Get Lean and Stay Lean
You can lose weight without pills and potions – but you can’t without altering your eating habits.
Behaviour modification is all about helping you put food into a new perspective, thereby altering your eating habits. GymRat-Fitness has concrete strategies and helpful hints that give you the tools to change the way you eat, whether you have been eating too much or the wrong foods.
Humans are creatures of habit. We develop habits for many tasks: driving, working, exercising and yes – eating! Our habits consist of the way we shop for and cook and eat our food. Our eating habits can play an integral role in our lives, being tied to our emotional state of mind.
Step one: Awareness.
The first step in changing habits is to become aware of them. You can’t reach a certain goal if you don’t know where you are starting from. Start a diary and keep it for four days. Record everything you eat, including approximate portions sizes, the time you arte, who you were with and how you were feeling.
It might not seem too important at first but you will soon see its value. This little tool (also used in many smoking cessation programmes) will show you many things that you were not aware of:
Do you practically nibble away at an entire meal while preparing it?
Do you half consciously eat whilst you are watching TV?
Do you eat too much in restaurants because “you are paying for it anyway”?
With this knowledge we can move onto Step Two.
Step Two: Why do we eat?
Take a look at your eating triggers, those things that immediately precede your eating.
Do you eat whenever you are offered something?
Are many of your eating triggers emotional ones?
Do you use eating as a mean of quieting psychological pain, making yourself feel better in the face of fear, anxiety, boredom, stress, loneliness or depression?
If you do, don’t worry. It’s not uncommon. Only by recognising these external cues and by being able to differentiate between psychological and physiological hunger can we make changes in the way we eat.
Don’t forget, eating cues are all around us all the time: TV commercials, the smell of cooking, the sight of others eating etc. But there is only one true signal; the pang of hunger from your empty stomach telling you it is time to eat.
Try to feel the difference between external cues and real hunger. One big distinction is that psychological hunger is not satisfied with food! A successful dieter will respond only to a true physiological need for energy.
Step 3: Goals and Victories
Now that you understand your eating situation and triggers, its time to set some goals. First set a long-term goal. This could be a desired weight, dress or trouser size, but a goal that outlines a percentage of body fat is probably more appropriate.
Second, break your long-term goal down into smaller short-term goals, each with an approximate date of accomplishment. This will give you something to shoot for that is in sight. When you reach your short tem goal, always reward yourself (a non fat frozen yoghurt is a good choice). You have now accomplished something – a small victory – and you should feel good about yourself. Take each short-term goal one at a time. Remember it is always a lot easier to climb a ladder one step at a time than trying to leap to the top.
Always set yourself goals that are reasonable. If a woman has never weighed less than 135lbs in her entire adult life, and comes from a family of heavy women, chances are that an effort to get under that weight will be doomed to failure. Be realistic!
