Lose Weight With Brian Power! |
When I was a kid, one of my father's favorite admonitions was, "use your head!" While I wasn't always successful, eventually I did learn the benefits of thinking before acting. Nutritionist Lisa Maffucci has written a five part series on the benefits of engaging your brain in your weight loss efforts. Here is the first installment.
This is the time of year that people make resolutions to lose weight and exercise more. And soon after they make them, they are back to their old habits, convinced that they can not make the changes they promised themselves they would. So how can you make those resolutions stick once and for all?
Change your mind.
That's right! You can change your bad habits by changing the way you think about them.
These simple (but not easy) suggestions will help you permanently change your habits so that you can improve your health. Commit to mastering one at a time and you will see results.
Suggestion 1: Change the way you think about diets.
You are not going on a diet. Diets are something you go on, and then you go off. Diets smack of deprivation, hunger, sacrifice, and suffering. When you go on a diet, you are so focused on what you can't eat that you set yourself up for failure.
Your goal in improving your health is not to stay on a diet, but to find a way of eating that you can live with for the rest of your life; a health-supporting way that allows you to eat anywhere, with anyone, without needing six different wardrobes. When you do this, your body finds its natural weight and you stay there (within a few pounds) no matter what.
Dieting puts you in a good/bad, on/off, black/white mindset. It is a rigid way of thinking that makes it difficult (if not impossible) to adapt to your current situation. Remember, your goal is not to only eat the "permitted" foods at the "permitted" times, but to be able to eat healthfully anywhere, anytime. Your diet should not alienate you from your life.
So change the way you think about diets. Diets don't work. Commit to learning how to eat healthfully for the rest of your life.
Look for installment two next week, same time, same station!
