Habit Change for Weight Loss

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Related Episodes:

• Willpower and Your Thoughts
• When You Can’t Keep The Weight Off
• Feeling Better in Your Body

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Full Episode Transcript:

Habit Change for Weight Loss

Welcome, welcome. I’m so glad you are here to listen to today’s podcast episode. When it comes to weight loss over the years, there has been massive focus on short term changes. Mainly through dieting. There are always new diets coming out, fad diets, natural diets, diet pills, you name it.

If you think about it though, the reason why so many different diets have come out is because they’re not that effective for long-term weight loss, and it’s not one size fits all. Diets sell though. That’s what motivates people to continue making up new diets.

Now certainly some people have success with short term weight loss with these diets, and maybe a small percentage of those people have success keeping the weight off. However, there have been multiple studies showing that people tend to not be able to sustain the weight loss. In fact, some diets will actually cause people to gain even more weight back once they stop doing the diet.

Typically, diet sustainability and subsequent weight loss sustainability is an issue because many diets are not truly addressing the most important part of weight loss, which is habit change. Sure, you may be excited to try a new diet to lose weight and start out following the diet’s restrictions.

However, if you’ve been on diets before, you’ve probably found that you can start out strong, but then old behaviors and habits set in, causing you to be unable to sustain the diet, and sustain the weight loss. This is completely to be expected. The human brain is not able to tolerate drastic changes, so diets that are very restrictive, which are most diets, are doomed right from the start.

When you try to follow a diet and start out strong but then fade quickly, you can end up feeling like a failure. This “failure” then sticks in your mind for any future attempts, ultimately sabotaging those future attempts. So, are you really the failure or are the diets failing you?

Many diets are created to be very restrictive, mainly with calories, so you see results sooner. The industry knows you want results and they want them right away, so they cater to that. When you see results quickly, it creates feelings of excitement or maybe something to excitement and you feel happy with the diet.

What happens though like I mentioned earlier, is that the diet is usually not one that you can follow long-term. If it is, then great. That means the diet is probably more focused on slower, more natural changes your brain can actually tolerate, rather than abrupt, short-term result-producing changes. This usually isn’t the case with most diets though, because of how I mentioned that the industry knows that people want results quickly.

When changes are smaller and repeated often though, they usually become a habit. Those are the “diets” that tend to work for people. And really, those “diets” are better termed “diet change.” What happens is you end up changing your eating habits to ones that allow for sustainable weight loss.

So, why is habit change for weight loss the way to go? Because as I mentioned, it’s sustainable, meaning you’re much less likely to gain the weight back. Also, you’ll require much less mental effort, or willpower, which means the whole process will actually be easier for you.

By the way, if you’re interested in learning a more about willpower, listen to episode number 2, Willpower and Your Thoughts. I’ll link to it via the episode page under the section, Related Episodes.

So, with habit change for weight loss, there will be less effort involved in the slower, more sustainable changes, than with the quick fad diet. Yes, you will most likely see weight loss within the first month of a diet that requires larger changes, but there’s also a good likelihood you’ll gain some or all back, maybe even a few extra pounds.

And who wants that? Especially after putting in all the hard work initially? Frustrating, right?

Just a little side note here. Without getting too far into the science of it, the reason why you can gain extra weight back after quick weight loss, is that when you make drastic changes, your body sort of adjusts to this new way of eating. Your body adjusts because it loves living in homeostasis, meaning it loves stability and aims to keep everything in your body relatively stable.

So, when you have sudden changes in the amounts of food or calories you’re eating, your body will start to adjust the rate at which it burns calories, the metabolic rate. It’s in survival mode, so it’s going to want to make sure it isn’t burning so many calories that you can’t survive.

In addition to adjusting its metabolism, a whole lot of other things occur as well, but in a nutshell, because of these changes that occur in your body, you can end up gaining more weight back than you lost in the first place, even just by going back to the same exact eating habits.

