Losing weight and keeping fit and healthy requires more than turning up at your local gym or health club. Losing weight requires a particular mindset and one that you have to maintain. Weight loss plans and fitness programs are only a device which you can use to lose excess weight and get fit, but by themselves, unused, they do nothing.

There is always a big increase in the membership of health clubs and gyms, at the start of January. Everyone starts the New Year with a new resolution to do more exercise after stuffing themselves over the holiday period. Every year the health clubs try to understand why they have such a difficult job holding on to members and then to get them to keep returning after the muscles first start to ache. The answer can be found in understanding what makes a customer to sign up to a fitness club in the first place.

The answer is obvious, you join a health club or gym to shed some weight and make yourself healthier. You don't join the health club to buy a diet, or to be sold any other fitness services or products. A healthy body is about individuals and their aspirations and not about taking a profit.

Sure, you will benefit from some advice on what to do and you require a schedule of how to go about it. You may benefit from a particular diet type and you may benefit from vitamins and healthy food types, but it is all too easy to become over-whelmed by all of the details planning of an exercise or diet program. Sometimes focusing too much on the numbers can and will result in forgetting your original motivation and in the process, set you up for failure.

Instead of thinking positively about losing weight and getting fit, which is the mind set that you started with, you may start to worry that all of the calorie counting, reps, and heart rate tracking are too much to cope with. The numbers take over and you start to lose sight of your goals. At this stage it becomes more of a hassle than a hobby and instead of being a means of stress release the whole thing becomes very stressful! You may even be tempted to stop exercising and dieting as a result.

Yes, you are going to have some tough days, it would be silly to think otherwise. It's hard work getting into shape. It takes determination and discipline. More importantly, you need to be able to see through the hard times when it all seems pointless, and keep the end goal in sight. Whatever you do, you should not get too worried about hitting all the numbers on the charts all of the time.

The biggest challenge for anyone who is going to lose weight or get fit is to be able to follow through. In order to follow through, you have to be a Weight Loss LIFER!

The term 'lifer' comes from the military where it is a term for 'a person who has been in the military a long time or plans to stay in long enough to retire'. These are individuals who are in it for the long haul. If you are serious about losing weight or improving your fitness, then you have to be Weight Loss Lifer. Are you a Weight Loss Lifer?

A Weight Loss Lifer has a mindset that knows that there will be hard times to go through; that there may even be really bleak times in the future, but they get through them or they go around them. It may need support from others, but whatever is required, it gets done. They know that losing weight is so much more than the measurements of a single day, or a single week. It is the total of everything that you have done to date.

You may not be a lifer at the moment, but you won't ever become one if you don't make changes now! New Year's Resolutions are good because they are a great trigger for initiating a lifestyle change. On the other hand they are bad because few individuals expect to keep their resolutions for very long and give up at the first problem. If you didn't give up on your weight loss promises to yourself then you would still be loosing weight. You would already be a Weight Loss Lifer.

We are all individual. Each one of us is different. You cannot just buy a diet plan or an exercise regime and "guarantee the results." It just doesn't work that way. Each one of us needs to fit the diet or exercise plan to match our own requirements. You can buy different diet types and plans or exercise plans but what you can't buy, is the determination of a Lifer.

Do not get over-whelmed with the details of losing weight or getting fit. Make exercising and eating properly a high priority in your life but make sure that it is not the only thing in your life. Be aware of the long term picture and make sure that you keep your eye on the ball. Bad days happen, but they are much easier to deal with if you are a real Weight Loss Lifer.