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My weight has gone up and down all my married life. And I figured that as I approached my fifties, things would only get worse. But I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be that way! I’m past fifty now, and no longer need to lose any weight.

It’s all about stabilising your blood-sugar level. Late afternoon used to be my low point. So I ate whatever I could find, which generally was highly calorific! All this did was to add to the fat that was already building around my waist.

What’s frightening is that fat also accumulates in the body’s organs like the brain and the heart. Now, I don’t get nearly as hungry or as tired. I also experience fewer flushes and my husband will tell you my moods are more stable too! Oh, and I have fewer sleepless nights.

This transformation has come through eating something small on a very regular basis. I used to miss meals during the day several times a week. Then I’d catch up in the evening, and gorge! This was the worst thing I could do.

Regular moderate consumption is what the body actually needs. By the middle of each day, the rate we metabolise food is at it’s highest. So early meals are vital, as later meals have a sluggish journey through our system.

Sitting down to have breakfast is now top of my list every morning. I only eat a small amount, which saves me having to tot up the calorific value. (Our stomachs are not massive empty containers – we should be aware not to overstretch them).

Lunch is now usually my main meal. I try to restrict pasta, rice and wheat. I still enjoy a bite of something around 4pm, but it’s now light and nutritious as the cravings have gone. I eat protein with every meal, and go for as many colourful vegetables as I can find (as they contain the most antioxidants).

The right types of fat should still be included in our diet – this is especially important for good health. I like seeds and nuts in moderation, and salads always get a good glug of olive oil.

Finally my weight has gone down because my alcohol consumption has gone down – I now just drink a glass of dry white wine a couple of times a week. Instead of wine and beer I drink iced tea and mineral water, which is very refreshing. Has it been hard, after all these years? It’s been a lot easier than I imagined actually. Not only has my weight dropped a couple of dress sizes, but I’m more energetic than I’ve been for years!

If you are an Internet marketer, then you will be promoting a website, whether you own that website or whether it is a generic site promoting an affiliate link is irrelevant.

Whether you own the site or not, the problem remains the same – how do you get enough interested visitors to your site, so that, if they like your product and can afford it, they will have a chance to buy it, before they get bored and move on.

This is the largest common problem that every single Internet marketer has, and it is called attracting targeted traffic, getting relevant visitors or something similar. All the phrases come to the same thing ultimately. If no one sees your product they cannot buy it or if your visitors are mainly young people interested in tennis, it is no good trying to sell them bird cages.

Therefore, you obviously need as many visitors interested in your product, as you can handle. Which means that you need to be highly ranked in the search engines and directories so that people can find your site. The biggest and most often-used search engine is Google. So, how do you become highly ranked in Google?

There are thousands of books on this subject, but without exception, the serious ones come to the same conclusion, unless they were written by self-interested safe-list or traffic exchange owners. And that conclusion is that you need links to your site.

Not many people will honestly admit to knowing how Google ranks sites in its search engine, but it is generally agreed that the more sites linking to your site the better. This has lead some webmasters to try exchanging links with each other. It sounds an easy way to get links but it doesn’t work because Google can recognize reciprocal links. The best links are one-way links, because it proves that someone places enough value on your website to want to be associated with it. These are called back links.

That means that the real problem boils down to how to get enough back links to your website to persuade Google (and the other search engines) that you run such an important website that they ought to rank it highly for your chosen keywords, which should be relevant to the content of your website. How do you do that?

There are many strategies you can employ such as traffic exchanges, safelists, FFAs, forums and writing articles, but to be blunt, the first three of these are a total waste of time. I used to own a safelist and have wasted thousands of hours on traffic exchanges, all for nothing. Posting to forums can be worthwhile, but then ONLY if the link on your post is a follow link. If it is not, it doesnt do any good and most are no follow links. This means that you have to do some research to find the forums where it is worth you posting to (more on this later). That leaves writing articles as the ONLY sure way to get rock-solid back-links to your site based on relevant keywords.

So, you write an article on a subject relevant to your site stuffed (but not over-stuffed) with relevant keywords but then what do you do next? Thats easy! You search Google for article directories, lists and blogs; sign up to a couple of dozen of the relevant ones; find the relevant categories and post your article to them.

And that is how you get the best links to become highly ranked, so that people can find you, so that they have a chance to buy what you are selling. The only catch is that Google will expect to see new links appearing on a regular basis, which means writing and posting time after time after time after time ad infinitum. Or does it?

