Are you wondering why you want to lose weight so much but you can’t seem to stick to it? Is your mind not cooperating? Or is it your body that’s not cooperating? Find out 6 tips to help your mind and body work together towards achieving your weight loss goal.
1. Know your outcome and find your inner motivation to lose weight.
How clear are you in what you want to achieve and why you want to achieve it? When you have clarity in your desired outcome, your determination and motivation to work for it increase significantly.
Ask yourself these questions:
- What do I want? (State it in positive terms, so instead of saying “I want to lose weight”, say “I want to be healthier, look good and feel good.”)
- Is it within my personal control?
- Do I really want it, or am I just saying I want it? Am I just feeling external pressure, or is it something that I truly want for myself?
- How will I know when I’ve got it? What do I need to see on the weighing scale or in your clothes size, hear from people around me, and feelings I need to feel for me to know that I’ve achieved what I want? (Make sure that you can get concrete evidences for your desired outcome.)
- What will happen when I get my goal? How will this benefit me? How will achieving this goal affect other aspects of my life?
- What would happen if I didn’t make the change?
- What wouldn’t happen if I didn’t make the change?
2. Prepare yourself.
Long-term weight loss takes time and effort. If you truly want to lose weight and keep it off, you need to commit yourself to a permanent change in your eating habits and activity level.
To find out if you’re ready for long-term weight loss, ask yourself these questions:
- Am I willing to make the time commitment to make these changes?
- When, where and with whom do I want to do this?
- What resources do I ned to get this outcome?
- Am I ready to give up my unhelpful eating habits?
- Who needs to know about my plan? What kind of support do I need from them?
Once you’re ready, staying committed and changing habits will be easier.
You are responsible for your behavior and for the successful achievement of your weight-loss goals. It is helpful to use support, of the right kind, which will help you stay motivated and focused. The right kind of support helps you develop a healthier lifestyle, encourages you positively without shame, embarrassment or sabotage, and listens to your concerns and feelings.
3. Change your eating habits.
Take time to eat mindfully and properly.
Eating slowly makes you feel fuller and can help with weight loss. This is because chewing food longer slows down your eating, giving your brain more time to receive signals from the stomach that it is full. Research shows that chewing each mouthful until it is liquid helps digestion and promotes weight loss.
More importantly, being mindful, being fully present in your eating experience will help you enjoy your food, which contributes to your feelings of satisfaction and joy. This satisfaction with your food also helps prevent over-eating.
Eat within a 12 hour window to achieve optimal body fat levels.
By restricting your eating to a window of time each day, you can allow your body to undergo a process called autophagy, which involves the elimination of old and worn-out cells. In turn, this can have many health benefits, including improving blood sugar levels and weight loss.
Eat fruits and vegetables and boost your gut microbiome.
The diversity of your gut microbiome, the collection of bacteria that live in your gut, is lower in those who are overweight. Some gut bacteria extract energy from food better than others, so if you want a diverse gut microbiome, you should eat plant foods like fruit and vegetables, nuts, seeds and whole grains. Eating a variety of colours of fruits and vegetables will also support a wider variety of good bacteria in your body. As they say, “Eat the rainbow every week”. Frozen fruit and vegetables can be cheaper than fresh produce and can obviously last longer if price and longevity are important to you.
This also increases your fibre intake. Fibre prolongs your feeling of fullness after meals, reduces your feeling of hunger and appetite, and reduces your total calorie intake.
Reduce your alcohol consumption.
Alcohol contains 7 kcal per gram, whereas fat contains 9 kcal per gram. Drinking 4 bottles of wine a month adds up to a yearly consumption of around 27,000 kcal, which is equivalent to eating 48 Big Macs per year. Drinking 5 pints of lager each week adds up to 44,200 kcal over a year, equivalent to eating 221 doughnuts.
So, if you’re trying to lose weight you need to think about what you are drinking as well as what you are eating.
