job than a hobby and instead of being a means of stress release the whole thing becomes very stressful! You may even be tempted to finish exercising and dieting as a consequence.

Yes, you are going to have some bad days, it would be silly to think that you won't. It's hard work losing weight. It takes determination and discipline. But most of all, you need to be able to look through the hard times when it all seems pointless, and keep the end goal in sight. 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 follow through, 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 result of a single day, or a single week. It is the culmination of everything that you have done to date.

You may not be a lifer at the moment, 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 trigger 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 quit at the first problem. If you didn't quit on your weight loss promises to yourself then you would still be loosing weight. You would already be a Weight Loss Lifer.

Everyone is an 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 trapped with the details of losing weight or getting fit. Make exercising and eating properly a high 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 will occur, but they are much easier to handle if you are a real Weight Loss Lifer.