Yes, it does, unfortunately. But the process can be automated and automation is the key to online marketing success. Set up a proven, successful process and let it run ” day and night: all day and all night! I use a system that helps turn an article into thousands of variations and posts them to thousands of search engines, directories, lists and websites, creating literally thousands of back-links!

These variations are not spun! (The industry standard way of creating variations is to use spinning software to substitute synonyms eg quickly for fast in a random way. This works to a certain degree but can produce gibberish too). The system I use does not employ this method, but still produces thousands or variants. Then it sends them to article directories and blogs. Thousands of them. In fact today, there are over 11,000 sites on their list and the list is kept fresh on a monthly basis. Most similar lists are not well maintained as it is very time-consuming and so contain many dead links.

This system will take your article, create thousands of variations and then post them to thousands of sites. All with your sites link in the by-line, which you can also vary. But not only that! It only posts your article to sites that want sites like yours (based on your chosen keywords) and posts according to a schedule chosen by you: ie 10, 20, 50, 100, 1,000 posts a day, starting on any future date you may choose! So you could write say, three articles and have the first one go out starting the next day at 150 a day; the second one starting after seven days at 150 sites a day; and the third starting after two weeks at a rate of 75 sites a day.

That would give your site at least 3,000 links in a month ” all for 2-3 hours work! If you wrote one article a day (an hours work) and had it posted to only 1,000 relevant sites, you would have 30,000 relevant links in a month. Imagine writing an article a day and having it go out to 50 sites a day! After 10 days you would have 500 extra links a day: 15,000 links a month! What about three hours work a day (three articles)? 45,000 extra links a month. Plus all the webmasters who would copy your articles to their sites, ezines and blogs. Just imagine the boost in sales that that would create!

If you would like to see an example of this systems output, you have already read one ” this article. And if you would like to find out more, follow the link in my by-line attached to it.

If you are an Internet marketer, then you will be promoting a website, whether you own that website or whether it is a generic site promoting an affiliate link is irrelevant.

Whether you own the site or not, the problem remains the same – how do you get enough interested visitors to your site, so that, if they like your product and can afford it, they will have a chance to buy it, before they get bored and move on.

This is the largest common problem that every single Internet marketer has, and it is called attracting targeted traffic, getting relevant visitors or something similar. All the phrases come to the same thing ultimately. If no one sees your product they cannot buy it or if your visitors are mainly young people interested in tennis, it is no good trying to sell them bird cages.

So, you obviously need as many visitors to your website, who are interested in your product, as you can handle. This means that you need to be highly ranked in the search engines in order that people can find your website. The most popular and most often-used search engine is Google. So, what is the best way get your site ranked highly in Google?

There are millions of books and ebooks on the subject, but without exception, the serious ones come to the same conclusion (unless they were written by self-interested safe-list or traffic exchange owners) and that conclusion is that you need links to your site.

Very few people will honestly admit to knowing how Google ranks sites, but most people agree that the more sites linking to your site the better. This has lead some webmasters to try exchanging links with each other. It sounds an easy way to get links but Google can recognize reciprocal links. The best links are one-way links, because it demonstrates that someone values your site enough to want to be associated with it. These are called back links.

Therefore, the real problem is how to get enough back links to your site to persuade Google (and the others) that you run an important enough site to rank it highly for your chosen keywords, which should be relevant to the content of your site. How do you do that?

There are many strategies you can employ such as traffic exchanges, safelists, FFAs, forums and writing articles, but to be blunt, the first three of these are a total waste of time. I used to own a safelist and have wasted thousands of hours on traffic exchanges, all for nothing. Posting to forums can be worthwhile, but then ONLY if the link on your post is a follow link. If it is not, it doesnt do any good and most are no follow links. This means that you have to do some research to find the forums where it is worth you posting to (more on this later). That leaves writing articles as the ONLY sure way to get rock-solid back-links to your site based on relevant keywords.

So, you write an article on a subject relevant to your site stuffed (but not over-stuffed) with relevant keywords but then what do you do next? Thats easy! You search Google for article directories, lists and blogs; sign up to a couple of dozen of the relevant ones; find the relevant categories and post your article to them.

