Top Ten Weight Loss
/ Maintenance Power Tips: On the Road to Weight Wellness
1. Keep a food diary.
Recording your daily intake (time of day, foods, amounts, and emotions)
increases awareness. And if you are an emotional
eater (eating related to feeling states, not in response to hunger),
you need to become more aware of your thoughts, feelings, and behavior
patterns. It's harder to fool yourself about what you are eating and
why, when you see it in black and white. If you are accurate, you will
identify trouble times, patterns and situations. Problem solve around
these areas to ensure success.
2. Plan your foods and prepare for meals.
Learn about high-yield nutrition and portion control, and
plan meals accordingly. Prepare meals when you have time
(over the weekend, the night before), so you are not making
choices at the last minute, when you are hungry or pressed
for time and more likely to behave impulsively. If you are
eating for health and to satisfy hunger, you will not crave
food to make up for nutritional deficiencies. Also, eat
a small, nutritious snack during a long stretch between
meals, to reduce bingeing at the next meal. Chew your food,
slow down and breathe; this will give your brain a chance
to signal satiety and decrease the tendency to overeat.
3. Keep trigger foods out of your environment (home,
car, office).
Trigger foods are those foods that are ones that you usually
overeat; they are often high in fat and sugar or salt. In
the effort to achieve weight wellness, understand that it
does not make you stronger to resist temptation –
you simply overwhelm your coping resources. If you have
trigger foods around, throw them out and keep them out.
Replace those foods with a variety of highly nutritious
foods that take some time to prepare. Delay impulses to
eat (especially trigger foods) when you are not hungry,
and ride out cravings. If the deprivation of something you
miss having is going to set you up for a binge, better to
purchase a small amount if possible, or buy it, put a portion
you intend to eat on a plate, throw out the rest (where
you absolutely cannot retrieve it, or destroy it by mixing
it with garbage like coffee grounds or something yucky),
and then eat what you had set aside. Better to waste a bit
of food than to wear it (and continue to endanger your health).
4. Eat breakfast.
Eating in the morning will kick-start your metabolism. Eat
when you need the fuel. Your metabolism is higher in the
morning than in the evening, so calories eaten earlier in
the day are burned faster than those eaten later. As you
are resting in the evening, your need for calories is decreased,
and you will also sleep better if your stomach isn't
full. Your body will be freed up to do other maintenance
and repair work at night if it does not have to be busy
with digestion.
5. Combine aerobic and weightlifting exercises.
Increasing your activity level translates to increased metabolism.
Also, one pound of your body's muscle uses up more
energy than one pound of body fat, thus burning more calories,
so you will look thinner at the same weight if you have
a higher muscle:fat ratio. It is best to strike a balance
between burning fat through exercises that sustain a target
heart rate, and building muscle through weight-bearing and
weight-resistance exercises. (Note: everyone should have
a physical before embarking on an exercise program that
will increase current activity level.)
6. Therapeutic relaxation and recreation.
Engage in activities regularly that you find helpful in reducing
your stress, which will improve your mental and physical state, and
also reduce food cravings. These activities should be enjoyable, so that
the actions involved will be self-reinforcing and thus you will be more
likely to repeat them.
7. Get enough sleep.
Most adults need 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep per night.
Proper rest is a priority for weight management (and a number
of other purposes), as people commonly overeat due to sleep
deprivation. With sufficient sleep, not only will you be
less stressed, and therefore be less likely to crave foods,
you will be more able to resist food cravings.
8. Positive realism.
Do you have a harsh inner critic? If so, negative self-talk (also called
“internal dialogue”) could be responsible for a large part
of your problems. Instead, treat yourself with dignity, and talk to yourself
with respect. Work on reducing negative thought patterns by replacing
them with realistically positive ones. Restructuring negative ways of
thinking is the central focus of Cognitive
Therapy, a highly effective approach geared toward changing a person's
thoughts, feelings and behavior.
9. Confront your issues.
Emotional baggage poses a huge obstacle to achieving weight wellness.
Your weight may be sending you a message to pay attention, and until you
do, you will continue to use food and weight as a way to avoid or escape.
It is difficult to face the pain, but unless you know what you are running
from, you can't overcome it. However, you needn’t do it alone. Therapy
is a good place to work on these issues and learn how to cope more effectively,
rather than using food to push the feelings down.
10. Clean up your social network.
Sift out the saboteurs from the supporters. Reduce or eliminate
your involvement with those who tend to undermine your efforts.
Supportive people will cheer you on, give you constructive
guidance, provide accurate information, and be there for
you emotionally. Know whom you can go to for what, and when.
Also, and perhaps most important, be a good friend to yourself.
Set a realistic goal (the healthy weight that you can realistically
maintain), have a realistic timeline, and a workable plan.
Then keep to your commitment, maintain your lifestyle changes,
and you will not only lose the weight, but keep it off.
Don't forget to pat yourself on the back for each
success, no matter how small. Be consistent and persistent
as you proceed, one step at a time.
Changing from the inside out to achieve a significant lifestyle change
is no easy task. In cognitive-behavioral
therapy, a therapist serves as a guide, partner and coach
in helping you to make key changes in negative thought and behavior patterns,
which in turn directly affect your mood and self-esteem. If you live or
work in the NYC area and wish to find out more about services offered
by Cognitive Therapy Associates, please call Dr. Allison Conner, CTA's
Clinical Director, at 212-258-2577.
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