Preparing Your Mind for Effective Weight Loss

You want to know the future of the weight loss industry? Simple! It’s rooted in bringing about the behavioral changes in people to help them achieve their long-term weight loss goals and keeping those unwanted pounds off for years to come.

With most fad diets having hit rock bottom in their popularity charts, more and more people are now realizing the need to bring about the crucial lifestyle and behavioral changes in their lives in order to fight this trying obesity battle. They now understand better than ever before that success of weight loss goals go a lot beyond just the right exercises or diet. That there are many other factors that can influence our hormones, the environment around us, and our body composition and influence our journey to lose weight.

While we can control a lot many of these factors, there are some factors that cannot be controlled by us. To ensure our success, we can try to identify these events or behaviors that are beyond our control, be proactive about them and prepare ourselves to deal with them.

Friends and Family Impact Your Weight

A study conducted by the University of Michigan revealed how behavior modification and peer pressure can affect the lifestyle/eating choices made by female freshman roommates. The results clearly showed that roommates who had bulkier partners are likely to gain a lot less weight (one-half pound) in comparison to those who had slimmer roommates (two and a half pounds, on an average) in the first year.

For sustainable weight loss, lifelong behavior modification is important. And our family and friends, to a great extent, influence what we’re eating as well as when/how frequently we’re eating them.

Quite understandably, researchers were of the opinion that bulkier roommates are, more often than not, on some kind of exercise routine or low-calorie diets, which catches on with their roommates, making them gain less and avoid the defamed ‘freshman 15.’ Behaviors of heavier roommates make their roommates more conscious about their nutrition and diet and modify their habits for the good toward weight reduction and healthy eating.

There are certain behavior changes that you can implement in your life to achieve your weight loss goals:

Switch to a Door-to-Door Meal Delivery Service Instead of Heading to a Fast Food Joint – It so easy to find a meal delivery service that provides healthy and delicious freshly-cooked food while keeping your calories in check. You can try this service or this one, to start with, which are two of the most popular meal delivery services in America. Stick to them and you’ll not have to get into the hassle of counting calories again. They do it all for you.

Aim to Change Your Habits Permanently, Not Temporarily

When you set unrealistically high goals for yourself, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment from the very start. Keep your focus on changing your habits rather than reaching out for a number, after which you long to get back to your “normal” habits, only to gain all of your lost pounds all over again.

Establish small goals for yourself while altering your habits. Try aiming for weight that is somewhere between your current weight and your final weight that you want to achieve. Give your body some time to metabolically adjust to every new weight loss plateau and accomplish your goal in small steps than just trying to take a giant leap.

Ask Your Peers for Help

Health-conscious behavior is contagious in social surroundings. We all more or less know about the basic negative and positive habits of people around us. When people who surround us indulge in healthy eating habits that encourage weight loss, it doesn’t seem too difficult to resist temptations and most of us often follow suit, only to see excessive pounds disappear in no time. Modify your lifestyle and eating habits and at least some in your peer group are sure to follow suit.

Reward Yourself for Your Small Achievements

Remember how your parents used to get you that coveted toy to reward you for scoring high in class? It was a great way of keeping you motivated to do better every time. Nothing much changes when you grow up, except that you need to reward yourself now.

Apply this to your weight loss journey. Maybe you wanted to buy that expensive watch that you thought is extremely extravagant to spend on. So set a milestone for yourself and if you successfully achieve it, go buy that guilt-free. After all, you’ve worked hard to earn this for yourself. Such small rewards can be a great positive reinforcement to motivate you to stay on track. The only thing you need to be careful about is, don’t reward yourself with any food items and you’ll be fine.

People and environmental factors that surround us can make a great deal of difference in our motivation and mindset to reach our weight loss goals. Try staying with positive people who share the same belief system and are trying to achieve the same weight loss goals and it would all begin to look as effortless as it could be.

Marcia Calleiro is a vegan and a work-from-home mother. Calleiro usually orders from any healthy meal delivery or diet meal delivery service as they serve fresh, tasty and nutritious food. She combines this with her fitness program for overall fitness. She is currently a contributor to Health Care Information Website, a site that educates its readers about various health and weight loss issues. In her free time, she likes square-foot gardening, playing games on her Xbox, and spending time with her family.


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