And that is the definitive method of getting the sort of links you need to get your site highly ranked, so that people can find you and have a chance to buy what you are selling. The only catch is that Google will expect to see new links appearing on the Internet on a regular basis, which means writing and posting time after time after time after time ad infinitum. Or does it?

Yes, it does! But the process can be automated and automation is the key to online success. Set up a proven, successful process and let it run ” day and night: all day and all night! I use a system that helps you turn your article into thousands of variations and posts them to thousands of sites, creating thousands of back-links!

But do not think that these variations are spun! (The industry standard way of creating variations is to use spinning software to substitute synonyms and pseudo-synonyms eg yellowish for yellow in a random way. This works to a certain degree but can produce gibberish too). The system I use does not employ this method, but still produces thousands or variants all written by human hand. Then it sends them to article directories and blogs etc.. Thousands of them. In fact today, there are over 11,000 sites on their list and the list is kept fresh on a monthly basis. Most similar lists are not well maintained because it is so time-consuming. Therefore many contain lots of dead links.

This system takes your article, creates thousands of variations and then posts them to thousands of sites. All with your sites link in the by-line, which can also be varied. But not only that! It only posts your article to lists and categories that deal with sites like yours (based on your chosen keywords) and posts according to a schedule chosen by you: ie 10, 20, 50, 100, 1,000 posts a day, starting on any future date you choose! So, for example, you could write three articles and have the first one go out starting the next day at 150 a day; the second one starting after seven days at 150 sites a day; and the third starting after two weeks at a rate of 75 sites a day.

That would give your site at least 3,000 links in a month or 100 a day ” all for 2-3 hours work! If you wrote one article a day (an hours work) and it got posted to only 1,000 relevant sites, you would have 30,000 relevant links in a month. And that does not include the bloggers, ezine publishers and webmasters who paste your article into their publication with your link. You could easily end up with 40-50k links. But it doesnt even stop there, because the article will be live for years and years, quietly beavering away at getting you noticed by the search engines and the people searching them. How many sales could that get you?

If you would like to see an example of this systems output, you are reading one ” this article and if you would like to find out how you can do the same, just follow the link in my by-line attached to it.

Losing weight can be as difficult psychologically as it is physically. It can become a struggle if we have to make family meals; eating our own meagre diet whilst still having to prepare tempting fare for the others. How can we improve our lot, and continue to please the family?

Let’s start with portion sizes – whatever’s on our plate, if we want to lose weight we should eat less. So find yourself a plate that’s about two-thirds the normal size. You won’t feel so deprived, because you can still fill the plate when you serve up. Wait until the rest of your family or friends have started eating before you start. Then slowly savour every mouthful you take. (Not only will this prevent you from finishing much sooner than the rest, it will also leave you feeling more replete.)

Most family meals can be eaten when you’re dieting, if you restrict the amount of fat and carbohydrate on your plate. Make up for it with lots of vegetables. And avoid the temptation of crusty bread! For seconds, think carefully before you indulge yourself. A small baked apple is fine – simply leave out the custard or cream.

On the other hand, you can make slimmer’s meals for everyone. No-one need suspect they’re eating a low-cal meals with some of the recipes you can use. Use lemon juice, garlic and fresh herbs for a really scrummy pasta dish. Tinned tomatoes are a great base for the sauce, and no oil is needed if you stir in a little low fat creme fraiche before serving.

When you’re shopping for food, always pick out lean cuts of meat. Remember also that fish can be a lower fat alternative. Whatever the rest of your family weigh, it’s still advantageous for them as well to eat lean meat. Roast chicken is a good all-rounder, just make sure you remove any skin and eat breast meat where possible. Select potatoes that have a naturally creamier texture, such as Vivaldi or Maris Piper. Then you can feel fulfilled without loading them with butter.

Whole wheat or oats are the best cereals to buy – and choose ones that don’t have any additional sugar. Leave cereal bars alone too. Even these have far too many calories for the amount of food you’re eating. There are also many ‘hidden’ cals in a lot of drinks. If you drink cola or other sodas, always buy the diet varieties.

Alcohol contains a lot of calories, so when you’re socialising it’s good to find some alternatives. Try drinking tomato juice with ice or spring water. Watered down apple juice makes a passable wine lookalike if you don’t want to be different from the crowd.

Naturally, we have to change our habits if we want to shed the pounds. But with a few little tweaks here and there we can seriously cut back on the calories.

