With the impending arrival of warm weather and summer, our thoughts drift to swimsuits. If the idea of yourself in a swimsuit fills you with dread, then now may be the time to embark upon a summer shape up plan. A few well-placed strategies can pay off much greater than a major approach to shedding some of the winter insulation.

1. Make up your mind. Decide you are going to change and accept it. Partial commitment will lead to partial results. Just because you ate well and exercised for a week, don't expect to be at your goal weight. As the weeks go by your progress will pick up momentum and changes will become much more visible. Consistency is the key.
2. Think before you eat. When making food choices, honestly assess what you're considering eating. Ask yourself, "Will eating this food get me closer to my goal?". If not, then make a better choice. Everyone loves French fries or donuts, but eating these things on a regular basis will make it very difficult, if not impossible, to attain your desired shape.
3. Eating for pleasure is a distinctly human experience. Our ability to make rationale food choices has been obliterated by the manufacturing of foods that serve no purpose other than to taste fabulous. Maybe these drive-through burgers and fries were ok when you were younger, but as we age, most people don't get enough daily movement to be able to eat for taste alone.
4. Food choices are a habit. Replace poor food choices with good ones, and it will become a new habit. You'll find that you feel better when you eat properly, and ultimately will discover that the bad food makes you feel badly.
5. Don't buy junk food. Similar to the previous recommendation, this includes the omission of poor food choices from the home front. If you don't have it in the house, you won't eat it. A potentially disastrous encounter can be avoided.
6. Don't skip meals. Humans are periodic eaters and continuous metabolizers. The key is to keep your body's furnace burning all day long. Food is fuel for the fire. Without fuel, the fire won't burn as hot. Drastic calorie reduction and long periods without food will lead to a decline in your metabolic rate that will result in low energy.
7. Skipping meals leads to the creation of hunger and hunger makes people do stupid things. Your ability to make wise food choices becomes severely hampered when hunger kicks in. You begin to feel that whatever can't outrun you is a viable food option. Smaller, more frequent bouts of eating four to six times a day will help keep hunger at bay by keeping blood sugar levels under control.
8. Be honest with yourself. If you work with a trainer, be honest with them as well as well as yourself. Half of a cookie is still contains calories. If you take little bites of different foods throughout the day, it still adds up. Fruit juice has calories. Sugar and cream in coffee and tea has calories. Alcohol has calories. It all counts. Count it.
9. Weigh and measure food for a week. While you may feel this is an inconvenient and unnecessary thing to do, it is probably one of the most valuable, educational tools in weight loss. Once you begin to learn the caloric content of the foods you typically eat, it becomes much easier to eat the appropriate amount of food. This practice will also provide you with the understanding and visualization of appropriate serving sizes. A serving is not necessarily what they served you at the restaurant. The education you get from this one practice will last you a lifetime and simplify your quest to attain and maintain your ideal body.
10. You have to move. Incorporate more movement into your daily activities. Even if you spend an hour, maybe two, exercising. At best, this is 1/12 of the day. If you can find a way to integrate more movement into the rest of your waking hours, just think how much of an impact that can have. Go for a walk at lunch or at a break. Park farther away. Take the stairs. Walk down the hall at work rather than use the intercom. Use the speakerphone at work and pace around the room as you talk. Don't take the path of least resistance.

Include resistance training. Even if your goal is fat loss, this aspect of your training is paramount. Resistance exercise burns calories, strengthens bones, reduces risk of heart disease, improves strength and coordination for daily activities, makes you look better and makes fat loss easier.

Take a multivitamin and mineral formula. People do not eat properly. You don't eat properly. Even if you eat well, it isn't good enough. The old, romantic notion that we can easily get everything we need from food is gone. Reality sets in at some point. Americans today don't move that much. This lowers their caloric requirements to prevent weight gain. Take away food and you take away the nutrients in that food.

With a goal of fat loss, this implies that calories taken in must be less than what is needed and used. This creates a gap between nutrients in and nutrients out. With hectic lives, children and jobs, most of us don't eat the best foods and are deficient in the fresh fruit and vegetable department. Finally, studies are continuously emerging that show the benefits of many nutrients with intakes considerably above the RDA. During a fat loss attempt, consider a properly designed multiple vitamin and mineral formula as nutrients, without the calories.

Mix it up. Most of us have certain machines or exercises that we really enjoy because we are really good at it. Unfortunately, when you get good at something, your body adapts. When your body adapts, you tend to burn less calories doing that activity. So, every two weeks or so, change up your cardio and exercise routines. Training the same trains you to stay the same.

These ten simple, basic strategies can help you achieve your swimsuit shape quickly and easily. There is no magic solution. It isn't dependent upon a special pill, the perfect ratio of protein, carbohydrate and fat or a secret sequence of exercises.

It takes common sense, discipline and consistency. You didn't put the extra weight on in a week, so you can't realistically expect miraculous results in a week. To obtain and maintain a healthy weight, you must eat properly, consistently, and you must include movement and exercise into your life, forever.