Friday, June 14, 2013

Can You Think Yourself Slim?

One great strategy for lasting weight loss is to link great pain to your current eating habits and pleasure to making better choices.

This might just be the trigger that stops you from reaching for the cookies/cake/chocolate when your trigger behaviour occurs. Trust me it feels great to recognise those occasions where you would have reached for comfort food and can choose not to.

Choice is what shedding weight is all about, nothing else!

Restrictive diets tend not to work because they are literally all about denial. When you deny yourself something you tend to crave it. Cravings are very hard to control. It goes back to the pain and pleasure principal and if your mind-set is "I have to feel miserable today so I might get thin tomorrow", what do you think is going to happen?

Most diets also fail because we don't change underlying attitudes towards food, how many times have you heard (or even said), " I lost the weight but as soon as I started eating normally I put it all back on"

Why? Because what we class as normal eating is not healthy, a quart of ice cream in one sitting is not healthy, drinking quarts of soda is not healthy, the same goes for candy, cookies, potato chips etc.

So how can we break free?

Make healthier choices, not as a diet but as a lifestyle. If we eat nourishing sustaining food, our bodies will naturally find the weight that is right, right for you, right for me. This is the best way to lose weight and KEEP IT OFF!

Learn your triggers, what makes you overeat?

Years ago I was a sales rep on the road, I would drive 50,000 miles a year. I used to eat in the car A LOT, I gained 30 lbs in a couple of years. Every time I went to put fuel in my car I put a lot of junk inside me, I finally worked out what was happening when I discovered that I had eaten 2 chocolate bars before even leaving the petrol station forecourt.

These days I still find that I want to eat if I surf the web or watch TV. So I now don't eat whilst doing anything else, more about that later.

Exercise.

Take some time and find out what triggers you, is it boredom, to distract yourself from pain be it physical, emotional or spiritual. Is it thirst, remember most hunger pangs are actually thirst.

It will be time well spent I promise you.