To lose pounds, spend more time at the dining table. Dieticians are agreeing that the rate we ingest food has a lot to do with how much we feel we need. Recent research suggests that the quicker we eat, the more we eat. When eating until replete, we get more down if we’re gobbling our food than if we take it at a steady pace.

Have a try yourself – for dinner, speedily eat a carbohydrate based meal. On a different day, enjoy the exact same dinner, but this time spend at least twenty seconds with each forkful in your mouth. The chances are you’ll eat more of the first meal than the second. Overall you’re likely to feel more fulfilled and comfortable after your second dinner, both at the end of the meal and for a good while afterwards.

The reason we overfill ourselves when eating at a pace is we don’t wait for the digestive process. Putting too much food in at one go then makes our stomach feel distended and uncomfortable very soon afterwards.

Furthermore, chewing food is all part of the digestive procedure. Well chewed food assists dieters with weight loss, as the whole digestive process is then optimised.

The amount we eat is affected by the way we eat. For optimal digestion, we should sit in a dining chair and eat at the table. That way we observe better table manners, and tend not to scoff the food down! Interestingly, we’re more likely to leave unwanted food on the plate when we’re sitting at the table.

Maybe it’s also because sitting at the table makes dining more of an occasion, so we don’t rush things so much. Certainly sitting on the sofa scoffing food in front of the TV is the least effective way to aid digestion.

If we get too hungry between meals we’re also apt to gobble our food down. Aim to prevent this by planning meals in advance, and eat smaller meals more frequently. A chocolate bar might give us an instant hit when we feel drowsy, but it won’t last for long. It’s often impossible to eat a meal every few hours during the week. So why not take snacks to work like oatcakes and seeds.

In summary, evidence is building to suggest that there’s a direct correlation between the time we take to eat a meal and how well satiated we feel. So delighting in each mouthful may well be an easy bonus that every dieter can benefit from.

We can easily jump to conclusions about the best way to shed a few pounds when we decide to get serious about weight loss. Take this idea for starters: There’s a belief in society that if we succumb to temptation and snack throughout the day, we’ll just get heavier and heavier! Is that actually the case?

Traditionalists would have it that breakfast, lunch and dinner are all anyone needs for a healthy diet. Today however we’re being told to increase that number if we want long-term weight reduction. Can this be right?

We would think more regular eating would mean weight gain, not loss. Leaving a big gap from one meal to the next makes us feel like we’re losing weight. In actual fact that’s not the case.

Not eating for many hours will leave us feeling starved. Which means that our appetite is massive when the next meal eventually comes. And we go on to eat more than we really need. An especially vulnerable meal for this is the evening meal. Then we’re in a position where we’re sitting down to relax but we’ve got a gut full of ‘fuel’.

But if we adjusted our day and ate 5 times in our waking hours, there’d never be a starvation factor. Such frequent ingestion is recognised by the body. It starts to trust that it’s getting what it needs when it needs it, and so can allocate the right resources to the right areas.

If it’s not fed on a frequent basis, it has to retain fat in case it needs an energy reserve later on. Hence we can struggle to lose weight despite the fact that we’re starving ourselves.

We can get most of our calories much sooner in the day if we take five or six smaller meals. It’s then possible to process that food when we’re burning more of it up, which leaves less in our stomach later on. Getting too hungry also makes it tougher to stick to eating good food for weight loss.

We are not satisfied with a nice crispy salad. We want stodgy carbo-loading food such as breads and pastas. Which is a nightmare if you are struggling to control your calories! To conclude – for effective weight loss that does not leave you feeling ravenous, stick to small nutritious meal plans and eat several times a day.

New business opportunities have grown in newly-invented sectors of activity with the development of the electronic market. How do people make money on the Internet? Well, it does not matter whether we are talking about businesses selling products or services, the basics of whether the Internet business is working or not is best judged by sales.

The growth of competition has forced both small and large companies alike to adopt all manner of methods to become or remain visible and profitable online. However, because the ways of achieving these goals are highly intricate, a new sort of business has appeared: the Internet marketing business. Who are these people and how can they help with business promotion? First of all, most people do not have any marketing knowledge and understand very little about the artifices used to promote a business, create a campaign and support a product or service at the top of a search engine listing.

