Beginning Steps: Starting Your Weight Loss Program

As mentioned in the previous post, the best weight loss program is one that helps to create and maintain healthy habits for life. Sounds easy, but it's not. Our minds are complex machines with highly, refined tools that enable us to operate safely and efficiently in our chaotic world.

Unfortunately, those very tools that allow us to drive a car, ride a bike, or move through our morning routines without thinking, are driving our obsessive, compulsive behaviours around food. But there is a solution.

Behaviour change starts with the understanding that our behaviours are subconsciously, mastered programs that lie beneath the surface of our selves. By now, if you've read my previous posts, you get what I'm talking about. Our chemical addictions and subconscious, emotional drives are making us fat, unhappy, and feeling out of control.

Can we change?

The good news is that all behaviours can be changed. That includes our impulsive drives to eat too much bad food (high in salt, fat, and sugar).

The first step to changing any behaviour is to become aware. We have to know and understand what triggers cause us to react; what behaviours are present when we act; and, what emotions are at hand when we indulge. All we have to do is stop and think. Here's how to begin.

Taking Charge: Overruling the bad guy

When we fail at talking ourselves out of the cheesecake, or side order of fries, were acting (or reacting) with our subconscious minds. Remember, the decision to indulge isn't really a decision at all. It's a deeply ingrained, automatic behaviour that was created over time, with lots of memory and repetition. It's a habit. It's beyond our control.

So, in order to change, we need to take control. We need to step into consciousness. When we're conscious, the subconscious mind can't operate. What a great opportunity to work on creating new habits. Because, really, that's all we're trying to do: replace old habits with new habits. We do this by waking up. By becoming aware of our thoughts and actions. And, we begin to consciously contradict what we're about to do, or, sometimes, what we've already done.

Waking from a dream

Our subconscious minds rule ninety-five percent of our days. Frightening, so let's change it.

Say you're at a social event, or the cottage for the weekend, somewhere where there's lots of food (usually bad) and drink available. It's difficult to resist. Our drive to overindulge comes from our subconscious. But this is the real world. This is how you have to live. Temptation is all around, and it's going nowhere fast.

So, instead of politely pretending that you don't want to dive face-first into that bowl of ice cream, you need to take control. You need to consciously replace the old wants and desires with a new perspective. In order to coexist with the triggers and stimuli that temp us into overindulgence, we need to learn how to master new behaviours around food. It's not easy, but it can be done. And, it's the only way to stop the dieting and compulsive eating cycle for good.

Permanent weight loss means in with the new and out with the old

Changing behaviours is simply creating new habits while fizzling out the old ones. Say you have a routine (or habit) of picking up a disgustingly, calorie-dense snack, loaded with fat, salt, and sugar every time you stop at your favourite coffee shop. You can't go in and just buy a coffee. You know you shouldn't get a snack. You're not hungry, because you just had lunch an hour ago, but you simply can't resist.

The first step in changing that automatic behaviour (or habit) is to become aware that you're doing it. As soon as you walk into the coffee shop and say, "Hmmm, every time I come here, I come out with a snack that I know I shouldn't have and deeply regret it later. . ." you're changing your brain. You're halting the automatic behaviour, even for a second, and creating new connections in your brain.

Let's go deeper

Thinking about your feelings of disgust and regret and consciously knowing how you'll feel about your purchase all contribute to the act of awareness. This is good. This is the beginning of change. Even if you absolutely can't stand the temptation and buy a donut, you've momentarily short-circuited the neurological process of the bad habit.

Furthermore, each time you go into the coffee shop with those conscious thoughts about the emotions, actions, and consequences of your temptation, and you leave with just a coffee, you're neurologically strengthening your new behaviour and weakening the old one. So, guess what might happen over time. . . ?

My challenge to you. . . O.K. I dare you!

Try this for a week, and then another week, and before you know it, you'll have mastered a new behaviour. If you give in to temptation, that's O.K. You're human, and this is hard. The same chemicals and brain centres that are responsible for drug addiction are active here. We need to start thinking of this as the addiction that it is and treating it as such. 

With constant effort and repetition of new behaviours, though, you will prevail. I'll continue this discussion in the next few posts, but, for now, I urge you to begin your journey by challenging yourself this week. Take one bad behaviour (one at a time), and practice replacing it with a new behaviour of your choice.

It helps to turn the old behaviour into the enemy. For example, every time you go to eat foods laden with sugar, fat, and salt (highly processed, unhealthy foods) tell yourself how disgusting they are, and that you can't possibly put them into your body. Tell yourself that your body is precious, the only one you've got, and it deserves better.

Eventually, with time, effort, and consistency, your new behaviour will become habit and you'll react to it subconsciously, just like the old one. Oh, and by the way, the old behaviour is now quashed, not gone, mind you, but quashed!

Good luck with your challenge. Please comment or email me at info@janetjstone.ca if you have any questions about any of this. I'm happy to help.

