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.