A short term accelerator is something that will help you lose weight rapidly, but something that you will likely do for only a short period of time.
Common Short-Term Accelerators:
1. Food Restrictions
Telling people to completely stop eating certain foods typically won’t last for very long. If you love pizza or chocolate and I tell you that you can’t eat those foods anymore, you’ll probably stop for a month or two, but you probably won’t stop long-term.
And then when you eventually give in and eat the restricted food, you’ll feel like you’ve failed the diet and go back to an unhealthy lifestyle.
Because restricting food is unlikely to be a successful long term strategy, it should be considered only as a short term accelerator.
2. Meal Plans
Meal plans used to be the primary thing taught in dietetics school (e.g. dietitian school).
Here’s how meal plans work … a health professional will start by analyzing your nutrition deficiencies, your lifestyle, foods you like/dislike, etc. They will then create very specific meal plans for you. E.g. on Monday for breakfast, eat this. On Tuesday for lunch, eat that. Etc. The meal plan should be the perfect diet …
However, the problem with meal plans is that nobody follows them long-term. Anyone who has ever developed meal plans for their patients knows this. They take a ton of time for the health practitioner to create and then they never get followed.
They don’t get followed because it’s too difficult to follow. It’s way too restrictive. Assuming that you are going to follow a perfect plan for your meals every day for the rest of your life is crazy.
You might be able to follow a meal plan for a week or even a month, but you won’t do it long term.
Interestingly, some new companies have been created to better enable you to follow meal plans. These companies ship you a week’s worth of meals that are already prepared … which takes the hassle out of you having to make all of your own meals. This strategy works better than just having a meal plan created, but it’s still unlikely (and expensive) that you will be doing this after a year.
3. Boot Camps
A lot of gyms and personal trainers will create fat loss boot camps. They are typically 30 days of intense exercise. If you do a boot camp, you will lose weight. But how long are you going to do that for? It’s not a long term strategy. It will help you in the short term, but you are unlikely to do this day-in and day-out for the rest of your life.
Take a look at the show, “The Biggest Loser”. That’s basically an extreme boot camp where contestants lose hundreds of pounds in a short time. But guess what? Most of them end up gaining it back and more. And that’s the topic of a new show they are doing called, “The Big Fat Truth”.
The reason why these contestants gain all the weight back, is because following the daily activities they did on the show are impossible to follow in the real world. They have not learned how to keep the fat off in a realistic, daily living approach. In other words, they never adapted a long term strategy, it was focused on short term accelerators of rapid fat loss.
4. “Challenges”
Any “challenge” is a short term accelerator. Certain long term strategies may be challenging initially or may require time to develop a routine.
But if anything you are doing is too challenging, then you won’t follow it long term. You will only do it short term. You will only do things long-term that you enjoy and come easy for you.
5. Detoxes or Resets
Any detox or reset is a short term accelerator. Many are very good for you, but you will not be able to do this week after week for the rest of your life.
6. Medical Procedures (e.g. Lipo, Gastric-Bypass, etc.)
Medical procedures will obviously work in the short term. But most people who have these procedures will gain the weight back.
If you haven’t changed your daily routine, you will always gain the weight back.
Medical procedures such as Lipo or Gastric-Bypass are short-term accelerators, but they are not long-term strategies.
