When was the last time you achieved a goal and built on it rather than let it slip then felt like you were back at square one again? How often have you heard about people who have lost weight on a diet but then put all the weight back on again? If you can identify with this then it’s fairly common and it’s not your fault.

We’re all easily tempted by the programs that offer rapid results like lose a amount of weight in a month by following a particular diet or get a body like Daniel Craig by following a particular workout. While these kind of things will get you results, they don’t really offer long-term solutions. If I was to say I could guarantee you the shape or the health you want by taking a magic pill everyday for a week then I suspect you would bite my hand off to get it. The thing is, most goals are easily achievable but require the things we don’t have a lot of – patience and time.

Losing weight and getting fitter can be a lot easier to achieve than most of us believe and the people we see who achieve the most outstanding results are the ones who have followed a different process, a process that isn’t rocket science, is something that we all know yet we don’t generally do. There are plenty of people out there who have achieved amazing weight loss results by making what seems like ridiculously easy changes to their diets and lifestyle and have never been on a branded diet. I bet if you asked them what they did, they’d say they ate better and exercised more.

The trouble with this, for many, is the perceived length of time it takes. The problem isn’t with the process but with our expectations of the process. When we read of people losing a lot of weight in 2-3 weeks, we tend to believe we should be able to achieve the same and get frustrated when we don’t. In diet plans that involve cutting out sugar (or any other food type), this works well until we get invited to an event, party or to someone’s house and caked other tasty snacks are available and our plan comes unstuck and it’s gone out the window.

Drinking a glass of water isn’t sexy, nor is eating a handful of nuts or adding broccoli to our dinner plates and we’re unlikely to feel instant benefit from having it but what if we were to do it at every meal? Would we lose any weight? It would seem unlikely after one day but if we were to repeat it for a whole week or even a month, we would do. Maybe a couple of pounds to begin with but when done regularly over a longer period, you would see a lot more come off, not just in weight but a difference would also be seen in quality of skin, energy levels.

The secret to achieving your goals, regardless of whether it’s to lose weight, change your body shape or run a marathon, is not really defined in one action but actions performed consistently over a period. On the flip side, not doing these things is just as easy as doing them and again, not doing them once is unlikely to cause any gain in weight or loss of fitness but if you were to skip them over a period then the outcome would be different.

The solution, think of little changes you can make to your diet/lifestyle and start doing them consistently, even if it’s one at a time. It won’t be long before some of these changes feel like they’re not a challenge anymore and so make another change and do it consistently and so on. The difference after a day or a week might be marginal, if at all, but the difference after a month, 6 months a year will be significant and yet it will feel like it hasn’t taken much effort at all.