Gradual Change Will Get You the Body You've Always Wanted

I know you want to get fit. I know you're tired of being embarrassed to take off your shirt in public. But you can't go from where you are to looking like a fitness model or bodybuilder instantly. As frustrating as it might be, gradual change is the name of the game, no matter how anxious you are.

This is a particularly frustrating idea for us guys to accept. It's our nature to jump in to something new with both feet first, without much thought of the consequences and all that. Many of us sit in front of a computer all week at the office, then foolishly expect to be able to beat our teenager at basketball when we get home. We have a hard time with half measures.

Even so, we should look at this logically. You don't look the way you want, or you wouldn't be reading this. And as much as it stinks, the reason you don't have the fitness you want is because of the way you live your life. You're going to have to make some pretty significant changes in your life. It's going to take a lot to go from where you are now to having the body you're dreaming of. But there are two problems with making the transition all at once.

The first is killing yourself. If you are really out of shape, you could kill yourself trying to change too fast. That's why you should see a doctor before starting a major workout program. If you try to go from your sedentary lifestyle & pigging out to working out like a professional athlete and eating like a fitness model in one leap, your body is going to react badly. It's too much change all at once. Your body needs a chance to adapt to changing demands and nutrition. You'll get sick or injure yourself.

If you try to change too much at once, your head is going to freak out too. You'll find it hard to do the full exercise program, and your gut will demand its daily extra-cheese pizza. You won't see any results right away, and you'll give up on the whole thing in despair.

Last of all, if you do change everything at once and somehow manage to avoid a physical or mental breakdown, you'll be missing something else. You won't know which changes were effective and which weren't. Did changing your diet do the trick, or was your new diet useless with great results from the workouts? Would you get better results from eating fewer carbs or working out more? There's no way to know.

This wouldn't matter too much if you could jump right into a program that let you build muscle and lose fat without having to make any mid-course corrections. But that's rare. Usually, you need to modify and tweak things as you go along to keep the progress coming. You wouldn't know how to tweak things since you dived right into the deep end and changed your entire lifestyle at one.

Gradual change is a better way. By changing one thing at a time, for example skipping the milkshake at lunch, you'll start moving in the right direction without major trauma. Your body and mind can easily adapt when the changes are small. You won't hurt yourself and quit because it is too hard. Instead, you will have your first small success under your belt and be physically and mentally ready to move on to the next step.

So there you have it. Change your diet and workout program gradually for the best results. You won't get there as fast as you would if you could dive in head first and change everything at once, but when has that approach ever brought you anything but pain and failure?