Beat These 3 Common Weight Loss Monsters
Easy strategies to banish everyday dieting demons
Losing weight might be simple, but it’s not easy. That’s because we are humans, with emotions, feelings, and ingrained behaviours around food.
Most people struggle with two or three food behaviours that can make weight loss difficult. These diet demons can include mindless eating, snacking, emotional eating, bingeing, or “eating by the clock” where food intake is triggered by external cues rather than by hunger.
What are the food habits you’d most like to get rid of? Here are three of the most common ones… plus strategies for getting rid of them for good.
TV Snacking
When you finally get the chance to sit down and watch some TV, do you need a snack? Something you can eat with your hands… something crunchy, sweet, or salty? This is a really common food habit behaviour, but it can spell disaster for losing weight. TV snacking is the epitome of mindless eating. You’re unaware of how much you are eating, and the food barely registers with your brain (became you’re distracted by the TV). You can easily eat far more than you would ever plan to eat.
Solution: don’t try to fight it. Work with it instead. Have a small, measured amount of what you want – and savour it. Weigh or measure your desired amount into a bowl (never eat from the packet). Put the rest away. Tie the bag up and put it out of sight.
Late Night Eating
Many people overeat late at night, and this can add hundreds of calories to your daily intake. Eating at night isn’t a problem in itself (200 calories at 8pm are the same as 200 calories at 2pm!) But late night eating has a tendency to be emotional, mindless, and lead to even more snacking. If you have some calories left from your daily intake, go ahead and have them! But if you have already eaten your goal amount, then anything eaten at night will take you over your goal.
Solution: calories are a unit of energy. So your body is asking for energy. Have you considered it might want the other form of energy… sleep? Rather than eating for energy at night, go to bed! When you get up to go to the kitchen, keep walking and go upstairs instead. Don’t fool yourself that you will sit up to do work. If you are eating, you are not getting anything productive done anyway. Tomorrow is another day.
Grab-And-Go Food
Life is busy and it’s not practical to prep every meal and snack in advance. But grabbing food on the go, without a plan, can add 100s of calories to your day. Not to mention drain your bank account and fill your body with unnecessary sugar, salt, and fat. We all need to fall back on shop bought snacks from time to time. But if you do it regularly, it could be standing in the way of you and that last 5lbs. If you regularly grab food (or caloric coffees) on your commute, school run, or at train stations, try this….
Solution: switch up your habits to avoid the triggers. Grab and go eating is less about lack of food prep, and more about ingrained habits. Walk or drive a different route (to avoid the express supermarket, the takeaway, the late night garage). Don’t have your wallet or cash on you. Do something else to distract your brain and your hands. Have something healthier with you, so your hands can still be occupied with food. Take a thermos mug of tea or coffee to sip, and listen to a podcast or audio book.
What are your diet demons? If you want to tackle them once and for all, get in touch by email stephen@stephen-clarke.com or phone 07883 060 108
