The next step to dial in our nutrition plan is to make sure the goals we choose are individual to your needs and are sustainable changes. We often fail because our goals are not sustainable, we jump into a weight loss journey and think we need to deprive and cut things out and that we need to become 100% disciplined and be up at 5a.m. every day getting in a run and hitting the weights in the evening after work. If that doesn’t not fit into something that seems like fun or that seems like you can maintain for a while don’t do it. Every time you do something that is not sustainable you set yourself for failure and for a skewed perception of negativity towards weight loss. Make it fun and make it fit your lifestyle now. We want behavior changes not extreme lifestyle changes, that is why people quit so often.
Non-hungry eating is probably the biggest culprit when it comes to food and problems with weight loss, this is eating when we aren’t hungry and includes over eating, grazing, nibbling, and bingeing. We want to work on empowering ourselves to develop a long term healthy pattern and attitude towards food. Before eating ask yourself “I can have it if I want it, but do I really feel like it?” This allows you to not deprive yourself of food and bring about a negative connection to food but rather it just makes you bring awareness to if you really feel like eating it. If you do, eat away, but always make sure you ask yourself this question. This awareness to non-hungry eating will start to allow you to understand if you are truly hungry or not and the fact that we are not trying to deprive you of anything should help as well. Once the idea of I can’t eat something comes about you immediately crave it but try your hardest to avoid it because you are trying to be good, this ideology will eventually result in over eating or binge eating. Just ask yourself the question above and if the answer is yes I feel hungry and want it than eat it.
The next step is to understand whether or not it satisfies you or not, a lot of times with super palatable food like chocolate we eat it fast and we eat a lot of it before our body truly has a chance to feel full. On top of that we don’t actually enjoy the food we are eating and thus will tend to keep craving it. Much like bringing awareness to our hunger we also need to bring awareness to our satisfaction as well. We need to learn to enjoy our food, so after a bit of food savor it, once you swallow it take the time to think how much you enjoyed and what about it you enjoyed it this will do two things that are important to stop non-hungry eating. It will slow you down and it will bring awareness to your satiety and satisfaction. If you eat it and ask yourself “Am I satisfied with this bite of food now that I have thoroughly enjoyed and took my time with it?” If the answer is yes than put it down and be done with it, if the answer is no than take another bite and do the process again.
