Losing weight is on a lot of people's minds with the approach of summer and there is no shortage of advice and information out there on how to make diet and exercise an essential part of your healthy weight loss programme.
Critical as these are to weight loss success, always keep in mind that even if you are the world’s most dedicated dieter you are statistically more likely to fail in the long-term unless you underpin your commitment with a clear understanding of not just what you eat but why.
According to Motivation Weight Management, 70 per cent of eating is for emotional reasons. An individual person’s habits, motivation, stress symptoms, emotions, and mental self-image all make up their ‘mental weight’. Through the Motivation programme, including the completion of a computerised questionnaire at the initial assessment consultation, people can identify and reduce their mental weight so that it matches their desired weight. This empowers the person to maintain long-term weight management goals.
Try these tips from Motivation Weight Management to keep yourself focused and motivated as you strive to achieve your weight loss goals:
Re-evaluate your relationship with food: We eat for many different reasons which all too often have very little to do with fulfilling our nutritional requirements and everything to do with feeding our emotional needs. That is why it is vital to assess your relationship with food. If you find that you are eating for comfort, reward, consolation, compensation or some other emotional reason, give yourself a pat on the back - by identifying the causes of your overeating you have taken the first step towards weight loss success.
Avoid those triggers: Devise strategies to avoid those situations that prompt you to eat. For example, if you are used to eating in front of the television, break the association by making it a rule to only eat sitting down at a table away from the screen. Once you start analysing the many settings and situations that prompt you to eat, you can start to eliminate all those food associations from your daily routine.
Find new ways to reward yourself: Whether it is a celebration, comfort eating to alleviate stress, or just snacking out after a long hard day, find alternative ways to compensate or reward yourself that do not involve food.
Educate yourself: Make yourself more aware of what you are eating by educating yourself about nutrition and food. Without getting into the detail of counting every last calorie, a general awareness of fat, sugar and calories values is very important for helping you to track and control what you eat. Food awareness is especially useful for checking nutritional values when you buy food in the supermarket.
Always read the label: Once you have started to educate yourself about food, make it part of your shopping routine to read the labels. Most product labels break down fat, sugar, calorie, and other nutritional values into Guideline Daily Allowance (GDA ) percentages, which is particularly useful for measuring your intake. You will be amazed at how quickly you start looking at food in a whole new light.
For a no obligation assessment consultation in Motivation Weight Management's Castlebar, Westport, Sligo, Letterkenny, and Buncrana clinics call (1890 ) 989895. For more information visit www.motivation.ie