Okay, so back to why habit change for weight loss is the way to go. We have sustainability, less mental effort, but also less likelihood of failure, which I mentioned very briefly earlier. Why is this important? Because when you have thoughts of failing or not being successful, you can tend to make it mean something about you. It’s just a human brain tendency.

When you make it mean something about you, you may have thoughts about yourself like, “I just can’t lose the weight” or “I’m just doomed to stay at this weight”. You might think, “I can’t keep the weight off, no matter what I try” or “I’ll never be the weight I want to be.”

These are all very negative thoughts and how do you think thoughts like that will make you feel? Probably defeated, incapable, hopeless, maybe even shame, right? These emotions aren’t going to be likely to encourage you to keep up your efforts, are they? They aren’t going to be likely to encourage you to try something new. They certainly aren’t going to feel good either.

So, in my opinion, when you “fail” to lose weight or sustain the weight loss with a diet, it’s really more the diet setting you up for failure. When the diet doesn’t work well with the way our brains are designed, there isn’t a high likelihood it will be effective.

Remember how your body likes to maintain homeostasis? Well, you can think of the human brain like that too. Your brain doesn’t like big changes. It likes to keep things relatively the same. In your brain’s opinion, that’s safer and easier. Your brain likes to avoid danger and it likes to conserve energy. Many diets are just not compatible with the way your human brain like to do things.

Your brain does however like habits. In fact, your brain LOVES habits. Habits make things easier, more streamlined. Habits make it so that your brain can save energy by not having to think so much.

If you recall, I mentioned earlier that your brain likes to conserve energy. That’s one of the three components of the Motivational Triad. The Motivational Triad is just what motivates the human brain to keep the body alive.

Now of course when it comes to weight loss, you’ll have to change some pre-existing habits. Mainly, eating habits. Your brain might fight you a bit on that, because it loves habits it already has. The good news is, it loves habits in general, so any new habits you start forming with the habit change, your brain will really like too.

This is amazing, because you can just slowly break down the pre-existing habits that were either causing weight gain or weren’t making it easier to lose weight. Then you can slowly build some new habits that are going to make it easier for weight loss and your brain will try to hang onto these new habits.

This allows you to not have to rely on willpower to keep up with those fad diets or short-term diets. Being you’re a career woman, you shouldn’t have to be spending your brain power trying to stick to these strict diets.

What you’re going to want to do instead is, chip away at the habit cycle, so you can break any eating habits you no longer want to be habits, and then start forming new habit cycles for the eating habits you do want to have. The eating habits that will help you reach your goal of weight loss.

Now, of course there are other habits, besides eating habits, that can help you lose weight. Such as exercise habits, sleep habits, hydration habits, and even thought habits, meaning what kind of automatic thoughts you’re having that might be sabotaging your weight loss efforts.

Since this is an eating habits podcast, I’m going to focus on the eating habit change, but thought habits also play a really large and very important role with eating habits, so I want to talk about those first.

So, anytime you want to change your eating habits, I’d like you to think of your thought habits as playing a supportive role. If your thought habits tend to be on the negative side, sort of like I discussed earlier, with that negative self-talk or negative self-belief, then it will be much more difficult to make the eating behavior and habit changes you need to make.

Therefore, your thought habits should be supportive. You’ll need the help of more positive self-talk to change your eating habits. When you start being your own cheerleader, you’ll be more likely to persist with the small changes you need to make.

Just think about like when you were a kid and maybe played a sport or two. Or, if you have kids who play sports now. If the coach is kind, supportive, and encouraging, you are more likely going to continue playing that sport with that team, or your kid is going to be more likely to want to continue with that sport or team. If the coach starts out encouraging, but then as soon as you make a mistake, is very discouraging and unkind, you’re not likely to want to continue. Or even worse, if the coach starts out very discouraging and unkind, it won’t leave you with a good feeling about the season, right?

So start noticing your thought habits about weight loss, your eating habits, your capabilities, even your experiences with prior weight loss attempts. In fact, I would encourage you to write down what some of your more common thoughts are. When you write them down, you can then see some patterns, especially some negativity patterns.