Internet marketing businesses are most often teams of people who have had proper professional marketing training and who have made a living out of studying the motion of the Internet as a mirror of real-life market transactions. The range of services provided by such companies is extensive and comprehensive. Some of them can help you with starting a business from scratch and building everything you require for online representation, starting with the design of the web page. What the average service company needs from an Internet marketing business is the development of advertising campaigns and their monitoring over an extensive period of time.

The goal of these campaigns is the growth of sales and overall company profitability. However, there are different categories of services that Internet marketing businesses can implement, depending on the needs of the client. Therefore, you can concentrate on search engine marketing, keyword marketing, web site marketing strategies, sales leads, sales lead management et cetera.

It can get even more specific too; there can be further targeted objectives. Thus, some companies need to convert visitors into leads, others want to improve their search engine ranking and small businesses often require local or regional promotion and so on.

And last but not at all least, Internet marketing businesses are often a very good source of tips for the more knowledgeable website developers, who manage the optimization of a suite of their own sites themselves, but who still need advice on strategies, tools and advertising techniques.

A good example is the choice of the software necessary to optimize a web page and monitor it constantly, improving the activity and increasing the company’s profitability. What is the criteria for recognizing a valuable piece of software? Well, it is not easy, but good software is usually fairly dear, but it should not be very dear. It should automate quite a lot of the processes you want and it has to produce easily-understandable reports that enable you to alter your website.

A good weight loss programme can be put in place simply by keeping a food diary. Start a full week before you plan to commence dieting. Make a note of all the things you have, and be scrupulously honest! Look at what you’ve written down, and after a few days you should be in a position to see where adjustments could be made.

Obviously, if there are several take-aways and other high fat foods, cutting those out would be a start. If your diary only shows nutritious food, then perhaps smaller portions would be the answer. Whichever one is closest to your situation, what’s in the diary will reveal a lot.

Make notes about how you intend the following seven days to pan out. Put everything down relating to exercise, food and drink. Write down different food categories to list what’s banned and what’s restricted. In a different section, make a list of the different foods you are allowed to have.

If you enjoy alcohol, decide on a small quantity that you will allow yourself at the weekend, and write it down. Fizzy sugar-laden beverages must go! With regard to exercise, write down a reasonable routine that you will stick to.

Just before you get started, jump on the scales and weigh yourself. Assess your progress each week, and adjust where necessary. Don’t be tempted to weigh yourself too often – once every week at the same time is sufficient.

A plan such as this will allow you to manage your weight loss programme and adjust it to suit yourself. Useful observations jotted in the diary will help to make the following weeks more enjoyable. Tick off each day you successfully complete your exercise plan. A diary is a very simple way to monitor your progress – and a remarkable tool for staying with the program!

Do keep your expectations reasonable though. In the early weeks, it may be difficult to see much change – but the groundwork is all taking place. Patience and perseverance are everything. Motivating yourself over a long period has it’s challenges – but if you concentrate on the prize instead of the price it becomes much easier.

If you do get demoralised with your results, analyse what’s been happening. It could be that you should look at altering your diet. Adding more exercise might be the thing. A brisk walk several times a week can be done at any time of day.

Recognise your successes. Dieting is much more motivating when you quantify your results and reward yourself for your efforts. A lovely new suit should probably wait until your full weight loss is realised. However, you could go to a live concert to celebrate a victorious week or month.

Doctors talk about our body mass index when they refer to weight issues. A healthy index is anywhere between eighteen and a half and twenty five. Above twenty five, and we have a problem with our weight. Furthermore we’re defined as obese and morbidly obese respectively if we rise above first thirty and then forty.

To work out your own index – Use a metric rule to measure your height. Then record your weight in kilograms. Start with a multiplication sum – your height times itself. Then take that answer and divide it by how much you weigh.

For example if your height is 1.6 metres and your weight is 78 kilos, your BMI is 30.47 (1.6 x 1.6 = 2.56 then 78 / 2.56 = 30.47). As a BMI of more than thirty has been classified as obese, action would definitely be required in the above example.

The continuation of a diet that regularly includes highly saturated fat will keep on adding the pounds. It’s important that we reduce our portions and convert to healthier options.

However, it’s not advisable to go full out on the latest fad or crash diet that is likely to simply depress you. A crash diet is any eating programme with less than 1200 – 1500 calories a day. Such ‘instant remedies’ may produce some results, but it’s likely the weight will flood back on.

