Mind Over Weight

What I’ve learned from trying to lose weight….

Over many years of trying to conform to an ‘ideal weight’ I’ve learned some things about weight loss.

What I’ve learned is as follows:

Losing weight is not a matter of:

• Following a strict formula doesn’t work: There are so many so-called “new diets” that rely on either eating specific foods, eating certain foods at particular times of day or excluding certain food groups entirely from the food you eat.

• Counting calories or points is not the answer: it’s very difficult to constantly keep a record of precisely what you eat. It is possible for a short while to vigorously weigh and measure food, yet you have to live a life as well as trying to lose weight. What happens inevitably, often after about 19 days, is that you can no longer maintain either counting calories, excluding certain food groups from your diet or eating meals as prescribed by your slimming club or diet book.

• Being your ideal  weight is not only about losing weight: it’s also about being able to enjoy your life more fully. That means being able to join in social events, eating meals out with friends, going to parties and having a good time.

The problem is that when you try to force restriction on to yourself, your body reacts by either craving what you are trying to stop, or going into starvation mode which means that you put on weight and more readily even though your intake has gone down.

Instead what it is about is:

• Becoming more aware of healthy foods so what you eat  is good for your body and your general health and also satisfies your genuine physical hunger.

• Becoming more aware of when you turn to food for emotional reasons and learning how to deal with those feelings in other ways apart from eating.

• Bringing some exercise into your daily routine without being fanatical  because exercise does you good. The more you introduce some regular exercise into your life the more likely you are to feel better about yourself and to start to eat in response to the physiological needs of your body rather than to its emotional needs.

• Accepting that there are days when you will eat more and days when you eat less,  which means that so-called diet routines won’t work because they are unable in the main to acknowledge this.

• Becoming more relaxed about eating, exercise and weight loss  and trust the process that happens quite naturally when you become more relaxed and change of mindset about your weight.

How to regain the weight you lost…

If you are fed up with diet routines and think that the easiest thing to do would be to stop all this bother with weight loss and just eat whatever takes your fancy, especially if it’s sweet and fatty.

You’ve had enough of dietary instructions and paying out so much each week to the club leader.

You throw away the diet books and the slimming club rules and regulations and have a massive binge and want to continue in this way and forget about ever getting slimmer.

You’ve made up your mind that diets are the only way and when you have a special occasion you’ll go on a crash diet and lose what has to be lost.

Here are some ways to regain any weight lost extremely quickly:

Skip meals and then overeat:

Remain convinced that the only witness to lose weight is to stop eating, so never eat anything until the evening, then it won’t matter how much food you eat or what sort of food it is.

Keep away from healthy food:

Don’t bother with anything that sounds healthy, it can’t possibly do you any good, just keep eating as much sugary, fatty and fast food as you possibly can.

Most of all don’t make any attempt at having a balanced diet, but never eat fresh fruit or  vegetables. Have a fry up breakfast every day and put plenty of salt all over your food.

What have you to keep away from anything wholemeal.
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Don’t relax, ever:

Don’t find out what relaxation means.  If you feel tension in your back on your shoulders or suffer from frequent headaches make sure that you take plenty of painkillers and see your GP regularly for prescription for more  of the same.

Only do what others do:

If your friends all like eating junk food then follow along at and do the same.  A burger and chips will fill a gap for you and you can be sure that within an hour two if not sooner you will be craving for more of the same  and quite soon your weight will begin to increase too.

Of course all of the above will have the rapid effect of increasing your weight. If that’s not what you truly what you want then just reverse what is suggested and the opposite will  happen. Your excess weight will gradually come off, your general health will improve and you will slowly move towards a healthy weight.

Why diets don’t work

There is a discrepancy in the way  our society views how to lose weight. Everywhere you look there are the latest diets, the best way to stick to your diet, the diet to get you slim for summer or for Christmas or for your holidays diet.

All these diets are promoted as the only way to lose your excess weight and  have your body transformed into a beautiful and probably rather unrealistic shape in just a few days.

On the other hand if you keep on reading  you will find articles and books which declare that diets don’t work. So who and what can you believe?

If you weigh more than you would like to weigh it is very tempting to attempt a quick fix diet. Half starve yourself for a few weeks and you will have the body of your dreams. No problem. Or is there? I’ll tell you why diets don’t work.

1. You may lose weight but it will be mainly fluid
2. When you restrict certain foods or drastically reduce the amount of food you eat you will after a few days crave the foods you have stopped eating.
3. It is bad for your general health to restrict what you eat to certain food groups and exclude others.
4. When you cut down hugely  on the amount you eat your body  goes into ‘starvation mode’ and  try to conserve both energy and food stores as fat. It will manage on less food so that when you reach your desired weight and increase what you eat you weight will increase rapidly again and is likely to be higher than the  weight you started with.
5. Life happens even when you are trying to lose weight: it is extremely difficult to have a social life and stick rigidly to any eating programme for a sustained length of time.

So instead a dieting you have to change your mind-set towards weight loss. You have to

• learn again what hunger feels like and how to satisfy it.
• Not satisfy your hunger with high dense foods such as those containing excessive sugar and fat and refined carbohydrates.
• Enjoy eating more healthy food
• Discover new flavours
• Eat a balance of protein , carbohydrates and fat
• Look at ways to cut down or remove from you food any thing with sugar and  high saturated fat content.
• Stop turning to food when you are upset or depressed, instead find other ways to deal with these emotions.

How to nurture yourself

Which part of you needs some work: body, mind or spirit…or all three?

There are some things you can do which will interconnect. You think you are nurturing your body for example but there are good effects on your mind and spirit too.

For example you decide it’s time to start eating more healthily so you look through your food stores and throw away or give away all the junk you have there: the high sugar foods, the high saturated fat foods and instead buy lots of fruit, fresh frozen and canned all are good so long as they are as natural as possible without additives and without sugar.

