About a month ago, I wrote an article that told you what the most important thing for consistent fat loss is: desire.  Without truly wanting to lose fat, you can never achieve the second most important thing for fat loss.  Want to take a guess at what it is?  I’ll give you a hint – it’s part of the title of this article.

Got it?

That’s right, it’s consistency.  Virtually any exercise and diet program will provide results (I’ll outline a few targeted programs in later articles), but that’s only if you stick with them long enough.  Fat loss is a slow and steady process.  It takes time for your body to metabolize all of the stored calories that you’ve built up throughout the years.  It does you no good to start a program, and then stop after a couple of weeks, or switch to a new program right away just because you think your current routine isn’t working.

You can lift all the weights you want, run as many miles as you can, and eat all of the veggies you can take, but if you do that intermittently over the course of 5 months, you won’t be losing any weight.  If you’re truly interested in cutting down your body fat percentage, you’ll come up with a plan for how you’re going to do it, and you’ll stick with that plan.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t tweak things here and there, because you should.  Your body will adapt quickly, and without tweaking, you may hit a plateau that you can’t overcome.  But you need to stick with your plan.  Don’t give up.  Don’t stop.  Results come steadily, but sometimes they can also come slowly.

In order to monitor your progress, you should take some key measurements on a weekly basis – weigh yourself, measure your waist circumference, measure your body fat (more on how to do that later).  When you feel like you’re not getting results, you can go back over your records of these measurements and literally see the numbers change.  It’s a good way to keep yourself continuously motivated.

So, with enough desire and a lot of consistency, you’re more than halfway through the process of transforming your body.  In future articles, I’ll go through the details of what to eat, when to eat, what to drink, what not to drink, when to workout, how to workout, and more.  But don’t worry about those, like I said, they’re just details!