Welcome to my latest Thinking Thin post. I have some excellent progress to report and I’ve decided it’s only fair to let you all know where I started out at. When I started making healthy changes to my diet 4 weeks ago I weighed in at 17st 4lbs. That was the figure that shocked me into action due to the physical toll carrying that amount of weight was having on my body.
At weigh in this week I was down to 16st 2lbs! A huge loss of 16lbs! It just goes to show it can be done with a bit of concerted effort. I have fallen off the wagon a few times, but I’ve managed to get back on it again without to much difficulty. Through the years of battling with my weight I’ve picked up a few strategies that help either stop you indulging too much or get you back on track if you’ve had a little blip.
I am convinced it all starts with how you think and feel about yourself and food, and if you practise these few simple tips you can honestly start to change your eating habits without the need for faddy or extreme diets.
1. Be Kind To Yourself: Love yourself for who you are now, and accept your body as it is. There is nothing to be gained by beating yourself up about being overweight, especially if your a comfort eater! You feel bad about your weight, you reach for food for comfort, you gain more weight and so the cycle continues. Give yourself a break and as soon as you hear those negative thoughts in your head like ‘I hate myself for being so fat’, start adding some new thoughts in there like ‘I love and accept myself for who I am now’. With a bit of practise you’ll soon start to change how you think about yourself. If you start to ‘like’ yourself you will be more inclined to look after your body, after all you need it, right?
2. Think Ahead: One of my biggest downfalls is going out for food or social occasions. All of us at sometime or another have over indulged at the buffet or squeezed that dessert in when we really didn’t have any room left at all. A trick you can practise to overcome this is rehearse the food choices you are going to make before you go out. Start thinking about the healthy options you are going to pick or the amount of food you are going to eat. Preparing your thinking before hand will help you make healthier choices, I promise.
3. How Will I Feel: This is such a simple and effective trick and worked wonders with me, especially when it came to those greasy fry-ups. Have you ever really craved something like Fish and Chips, but then felt totally disgusting afterwards for being such a pig? This feeling can really help you make better food choices. If you get one of those cravings, before you give into it give yourself a minute to project yourself to how you are going to think and feel after you’ve eaten it. When it hits you that you are going to feel totally gross, sit with that feeling for a few minutes and trust me, you’ll start to make healthier choices with a bit of practise.
4. The Memory Cheat: You may still fall off the wagon every now and again as the reasons for over eating are often complex and over whelming. Old habits are not broken overnight, and do take some practise. If you did have too many sausage rolls at the buffet, there are still things you can do. Previous behaviour informs our current actions through memory. Your brain doesn’t really know the difference between a real memory and a false one so you can use this to your advantage. Go back to the buffet in your mind and replay the event with you picking the healthy choices or saying no to the cakes. This will help your brain to think about making better choices in the future.
I’ve heard it said so many times that you just have to say ‘No’ to certain foods. If only it were that simple, we’d all be thin wouldn’t we! It is about getting to the point that you can say ‘No’ to that greasy fry up, but to get there you really need to work on how you think and feel about food. Give these ‘tips’ a try for a month, and by the end of it you will start to have more control of what you eat. It would be great to hear how you get on, so please do leave me your comments and updates.