Just being aware of these thought habits is a big step forward. Because then, when you have one of those thoughts, you can catch yourself. You can then have a follow-up thought like, “That thought won’t help me, let’s think of one that will.”

Once you start being a little more supportive of yourself and your capabilities, you’ll be more likely to continue with the eating habit changes you want to make. If you continue with those more negative, unsupportive thoughts, it will be very easy for your brain to say, ”See you weren’t able to keep the weight off before, so why even bother trying?” or “You always go back to eating too much sugar. You’ll never break that habit.”

This is such an important component of being able to change your eating habits, that I teach more in depth how to do this inside my Food Freedom membership. That’s the advantage of having a coach, not just someone who teaches you how to do something, but also who coaches you on your thoughts, that super important piece.

One more thing I do want to mention about thought habits is, that we tend to base our current thoughts on past experiences. Your brain loves to use the past as evidence for the future. This is mainly due to your human brain wanting to avoid pain, for survival purposes. That’s another of the three components of the Motivational Triad. The third one is to seek pleasure.

So, when you have a negative experience in the past with a prior weight loss attempt, your brain is going to want to avoid that experience again, so it likes to remind you of that negative experience, so you don’t make an attempt again.

See how manipulative your brain can be? It’s all completely normal though. All our brains do it. It’s thinking that it’s protecting you, but it’s really sabotaging you by keeping those negative thought habits alive.

Those negative thought habits often get worse with every “failed” weight loss attempt, or every “failed” diet, because each perceived failure just reinforces to your brain that you can’t do it, so you either A) shouldn’t try, or B) if you do try, you don’t succeed because you don’t have the proper mindset to set you up for success.

That’s why it’s so important to not only focus on the action or behavior piece of eating habits, but also the thought-work or mindset work. Working on your thoughts will only increase your likelihood of long-term success.

The diet industry tends to just ignore this piece, because they know people just want to be told what and how much to eat, rather than addressing true habit change for weight loss.

So onto eating habits. Like I mentioned, the diet industry loves giving you what you want, telling you what and how much to eat. That sounds great, but the problem is, a majority of people don’t do what they intend to do. They may intend to eat a certain number of calories a day, or mainly eat veggies, protein, and whole grains, and limit refined grains and sugars.

However, when it comes down to it, our brains are in that habit cycle already, and since our brains love habits, they tend NOT to just break the habit cycle with the snapping of fingers.

Your brain wants to hang onto the former habits, so even if you intend to eat what the diet says to eat, it can be quite difficult to follow through. Especially with those big changes that many diets often require.

If you think about it, if we followed through on everything we intended to do that we knew was good for us, we’d probably all be close to our ideal body weight, with diets consisting mainly of healthy foods and amounts, right?

We’d probably also all be getting a moderate amount of exercise a day, sleeping 8 hours a night, drinking 64 ounces of water a day, all the things. And maybe some of us do, but I’m willing to bet most of us don’t. For me personally, I’m good with the eating and exercise habits, but sleep and hydration could use some improvement.

So, when it comes to weight loss, addressing your brain’s habits, is required if you want more than just to lost 10 pounds in 10 days. And certainly, if you want to not gain that weight back, plus potentially more, 1 month later.

You want to break old eating habit cycles and form new ones that are more aligned with the body weight you wish to stay at for the most part.

Another benefit of that too, is that now since you’ve been successful at losing weight with habit changes, your brain will think, “I can lose weight AND keep it off.” So, even if you gained some weight back down the road for whatever reason, you know you can lose it again.

You now have the knowledge and skill you need to do it effectively. You’re left with a feeling of confidence, rather than defeat or self-doubt. You understand your body and brain more, making it so much easier.

You already work hard, so let’s make weight loss easier. Work on the habit change, rather than the drastic change. Work on your thoughts, so they are supportive, rather than a hindrance.

Take care, thanks for listening in today and I’ll talk with you next week.