Here is a quick guide to help you devise a regimen that can help you see success and meet your goals.
Create an Exercise Schedule Weekly
Although our day-to-day work life may be pretty much the same, not always will our out of work life routine be the same. Dentist and doctor appointments, school activities for your kids, weddings, funnels, court dates etc., can all be things that make our out of work routine change from day-to-day to week-to-week. Your exercise schedule that worked well one week may not necessarily work well the next. And if you don't schedule around those bumps in the road, trust me, as someone who has spent a lot of time going to the gym, it does not take much to lose your focus and motivation forcing you to skip for the day.
Give Yourself the Time You Need for a Successful Workout or Don't Bother
This is huge. I know it's hard for most of us with busy schedules to find enough time to get to the gym, but if you only have the time to put in a 50 percent effort than why bother. You would be better off taking the day off from the gym and taking care of your errands for the day and maybe even some that you have scheduled for the next day. This will free up more than enough time for tomorrow and you can get in a workout you deserve.
If you try to cram a short workout into a small window of time and your focus during your workout is on what you have to do when you're done, you will most likely experience lack of motivation and effort eventually leading you to accomplishing very little. But if you go to the gym with time and then some, you should be able to stay very focused and walk away with a successful workout.
Dieting and Exercising is a Marathon not a Sprint
One of the biggest reasons people fail at their attempts to start and stick with an exercise schedule is the way they start out. Deciding one day that instead of coming home every day and sitting on your duff, you're going to go to the gym and run and exercise like you never have before. And instead of your usual super sized Big Mac meal, you're going to nibble on veggies. The problem with that logic is you most likely will never see success. You will be so sore and tired from over working out, you won't be able to get back into the gym for a long time, and you will be so hungry that you will be miserable eventually leading you to break and go back to bad eating, probably worse.
Baby Steps for Success
To give yourself the best chance of sticking with your exercise schedule you created to lose weight, you have to be truthful with yourself and come up with a reasonable plan that you know you can accomplish. If you can barely get up and down a flight of stairs without losing your breath, you probably need to start out with just a walk on the treadmill, and when your comfortable with that you can move up to power walking and so on. It may take weeks or even months, but the slow progression will help you find success, whereas just believing that some type of miracle is going to happen, you're just fooling yourself.
This thought process should be applied for your whole exercise/diet plan -- from your cardio, to weightlifting and even your eating habits. If you treat your exercise diet/plan like a marathon, you'll make it; if you treat it like a sprint, most likely you will fall flat on your face.
In the End
Losing weight is not easy to do, without an exercise schedule that you can accomplish without killing yourself or being stressed for time, you won't make it. You need to set yourself up for success with reasonable workouts, a diet that you can handle, and you need to make sure you give yourself the time and then some to give your workouts all the focus they deserves.