Long-term weight reduction takes time. If you reduce your calorific intake by a fifth, there’s a good chance you’ll take off up to a couple of pounds a week. Not quick-fix, but much more likely to show a result in a year’s time.

Foods which contain the most calories tend to have a high fat content. Lower your intake of saturated fat then, and you achieve a noticeable reduction in calories. Substitute fat with whole grains, vegetables and fruit. It’s amazing how quickly you’ll start to notice improvements in your health.

Don’t miss out on meals in an attempt to reduce the amount of calories you eat. By the afternoon, you’ll be so hungry you might be tempted by chocolate or crisps. In point of fact, eating at least 4 small meals every 3 hours or so will prove much more satisfactory. It’s in fact more difficult to lose weight when you starve yourself. Your body can metabolise more productively when it knows it’s receiving small regular intakes of fuel. This allows it to get rid of excess fat more easily.

Modern lifestyles that pile on the stress, and shrink down the sleep might just be making us fat! How many of us today try to take on far too much? We rush around from pillar to post, in reality struggling to do anything really well. The tension rises as we bounce from one challenge to the next! And so we turn to eating, to counteract the pressure.

But it could be there’s a connection between food that’s laden with calories and feeling stressed. Stress-related weight gain does exist. The process is thought to be something like this – Cortisol, a stress hormone is exuded by the body at particularly stressful times.

As a result, this stimulates the release of insulin in an effort to make our blood-sugar level stable. This insulin release makes us feel hungry- particularly for carbohydrate and fat-rich foods. So we eat carbs and fats, and pretty quickly feel more energised.

For a short time we feel replete and the stress reduces. However, before long we’re back where we started feeling exhausted! It’s known that this is due to the released insulin grabbing hold of the glucose in the blood and dropping it into the areas where we store fat, such as our waist.

Thus if weight loss is your objective, first try to create a more harmonious lifestyle! Weight loss might also be related to getting enough sleep. We currently spend on average less than seven hours a night asleep. It used to be a good hour more than that.

In conjunction with less sleep, we now have more obese people. Hormonal challenges are thought to relate the two things. We experience a rise in our appetite hormones when we’re not getting enough sleep. Since we have a longer ‘day time’, the body’s logic is that it needs more food.

Apparently tiredness leaves the body wanting more food – again particularly the sort saturated in fats and carbohydrates. Having eight hours of quality sleep may be just what’s needed to retrain our hunger hormones.

And so to our conclusion. If we aim to reduce the tension in our lives, we might just find it easier to reduce our weight as well. We might try delegating more family and work responsibilities and say no to people’s requests sometimes. And then at the close of the day, instead of grabbing another bite to eat, simply play some relaxing music and snuggle up in bed…

To achieve anything new takes a certain amount of planning, with specific targets to measure progress. This applies to everything – including a weight loss regime. Barack Obama didn’t become the President of the USA without goal planning.

The most successful people on any diet programme are those who set themselves realistic, achievable goals to get them from A to B. Spending a little time planning these goals will pay dividends down the road. To have a chance of reaching your goals, they should always be S.M.A.R.T. – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Targeted.

Use the following five D’s to help you get emotionally involved with the result of your efforts. Write your five D’s down in a contract to yourself. Define (what you want out of it) e.g. The exact figure, attitude, lifestyle etc. Be specific about the things you’re looking forward to, the kind of look you want, the sort of sports you’ll be able to play and the type of lifestyle you’ll have.

The thing that really moves us to action is desire. Find something that you really want to achieve from your weight loss. For example personal challenge, get out from where you are, you owe it to yourself to have better health, to prove to someone you’ve got what it takes, to take control of your destiny.

The next thing to consider is Dedication… How much time will you spend exercising each week and when? Put it on a calendar, in a diary, or on the fridge!

You will become more dedicated as a result of sticking to your commitment. Then others will see you mean business! Having a routine prevents you feeling stressed. It means when you’re relaxing you won’t be feeling guilty that you’re not working-out, and when you’re exercising you won’t be feeling you’re missing out on some other activity.

Determination – the will to stick to the plan until completion and see it through. This is your contract to ensure that you won’t let yourself down. Having your goals formally laid out gives you the Discipline to work at them efficiently. It’s also much easier to stay on course with good discipline.

