They’ve been trying and failing to lose weight for years. They’ll start a diet, set a goal to lose weight, and once they lose it they go back to eating “normally”. We get stuck because instead of creating habits that last, we do a diet until we reach a goal. , Then we believe that we can stop what we were doing that got us to that goal in the first place.
Misconception about what it takes to lose weight
A simple google search of “how to lose weight” will bring up thousands of super restrictive diets, meal plans, and “weight loss foods”.
There is a perception that it will be easier to lose weight if someone tells you exactly what to do. Unfortunately, as humans, we don’t actually like it when other people are in control of our lives.
We rebel against what we are told to do, and sabotage our efforts because we want to do things our own way.
One of the diets I tried was sold to me by a girl I knew in college, who had no nutrition training prior to going on this diet. The diet used dehydrated weight loss foods. They also provide a coach to tell you how to keep the foods from tasting awful. That way you could keep eating their meals 5 times a day.
The transition off of this specific diet includes eating 3 weight loss foods every day. Even after you lost your weight.
Knowing exactly what my next meal was going to be did not give me the peace of mind I’d hoped for. Instead, all I could think about was all of the foods that I was not “allowed to have”. It drove me crazy, and took way more of my mental energy than I was willing to spend thinking about food.
I was able to stick to it for about 3 months before I “fell off track”. Rather than starting over on a plan that made me miserable, I gave up. This led to weight gain because I was devouring every food I’d thought about, but couldn’t have for the last 3 months.
Does this pattern sound familiar? I was yo-yo dieting even though I knew better, and it led me to gaining more weight than I’d lost.
When we regain weight we’ve lost like this, it is not only discouraging, but we feel like we failed. That it was our fault we regained weight because we didn’t stick to the diet we were attempting to follow.
Programs like this don’t help long term because they don’t reach the core of the issue. Our mindset, and our habits in real life when we aren’t thinking about food 24/7. We get stressed, life happens and we fall off track and gain weight back. Then the guilt sets in and we resign ourselves to start over, and the cycle continues.
We never really learn the skills needed to keep our weight off. We ignore the mindset and habits needed.
What it Really Takes to Stop Yo-Yo Dieting
To truly lose weight and keep it off, we must address our mindset, and change our habits.
Mindset
Our mindset determines if we will lose weight and keep it off, or if we will continue to yo yo diet.
Weight loss is individual. What works for someone else won’t necessarily work for you. Each person has their own individual food preferences. We have to think about those when losing weight. Many diets sell a “one size fits all” plan, that doesn’t take into account the foods you like. Rather than following a plan that won’t work for you, we need to find the things that work for us.
We also have traditions around food, and family. In my family, we make a dish called shrimp dip during the holidays.
We make it with cream cheese, canned shrimp, spices and a bit of milk to make it creamy. We only make it once a year, because it isn’t the most healthy food, but we enjoy it when we have it.
When I’ve been on diets and tried to avoid eating this dip, I felt deprived. I’d usually end up eating other foods to try to get past the craving, and still ending up eating the shrimp dip. I ate more food trying to avoid a tradition than I would have if I’d enjoyed a little and moved on.
Diets don’t work to allow us to live our best lives. When we let ourselves feel guilt and shame around the food we eat, it is impossible to be our best selves. We get obsessed with food, and consumed with our weight loss efforts, and we can’t have any fun.
Shifting your mindset away from this is the only way to lose your weight and keep it off. You need to believe that you are able to lose weight, and that you can do it while still enjoying your favorite foods.
We live in a world where we experience instant results. You send a text and get a response. You put food in the microwave, and you are eating within a matter of seconds.
If the scale doesn’t move as quickly as we want it to, it is easy to get discouraged. Then we sabotage our efforts because we believe the changes we’ve made don’t make a difference anyway.
Rather than always relying on the scale to show progress, you can track non-scale victories (NSV). Or track the progress you are making in changing your habits.
We need to build awareness of what is happening in our mind. so that we can prevent the self sabotage that comes from not seeing the instant gratification that we crave.
Once we’ve identified the parts of our mindset, and our habits that are keeping us from losing weight, we can identify the actions to take to get real results.
Habit Change
Our daily habits determine where our life is headed. The more we do something a certain way, the more automatic it becomes.
For example, say you stop for ice cream on the way home. If you stop for ice cream on the way home from work every day, it will eventually become automatic. You will not even have the thought “I want ice cream”, you just end up in the drive through without even realizing it.
Another example of this that we all experience is driving to work. When you first get a job, you pay attention to the time you must leave the house, every turn you need to make, and where to park.
After a few months or a year, you stop noticing the little parts about the drive that you had to focus on at the beginning. Then when you get to work, you realize you don’t even remember the drive to get there. Driving to work is now a habit that you can do without thinking about the process.
You can look at the results you have in your life right now, and decide if that is what you want. Building awareness of your habits requires identifying the trigger, or usually the emotion that causes us to respond how we do. Then we can identify the action we take, and the reward we get from it. Or the “What’s in it for Me.”
Awareness, and figuring out how to reframe the action you take to get to a reward is what is going to help you change your habits. By changing your habits, you can lose your weight, and keep it off. You will no longer have to worry about backsliding and falling off track.
Action Steps:
In future posts we will dive further into how to realistically lose weight and keep it off.
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