Too much food, too much weight! You are done with this game.
You are not going to eat so much food anymore. You are fed up with your clothes being so tight and you do not want to buy bigger clothes… again.
If this sounds familiar to you, you have a lot of company. Dieting and weight loss is a multi-billion dollar industry. If you have spent your hard-earned money on diet pills, shakes, food and other promises, the reason you still are trying is because all eating issues begin with behavior.
If you ask any naturally thin person, one who doesn’t diet, they will tell you that they only eat when they are hungry. Food isn’t an obsession with them; it’s a way to nourish their body. I know what your thinking. Yes, those people do exist.
Changing your eating behavior is the key to weight management with dieting. To change an old behavior such as your eating pattern, you have to create a new one.
I always share with my clients that they didn’t get to where they are now in a couple of weeks, but their eating behavior is a culmination of lifelong habits. You are cued, or triggered (signal for a specific behavior) to crave a particular food. For instance, you relax in the evening in your recliner and eat cookies. Sitting in the recliner can be a trigger/cue (your signal for behavior) to eat cookies. To change the behavior, you need to change the cue. Simply moving your seat or engaging in another activity and the cue is changed.
Behavior is also increased if it is reinforced. So, if your reward is stress relief from eating the cookies, you are reinforced to eat them again and again. But if you substitute another fun and stress relieving behavior for eating cookies, like dancing or chatting with a friend, you can change the reward.
It takes time to both learn and unlearn behaviors. They become habituated to cues and reinforced until we decide to change/substitute them.
- Find your cue or trigger
- Replace with another cue
- Substitute with non-food reward
- Be patient with yourself
Treat this as a journey, not a goal with an end result. And enjoy the journey along the way.