4. Move. Find a cardio workout that you like.
You lose weight when you are on calorie deficit, which means that you burn more calories compared to how much you eat. When you’re trying to lose weight at home, cardio is an almost mandatory tip. While it’s much easier to do cardio outdoors, you can do it at home as well. Here are some options of cardio you can do at home:
- There are thousands of free exercise videos on YouTube. Experiment on which channels and exercise routines will work best for you.
- HIIT workouts are high-intensity interval training sessions that are short in duration but maximize the amount of calories burned and muscle built. HIIT extends your body’s ability to burn calories even after workout.
- Skipping rope can burn a great amount of calories and help you tone your muscles. You can even do it without a skipping rope! Try it.
5. Manage your stress and embrace good sleeping habits.
Even if you have a very good diet and you exercise regularly, your body will sabotage your weight-loss efforts if you are experiencing chronic stress or chronic sleep deprivation. Both situations increase your body’s cortisol level.
Long-term exposure to elevated cortisol has a number of negative effects on the body, such as increased blood sugar and decreased action of the hormone called leptin. When leptin levels decrease, this stimulates intense hunger and appetite and can lead to increased food consumption.
Cortisol also promotes protein breakdown, which means that if you are constantly stressed or sleep-deprived, your body is naturally breaking down the muscles you’ve worked so hard for!
6. Change your mindset.
You can’t just eat healthy foods and exercise for a few weeks or months and have long-term weight management. To lose weight, you have to take an honest look at your eating patterns and daily routine, assess your personal challenges to weight loss, come up with a strategy to gradually change these habits, and plan how you’ll deal with these challenges if you’re going to succeed in losing weight. After a setback, simply start fresh the next day. Remember that you’re planning to change your life. It won’t happen all at once; it’s an ongoing process. Stick to your healthy lifestyle and the results will be worth it!
Here are some questions to ask yourself to encourage your brain to support you in making the change:
- What’s not working?
- What triggers the problem?
- What stops me from getting what I want?
- What beliefs and internal dialogue are not helping me?
- What stops me from fixing this?
- Who benefits from me not fixing this?
- When have I achieved something that was challenging at first? What did I do?
- Who do I know who’s like me and successfully achieved their health and weight goals? What did they do?
- If I had already achieved my goal and I were looking back, what do I see as the things I had done in order to lose weight?
- What will I learn after I’ve reached your goal?
- Who else will benefit once I’ve reached my goal?
- After I reach my goal, what will happen next?
Practise self-compassion yet curious to find out what happens if you keep moving forward with your goal. Also recheck the ecology of your goal around various aspects of your life and your environment. Aiming for a weight loss goal of 1 to 2 pounds a week is realistic and attainable, but how do you know if it’s realistic for you? To reach this goal, you need to burn 500 to 1,000 calories more than you consume each day through diet and exercise. How can you manage this kind of calorie deficit?
Be flexible and be willing to adjust your plan, keeping in mind what would work best for you as a whole person, not just what would shed the most pounds the fastest.
Start one habit change now!
While every tip may not work for everyone, it’s likely that you’ll find several that will suit your way of living. Try applying a couple of these tips and begin to lose weight today.
Start by asking yourself the powerful questions we’ve shared with you above, and see what happens.
References
https://www.evergreen-life.co.uk/health-wellbeing-library/7-tips-for-weight-loss-how-to-reduce-bmi/
https://www.hindustantimes.com/lifestyle/health/are-you-lactose-intolerant-here-are-food-options-to-fulfill-your-need-of-dairy-products-101672290559726.html
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/diet-nutrition/advice/a17162/lose-weight-faster-karas-0302/
https://www.godigit.com/health-insurance/weight-loss/weight-loss-tips-at-home
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/alcohol-advice/calories-in-alcohol/
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-weight/managing-your-weight/12-tips-to-help-you-lose-weight/
https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/losing_weight/index.html
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-depth/weight-loss/art-20047752
