Flexing Your Mind
How changing your attitude and focusing on emotions can help you drop weight.
Binge eating due to stress can always derail your diet plan, while lack of confidence or a negative outlook may prevent you from following through with a weight loss plan or keep you from beginning one at all. To help keep up with your Optifast weight loss in New Jersey, here are some tips on avoiding the mental anguish and self-deprecation that can help keep you on track with your weight loss goals.
Focus on the good parts of weight loss. It can be easy to get frustrated or negative about losing weight if you feel you’ve been unsuccessful, but maintaining a positive mental attitude is absolutely crucial in losing weight and keeping it off. If you break your diet in a stress-eating binge, you’re bound to be pessimistic about your chances to slim down, but slip-ups can always be overcome.
Instead of dwelling on it, focus on the positive. Think about why you wanted to change in the first place and the ways in which losing weight will positively impact your life. Remember that everyone makes mistakes, but that losing the weight is both worthwhile and possible. If you stay optimistic, you’re more likely to avoid mistakes in the future and stay on track to a healthier lifestyle.
Allow yourself small indulgences. Saying no to unhealthy foods can be an incredibly difficult thing to do. Though it may be your goal to eliminate them from your diet, eating a small amount of the fattening foods that call out to you can save you from gorging on them later in a moment of weakness. Keep your indulgences within reason, of course, but allowing yourself to satisfy a gnawing craving for a little piece of cake now may keep you from eating the whole thing later.
Keep a food diary. Writing down everything you eat will help you wrap your head around exactly what you’re putting in your body. While you may think you’re following your diet plan exactly, writing all of your food choices down will force you to acknowledge your diet mistakes and put it all in perspective.
Get a couple highlighters and pick one color for wise food choice and another for unwise. Go through your food diary at the end of each week and mark your choices with their corresponding colors, paying close attention to the ratio of wise to unwise. This will help you keep track of your progress and allow you to identify problem foods and factors that may cause you to overindulge.
Identify your trigger emotions. When you get an urge to eat that isn’t caused by physical hunger, try to figure out which emotion it is that may be causing that urge. Anger, fear, sadness and anxiety are common emotional triggers, while even happiness or excitement can cause you to go rushing to the fridge. If you can pin down which emotions are most likely to make you cave to the desire to overeat, you can focus on staying strong any time you feel that emotion. Realize that hunger isn’t always what’s telling you to eat, so it’s important to figure out what is.