You replace your saturated fats with olive oil or other healthy oils and fats: which can include some nuts and avocado pears too. You buy lean organic meat, chicken, low fat beef and lamb and lots of fresh fish too. Finally you fill any remaining spaces with plenty of vegetables and fresh salad ingredients, as much as possible organic.

You make lots of healthy meals with these ingredients supplemented with wholemeal bread, brown rice and brown pasta. As a result you may lose weight and your skin will probably become clearer and healthier looking. Your whole sense of well being will improve just by improving the way you eat. Continue reading ‘How to nurture yourself’

Exercise for weight loss

A very important aspect of losing weight is to use your body more and increase the amount of exercise you take.
Instead of concentrating on losing fat it is better to do something about increasing your muscles because it is using your muscles that burns the fat. By exercising more you are not only increasing your general fitness level you are also increasing your body’s ability to burn more fat. This is referred to as using up calories. When you eat you take in calories and when you exercise you burn calories.
Unfortunately many people don’t take as much exercise as they could do because life has for many people become more sedentary.
How can you increase the exercise you do?
You can:
take the stairs instead of elevator or lift
walk instead of using car
cycle instead of walking
move more instead of sitting in front of a computer screen all day

Become more aware that your weight is a balance between the calories you eat and the exercise you take so it’s important to balance these too. When your weight stays steady you have found the balance between these two. So if you want to weigh less you must either burn more calories or take less in the form of food. It is preferable to do a bit of each by eating less and exercising more. Since you must have muscles in order to burn more calories, the reason diets fail is when food calories are reduced but now more exercise taken so then there aren’t the muscles needed to burn more fat. The decrease in calories alone ends up with a loss of muscle rather than loss of fat.

For those of you wanting to lose weight there is not only the largely sedentary lifestyle but also the foods which are high in fat and sugar and therefore calories which are easy to eat and easy to increase your weight gain.

So as well as increasing exercise and decreasing food calories it is advisable to adjust what you eat to foods which are lower in fat and sugar and are more natural without additives. These will take longer to digest, leave you feeling satisfied for longer and so enable you to lose weight more easily.

Think natural when you decide what to eat and concentrate on foods which are as near as possible to their natural state. Eat as  much as you can which is organic so you  can be as healthy as possible and avoid ingestion of pesticides and other chemicals.

Weight loss goals

Do you resolve each year that this will be the year that you’ll reach a healthy weight and keep the weight off?

What happens after the initial enthusiasm and how can you keep motivated to achieve your goal and keep to a healthy weight?

How can you change your mindset so you can achieve and keep your weight within a healthy range?

1. Set  specific goals.  Instead of these being around the weight you want to be, how about trying goals which are about changing your habits and beliefs about weight.

2. Decide to introduce a positive change each week and build on your  new healthy eating habits each week. Don’t change everything at once. Remember it can take at least twenty-one days for a new habit to embed itself into your unconscious mind.

3. Start by eating more fruit and vegetables and less foods containing sugar. Then eat more healthy fats, such as olive oil and avocado and less saturated fat such as red meat and butter.

4. Do something similar in relation to increasing the amount of exercise you do. Make it simple such as parking a bit further away from the shops, getting off the bus a stop sooner than you need to and taking a walk around the block each day.

5. Notice your self-talk: the things you say to yourself, and make sure you make positive statements such as I am confident that I am gaining a healthy weight, rather than Losing weight is really difficult and I’m going to fail once again.

6. Always remember to have a life too. It’s OK to have something not strictly permitted from time to time: the danger is when that becomes everyday. Get your mind in the right frame by really enjoying the taste of healthy food so that  eating more healthily is a pleasure not a chore.

13 Tips to Control Your Sweet Tooth

Do you find that sometimes only something sweet will do? Here are some ways to satidfy the craving but reduce the impact on your weight:

How to Stop Sugar Cravings: 13 Tips to Control Your Sweet Tooth

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Get your diet going with these tips

Try these easy  tips to get your diet going:

http://bit.ly/5mR1tl

Good intentions and others

However good your intentions for keeping to a healthy diet and progressing in your weight loss journey to become the weight you truly want to be, there are days when things just don’t work out well.

Even though you plan to cut down on the amount of white flour and then see and  smell the aroma of freshly baked bead with sunflower seeds (=must be healthy) and honey (could be better than white sugar?!) Meant to eat just a slice but the taste ….mmmm….and before you know it most of the loaf has disappeared and your stomach feels rather bloated and full. We’ve all been tempted haven’t we and sometimes given in to the cravings. So then the secret is not to give up but to pick yourself up, dust yourself down and start again: eating healthily, plenty of fresh wholesome fruits and vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, some healthy fat from avocado, olives, nuts and oily fish, and  some low fat dairy foods such as yoghurt and cottage cheese. You will soon be back on track once more!

As always keep your goals in your mind and don’t give up if occasionally you slip off the path you are on. If you are following the advice given here rather than a very strict diet regime then you will lose weight becasue you are treating your body well and you are keeping your mindset positive too. Being in the right mindset is the number one important thing to aim for. Get into it by practising regular relaxation and visualising how you will be when you reach your desired weight.

Look to the future: slim or overweight?

Imagine you continue to eat in the way you eat now. Then project your thoughts into the future and see how you might look in 2 or five years time if you continue as you are now. What do you see? What are people saying about the way you look?

Now bring your mind back to the present time and ask yourself what simple change can you make right now, today to make a difference to that furture you?

Let me know in the comment box below what change you will make.  Perhaps it will be to eat more fruit and vegetables and really savour their flavour; or to stop eating processed foods; or keep to low fat dairy products.