In your quest to lose weight, you don't have to necessarily take on a completely new lifestyle of diet and activity all at once. If your weight loss program tells you to do this, read on.

Whilst a definite commitment to losing weight through your chosen method is essential, preferably marked by some event you'll remember, you may be well advised to start off gradually and ease yourself into things over several days or even a few weeks.

Take diet, for example. If your new diet regime requires you to drop cookies or candy bars, and you are partial to three or four of these a day, then you'll probably find it difficult or impossible to drop them from your daily intake instantly. So cut it down to two a day for the first week, and then one a day for another week, before cutting them out altogether.

The same goes for exercises. All weight loss methods should make exercise a key component. If you normally do no exercise at all, then ease yourself into it gradually. If you throw yourself into doing a lot of running when you normally never run then you'll probably burn yourself out very quickly or injure yourself through a pulled muscle or ligament.

Better to start slowly, in spite of your natural impatience and desire to lose weight quickly. This is especially true if you have led a sedentary life, taking little or no exercise. Going from no exercise to speak of at all to running for just 5 minutes a day is a tremendous advance. Look at it that way and you'll see the progress you have made.

Before you start running, or any other exercise, regularly, become more active in gentler ways, such as walking instead of taking a bus, for up to 30 minutes each day, or taking the stairs instead of the elevator or lift. Just a small change like this can lead the way to a radical change in your lifestyle.

The important thing is to get your heart and lungs used to doing more. After a little while your body will realise that its workload has increased and it will make adjustments accordingly. These adjustments will include reducing excess fat and weight so that the physical demands placed upon it can be performed more efficiently.

If you feel you are so overweight that even a little running is out of the question, then try extra walking as I've just described, but then before you progress to actual running or jogging, try some walking with breath control.

By this I mean controlling how much you breathe in and out when walking. Start off by breathing in for three steps and then exhaling for the next five steps. Repeat this cycle for as long as you feel comfortable with it, perhaps a minute or two, and gradually increase the length of time you spend on this exercise until you can manage it for ten minutes.

You might like to increase the number of steps you take whilst inhaling to four or five, and the number breathing out to six or seven. It doesn't matter as long as it makes you feel healthier at the end, and it will.

Easing yourself into a diet or exercise regime like this will make it easier for you in the long term and increase greatly your chances of success with your weight loss program.

As to which weight loss program is right for you, check out this review of three leading programs.

Copyright © 2009 Philip Gegan