Cheers, Janet

The Best Weight Loss Diet: How to end the dieting cycle for good

The best weight loss diet is a combination of making permanent change for life, and changing our behaviours around food. The hunt for weight loss diets that perpetuate the dieting cycle continue to consume people in their desperate search for a solution to weight management.

Weight management starts with the internal belief that you are a thin, healthy person, and, from there, you can adopt lifestyle behaviours that fit with who you really are. I've heard so many overweight people say that they're a thin person on the inside. "This fat person is not who I am," they say. So how do we take that conscious belief and make it a reality? We begin on the inside where our behaviours around food originate.  This is our control centre, where our current eating habits lie.

Becoming Conscious: Why are we overweight?

How can we possibly find a solution for change until we know how we got where we are, until we understand the behaviours that continue to drive us to overeat and crave the wrong foods? I believe there are two primary influences (outside of psychological convictions) that have contributed to our society of overweight over-eaters:

1. The reward centre in our brains is overloaded with the proliferation of high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt, processed foods. We're so far gone (physically addicted) when it comes to gaining control over our chemical drives around processed food that these bad, obsessive behaviours are ingrained. So, we're forced--over and over--into desperate, dieting techniques that merely add to our demise.
   
   These behaviours will not go away until we consciously change. So, unless your new weight loss diet begins with the foundation of permanent change, you'll, inevitably, go back to your old ways. Eventually the weight will come back, and you'll begin the cycle again.

1. We eat too much.
   One reason we eat too much is that we simply can't stop for the reasons I've stated above: we're addicted. Secondly, because portions sizes and portion control are out of whack, we've become completely out of touch with our bodies. We no longer know what it feels like to be hungry; to feed our bodies simply because they need and are asking for nourishment.
   
   We clean our plates no matter how much food is put on them. Unfortunately, super-size has become the norm. And, we eat as though we can't get more, forgetting that there is an abundance, and we'll eat again in four or six hours. We forget that any excess will get stored as fat and that we'll work twice as hard to get it off than to have pushed ourselves away from the table.

What we need is an attitude adjustment

Dieting is dieting. It's deprivation and starvation. No wonder it takes so much will power and strength to begin a "diet" on Monday morning. It's horrible! And no way to live. 

My question to you is this: When you start that diet, do you think about what will happen after it's finished? When you've lost the weight, how will you eat? What will you eat? How will you deal with grocery shopping and temptation and celebration? How will you react when bad food is available to you? How will you choose what to do?

I can answer all of those questions for you. The only behaviour you know is what got you in this mess in the first place. The overeating, poor decisions, and bad reactions to situations will not change unless you change them.

Dieting is not a long-term, permanent solution.

Dieting doesn't create new, positive behaviours around food. It doesn't teach you how to say no and feel good about it. It doesn't teach you how to enjoy a treat now and then and get right back to healthy eating--not dieting--the next day.

Dieting only makes you want food more because you've suffered and deprived your body of what it needs to be healthy. The only successful weight loss plan is the one that embraces whole, healthy, unprocessed foods as a permanent way of life. A plan that changes core beliefs about food and teaches us how we can enjoy food as the beautiful, nourishing part of life that it is.

The First Step to Weight Loss Success: Become Aware

We run on autopilot for ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of our day. We operate on pre-programmed (usually negative) beliefs systems that run in the background (our subconscious) and they determine who we are and what we do. The only--and I repeat--ONLY way to change our subconscious beliefs and take control of our lives is to consciously create new lasting behaviours. How do we do this? Well, the first step is to become aware.

What is awareness?

Awareness is simply being present wherever you are at the moment. When we become aware we move from a subconscious to a conscious state. We pay attention to and control our thoughts and reactions to our environment. Here's the best part: when we operate from a conscious state of mind, we can't operate from a subconscious state, which puts our automatic responses and behaviors on hold.

Let me ask you this. If our subconscious mind is a million times stronger than our conscious mind, and it runs ninety to ninety-five percent of our day, without our consent, is it any wonder that we can't seem to change our behavior?

Here's an example: I'm in the kitchen at the office making a cup of coffee. While it's brewing, I turn and see a box of donuts sitting on the table that someone's brought into work. I grab one, without thinking (automatic, subconscious behavior), and before I realize what just happened, it's gone. Now what?

Feelings of guilt, anger, blame, resentment . . . flood into my body. Now the self-talk; 'I hate myself. How could I? I have no control. I'll always be fat . . .'

Sound familiar?

How do we begin to change?

The first thing to do when confronted with food temptation is to pause. This snaps you out of your subconscious mind. Take a moment before you simply react, breathe deeply for a couple of breaths (no one needs to know you're doing this), and begin to ask yourself some questions. Why do I want this? Am I really hungry? Are there better, healthier choices? Do I want it simply because it's there? What are the consequences? THIS IS IMPORTANT. How will I FEEL about this later?

The most important part of becoming aware is that it gives you control over your environment. You can override negative, subconscious beliefs about yourself and your life, and become the creator of your world.

Give it a try. It takes concentration, consistency, and effort, but over time, you'll be amazed at the changes in your behavior.