Top 5 Reasons Why Now Is the Perfect Time to Lose Weight

I think spring 2013 is absolutely the best time in history for you to permanently solve your weight problem. Here are the top five reasons why:

5) Summer is coming!

If you start now, you can lose 25 to 50 pounds or more by the time your summer vacation starts. Whether you use my method or some other science-based approach, count on a much happier summer, feeling slim with a new outfit or two, a spring in your step and vacation photos you feel good about. Don't put it off. Make a list of what to do to get started and make this the best year of your life. Put it off and you'll miss a great opportunity.

4) There are more low-calorie, great-tasting foods available than ever before. The marketplace is exploding with new products to make weight loss easier.

The food industry has stepped up to the plate (no pun intended) and done a great job answering our demand for food and services to help us lose weight, maximizing enjoyment and convenience and eliminating the sense of deprivation.

Today we have Lean Cuisine, Smart Ones and Healthy Choice frozen dinners, all around 300 calories -- easy, tasty and low calorie meals when we are too tired or rushed to fix something. I Can't Believe It's Not Butter's spray makes vegetables taste great with almost no calories. Walden Farms makes dressings without calories so we can have a scrumptious salad and save our calories for meat and potatoes. Egg Beaters makes it so we can have twice the scrambled eggs for the same calories and Hellman's makes it so we can have sandwiches with mayo without breaking the budget. Splenda helps us have rich coffee in the morning without wasting lots of calories on sugar, and diet soda lets us have something besides water with lunch and during the day without worrying about how many calories we're getting.

Restaurants are putting the caloric values on their menus, making it much easier to eat out. They are also offering more and more items to fit the caloric requirements to lose weight. I used to avoid eating out because it was such a pain to try to figure out the calories at restaurants --it was so much easier to eat at home. Now I can enjoy eating out without the stress and without gaining weight.

With their ingenuity and profit motive turned to creating food that serves our desire to lose weight, we are due for a whole new world of products and services that will make losing weight easier than it has ever been. Get ready for a lot of new healthy innovations from the food service industry. There has never been a time like this before. It's the perfect time to lose weight.

3) No festive holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's to throw you off track.

No explanation necessary.

2) We live in a time of easy access to all the qualified information and assistance you need.

Because of the recent intense focus on the obesity epidemic, we are seeing more legitimate research on weight loss than any time in history. There has never been a better time to lose weight. Good scientific information is as close as your laptop or smartphone, as long as you are careful about the validity of the information. Unfortunately, much of what you'll find on the Internet is erroneous misinformation, so you must be selective about who and what to accept as factual and what to accept as questionable opinion or dubious sales pitch. Look carefully for real clinical credentials. Look for state licensing and peer review and endorsement before giving credence to an advisor or author and the validity of their information.

Not only can the Internet lead you to great books and articles, mine included, but it can also lead you to great helpers. I and many other specialists in behavioral medicine respond to hundreds of inquiries, all for no charge, at ChooseHelp.com, an Internet resource for those needing help with a variety of behavioral health issues. You can also connect with a variety of self-help groups, inspirational leaders and healthcare professionals by searching carefully with one of the many search engines at your beck and call.

Technology itself can be a tremendous help. Many of my clients are now using their smartphones to track their calories. They love it. There are hundreds of apps available to download and many are free. This terrific help probably did not even exist the last time you seriously tried to solve your weight problem.

And finally the number one reason, we live in the perfect time to lose weight and keep it off permanently is you.

1) You are smarter, more knowledgeable, more mature, stronger, more determined and better equipped than the last time you tried to lose weight.

The "you" that exists today knows a lot more than the old you, not just in facts, which is true, but in wisdom and maturity too. You've tried and failed in the past, and learned things that cannot be learned any other way. When I finally solved my weight problem, losing over 100 pounds for good, my success was due largely to what I had learned from all my failed attempts.

When we were childish, we wanted someone else to solve our weight problem for us, but no one else can. We wanted to lose the weight without doing the work and giving up what stands in the way. You know differently now. With what you know today, and what you can learn this spring, this is the perfect time to lose weight. That day has come.

William Anderson is a psychotherapist who specializes in weight loss, eating disorders and addictions. He is the creator of "Therapeutic Psychogenics", which helped him lose 140 pounds permanently thirty years ago after years of obesity and dieting failure. He has written a book about it, The Anderson Method, and he is teaching these techniques to individuals and therapists all over the country.

For more by William Anderson, MA, LMHC, click here.

For more on weight loss, click here.

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