Losing weight can be challenging, and there can be many ‘hiccups’ along your weight loss journey. You have a day when you know that you have eaten or drunk the ‘wrong’ things. Are you filled with food-regret, feeling ashamed, and ready to hit the ‘Start again” button on your diet? Have you gone so far ‘off-piste’, that you cannot fathom how to get back on the wagon? Or are you waking up each day committing to starting anew only to eat something you didn’t intend and by evening you’ve totally blown it? Have you vowed that this time will be different?
“I just have to get serious! I’m going to try hard and do it once and for all!”
As a nutritionist, these words make me a little nervous, because they are the sign of someone relying heavily on willpower to make a lifestyle change, and willpower is a finite resource that rarely, if ever, is enough to carry us through the long-haul that is meaningful and sustainable weight loss.
Read on to find another way to break the cycle of weight loss followed by weight gain.
While having occasions away from your healthy eating plan is not something to be actively encouraged, if you find yourself in that situation, by using it as a learning experience you can begin to build up resilience, a crucial component to long-term success.
How many of us have gone through this ever repeating scenario:
- We’re fed up with how we look, how we feel. We are desperate to lose weight, to lose inches. We’re building up to a diet.
- Before we start! One last hurrah to indulge in all the foods we know we shouldn’t eat. These are the one that we are addicted to.
- We start that new diet, with enthusiasm.
- We soon experience hunger, cravings, feelings of deprivation, a inability to manage social situations and holidays.
- We lose control, resulting in binge eating.
- We then experience feelings of shame, guilt, powerlessness. We blame ourselves and feel a failure.
- We continue this path of calorie counting, reliance on willpower, unaware of the part that food addictions and hormones are playing a part.
- This inevitably leads to an inability to successfully implement lifelong sustainable behaviour change.
- We GAIN weight
- And so the cycle repeats……Go back to 1.
We all make mistakes when undergoing a weight loss plan, but learning to withstand and recover from those mistakes is key to breaking free from the above cycle.
Some key steps to help improve success are:
- Get rid of the bad and stock up on the good – Make sure that you throw out your trigger foods (don’t use them up, throw them out), and stock your cupboards and fridge with low carbohydrate, satiating foods rich in good quality protein and healthy fats.
- Know your appetite cues - Prioritise protein, eliminate processed foods that stoke your appetite and are easy to over-consume, pay attention to when you’re drawn to eat for any reason other than hunger, and move your body instead —go for a walk, do some yoga.
- Eat the right foods, slowly - Eat whole, real, nutrient-dense, and satiating foods. Lots of them, but eat them slowly. If it is meat, fish, chicken, eggs, Greek yogurt, green leafy vegetables? Eat as much as you need to be reasonably full, and as often as you need to squash hunger and cravings. Do not worry about meal timing or frequency. Eat more, not less: resist the urge to over-restrict or limit intake. This flies in the face of every diet rule you have ever heard, but it is a means to an end. You will never get where you want to go if you are chronically hungry, hangry or feeling deprived. Eat more to weigh less. You’ve tried over restricting and it hasn’t worked. By eating slowly, your brain catches up with your stomach in terms of feeling full.
- Relax being you. Stop comparing yourself to a previous version of yourself. It is shame in disguise, and it will only serve to keep you stuck. If you had been successful with your eating before and then fell off that wagon, don’t rush to get back to where you were. The process takes time.
- Be kind to yourself: Encourage yourself as you would a friend, and if things slip, gently remind yourself that change is possible and will happen.
- Focus on the now – One day at a time – Remember ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’, and you are embarking on a sustainable lifestyle change. Small steps, and if you take one step back, remind yourself that you can take two steps forward. Do not catastrophise should something go wrong. Consistency. Teeny, tiny baby steps. Make the next right decision. And then another one. Not forever, just right now. Just today.
- Know your people – have support in place, maybe a friend you can call. Make sure that people around you understand your reasons for your lifestyle change, the importance of it and seek their encouragement and support.
- Choose Your Hard – I love this one – Losing weight is hard, but being overweight is hard – CHOOSE YOUR HARD.
Remember to be resilient and bask in your successes. Learn from your setbacks and turn them around quickly. Not tomorrow. Now. Do this regularly and success will come.