Read your contract every day, and add positive new jottings and pictures to it that will help you when the going gets tough. This will help you to see your goal through. Plan your work, and then work your plan with commitment. Ensure your weight loss success with the right goals and plans.

Some folks appear to have it all – and everything they do seems to fall easily into place. Whereas there are also those who live at the other end of the spectrum, and make a mess of everything they do. So we have the victorious and the victimised – and they can generally be differentiated by their attitudes.

When you want to reduce your size, it’s vital to learn the habits of a victor to achieve your goal. The victims pursue their actions timidly – wanting great things, but never really believing they’re worthy of them. A ‘victor’ will be one hundred percent committed to the goal mentally. They’ll get emotionally involved with the outcome.

Imagine two tennis players who’re about to play in the finals. We hear the first athlete saying they’re both great players, and may the best man win. Then we hear the second saying they’re both great players, so he will play exceptionally well to win. It’s not difficult to predict who’ll win the tournament.

‘Oar’ can be used to describe a victor who paddles his way to the winning post. O is for ownership, A is for accountability and R is for responsibility. We can define the victim by the word BED (Blame, Excuses and Denial) – a person who stays in bed and gives up.

The victor doesn’t expect someone else to lead the way – and takes ownership of his or her tasks. He’s accountable for his actions, and so takes them seriously, seeing things through by tackling problems not creating them. Ultimately, he is very responsible.

The victim always has a reason for not achieving, and it’s rarely to do with him or herself. Everything is always someone else’s fault – he feels out of control so lays the blame elsewhere. And then he reasons why something didn’t go well – although no-one’s convinced but him! After repeating this cycle of excuses and blame for a while, the victim is in denial. He’s absolutely convinced that there isn’t anything he can do to change things.

Slimmers about to embark on a life-changing fat loss regime should give themselves a mental work-out, to prepare for success. Anyone who’s a fully paid up member of the victim society will have to address their issues before they start, to truly embrace the concept of losing weight.

Both sets of attitudes are just habits, and with constant repetition, habits can be changed. When you’re alone with your thoughts, are you thinking like a victim? If the answer is yes, then take control right away. Achievers are just like the rest of us – except they’ve conquered their demons and taken control.

“There is no such thing as a hero, only those who rise to the occasion”. Those were the words of Winston Churchill, and they’re just as valid today. We need to have a winning outlook on life in order to become a winner in the weight-loss arena.

A glance in any book shop today is bound to reveal a ton of autobiographies. Successful people explaining how they made it in life. From glamour models to empire builders, they all have a different story to tell. But each has a common thread – they overcame adversity by focusing on the positives. This is the only way to achieve anything we’re aiming for. We have to consume ourselves with positive beliefs, and not allow negative a foot-hold!

And so for someone attempting to reduce their weight, a positive mind-set is fundamental. You can only do it if you think you can! An up-beat, affirmative viewpoint harnesses the right results. On the other hand, a negative outlook blocks us and numbs our ‘can-do’ receptors.

We all have an automatic ‘device’ in our brains, known as our reticular activation system. This system is responsible for everything we focus on. Over our lives, we’ve experienced a huge number of things that no longer remain in our conscious thoughts – the bulk of what we’ve learned moves from our conscious mind to our sub-conscious mind, a kind of store cupboard stocked up with all our past knowledge and beliefs.

Then, when we have a need to refer to something, our automatic RAS (reticular activation system) goes through our sub conscious to check if we’re holding anything relevant. So when we’re strolling down a road, things that have meaning to us come to our attention, but everything else doesn’t.

Therefore, if our conscious mind has generally been transferring positive, upbeat messages to our sub-conscious mind, that’s what it will send back. But if our sub-conscious has been given loads of downbeat messages, then that’s equally what will be sent back.

We have an element of control over this. Successful people have generally worked on their attitude and restricted the amount of negative being stored. And so the reticular activation system emerges as a brilliant mechanism for fulfilling our dreams. The sub conscious has no way of knowing whether information sent to it is imaginary or not.

In other words, we need to build a very detailed picture of our goal in our conscious mind. Dutifully, our RAS will then store that image sub consciously, ready to assist us with our objectives. Because when we need to retrieve our old information on losing weight, the message is that it’s a done deal!

A positive mental attitude has long been understood. Abandon negative thinking and keep the focus on hitting the goal. On the other hand, if we set our mind on doubt and failure, we have very little chance of reaching our goals.