I was riding home on the train today when I heard a woman in the seat in front of me utter the fateful words…”Oh well, diet day is Monday.”  It instantly took me back to my childhood when my grandmother would always utter that phrase after a particularly large family meal.  It took me until I was in my early 30s to realize how horribly wrong my grandmother really was.

Let’s be honest, going on a diet is not necessarily fun.  It forces you to do things you don’t normally do, and people are very resistant to change by nature.  Rather than focusing on the end goal you have a tendency to focus on the immediate “dread”, which forces you to put it off until the next most convenient time (in your eyes).

Now let’s say you sprained your ankle – not just a slight tweak but a really hard twist.  Would you hobble around trying to walk it off, or go hit the gym hoping that the workout will do your ankle good?  Or would you take action to address it before you did any more damage?  To be successful with your weight loss efforts you should not wait until you do more damage.

Mondays are hard enough for most people.  The weekend is over and it is back to the same weekday routine.  People who wait until Monday to start making a positive change are more likely to abandon their program by midweek.

So when is the best time to start?  At your next meal!  Even if you string together four or five meals that are in line with the diet program you are following, and then slip, start right back up again at your next meal.  Don’t focus on your failures of the past, make the commitment to change going forward.  I am a strong advocate of the 90/10 rule, meaning that if you can adhere to your diet ninety percent of the time you eat that you will not be derailed by the ten percent of the time that you do not.

Want to know how I successfully lost 80 pounds and kept it off? Read about my unique approach to lose weight.

A fat belly certainly makes you a big man – and also less of a man, according to a study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.  Researchers studied over 580 men for almost 20 years, and found that a 4-point increase in body mass index – a (somewhat-flawed) calculation used to determine obesity – accelerates your natural decline in testosterone by 10 years!  This corresponds to a gain of 30 pounds for a man who is 5 feet 10 inches tall.  It’s not just the testosterone levels that suffer – the deficiency also increases your risks of diabetes, bone fractures and Alzheimer’s disease.

So what to do if you are putting on weight?  Grab a copy of my diet program that I personally used to drop 80 pounds in 8 months at http://burritodiet.com to get rid of that belly fat and preserve your manhood!