Before You Go on a Diet

You already know that you weigh too much, and it has gotten to a point that it has serious negative effects on your life.

You want to go on a diet (good for you!).

ln order to maximize your chances of success, you can make some preparations before you start dieting. Think how you prepare for important things in your life. For example, when you’re looking for a new job you first make sure to write a great resume, you brush up on your interviewing skills, you network to get more leads.

Taking dieting seriously and preparing for it will increase your chances of long-term success.

Mental Preparation:

Picture yourself thin. This will help you focus on the end goal. If you were once thin, hang up these pictures of yourself around the house.
If you’re not doing that already, start dressing nicely and taking good care of yourself. Start feeling good about how you look, and you’ll believe you are worthy of all the effort involved with dieting.
Start thinking as a thin person. Mostly, that you need to eat only when you’re hungry, don’t worry about not having the opportunity to eat when you get hungry, don’t be afraid of being hungry.
Make a list of why you want to get thinner. List everything that you will gain by losing weight (and not just the obvious – that you’d look better and be healthier. Think of everything, such as that you will feel more outgoing, do more things, will probably live longer, and much more). Hang this list in strategic places, such as on the refrigerator.
Know that you will face some breaking moments, and prepare yourself on how to respond. Read more here – Let’s Stop Fooling Ourselves.
Find out if you’re an emotional eater, and think of the strategies to deal with it – Emotional Eating.
Choose small goals that you will celebrate. If you want to lose 40 pounds, plan to focus on losing only 5 pounds at a time. Plan how to reward yourself on every 5 pounds that you lose, and not with cake of course 😉
Think about when do you eat the most, and find other things to do during that time. For example, If you mostly eat junk when you’re watching TV in the evening, decide that you will start exercising at that time instead or join some class.
Be realistic. Healthy weight loss can take longer than you might expect. Even if it is realistic to lose 1-2 pounds a week, there will be weeks that you plateau, or even gain a little weight. Expect this, and you will not be disappointed when that happens.

Practical Preparation:

Choose a diet that you will follow. There are so many choices available, so read about the different suggestions and see what makes sense to you.
Prepare an exact menu for at least one week. You don’t want to start thinking what you need to eat when you’re already starving.
Do some shopping, and make sure you have all the ingredients you need to prepare your food. It’s even better if you can prepare some food in advance.
I strongly recommend getting a food scale. This will help you measure the exact portions that you’re eating, eliminating the guesswork. I have this scale, but there are so many other options as well.
I also strongly recommend that you write down everything that you eat. This will enable you to make sure you’re still on track and not straying too much. Find a platform that can help you with this task. If you have a Fitbit device, you will be able to use their platform to log what you ate (and your exercises as well), but there are plenty of other available apps, such as MyNetDiary.
If you have some food laying around that is not supposed to be included in your diet, throw it away. It’s harder to resist temptation when it’s right in front of us.
Plan how to incorporate exercise into your routine. You can start by getting a good pedometer and setting a goal of walking 10,000 steps each day. Omron’s pedometers are known for their accuracy, I personally love this Fitbit.
Consider joining a weight loss group or working with a dietician or personal trainer. Many people can benefit from the structure and motivation that these options offer, not to mention that they help to adopt healthy lifestyles.
Think if you will benefit from sharing with others that you’re dieting. Some people will enjoy the moral support that they receive whereas some will experience it more as pressure and even nosiness.

Plan ahead! This diet could be life-changing for you, it is important so it makes sense to treat it as such.

Do you have other tips? I’d love hearing from you!

Emotional Eating

When I went on one of my diets, I shared with my husband that I usually eat when I’m not hungry at all, and it’s hard for me to just stop eating all the time. He said that I’m lucky. That he eats when he’s hungry so it would be difficult for him to try to lose weight because he’d be left hungry if he ate less, and I can just cut down on food and not have to deal with hunger. Ha! Goes to show you that people who don’t suffer from emotional eating don’t really understand it and how tough it is to conquer this behavior.

Yes, we should eat only when we’re hungry. But many of us eat when we suddenly have a craving for something, even when we don’t feel hungry at all. We can eat one snack after another, and because we’re not trying to satisfy hunger, but something else, it’s very difficult to hit the spot where we’d feel we’ve had enough. We’re using food not to fulfil hunger but to comfort and distract us.

Food is sometimes used when it’s hard to deal with difficult issues we’re facing. We could be struggling with financial difficulties, health issue, relationship troubles, work stress, and more. True, some people tend to hardly eat when they’re facing these situations, but others automatically turn to impulsive eating and consume whatever is available, without even enjoying the food. Our brains can become wired so we automatically reach out for food when we’re experiencing negative emotions without even thinking about that.

We also use food to subconsciously self-sabotage us. I went on countless diets, was able to stick with them nicely, and as just the pounds started coming off, I would go into unstoppable binge eating. I now understand that my brain was trying to protect my perceived identity. If I’m used to thinking of myself as an unthin person, I would subconsciously feel that something is off when I start looking thinner and thinner.

Food becomes a (temporary) distractor, but it doesn’t solve the issues we’re facing with, and it causes more problems for us.

How to know if you’re eating because you’re emotionally hungry and not physically hungry:

You suddenly feel an overwhelming hunger. A physical hunger develops gradually
You crave specific food (fatty and sugary) and want to eat more and more until you’re absolutely stuffed. When you’re physically hungry almost anything will sound good and you’ll stop eating when your stomach is full.
After you eat you feel bad about yourself.

Let’s say you’ve identified yourself as an emotional eater. How to deal when the cravings hit again? Here are some tips that are working for me:

Identify your triggers. Do you eat out of boredom, to give yourself something to do? Out of childhood habits? Out of stress or dealing with negative emotions?
Find other ways to deal with your feelings. If it’s boredom, you can go read a book or exercise. You can talk with a relative or a friend if you’re depressed. I absolutely recommend the book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business by Charles Duhigg. It discusses how habits are an automatic response to specific triggers, and how we can deliberately work at changing our automatic responses to these triggers.
Write down all the reasons you have for wanting to lose weight. When you feel like you’re about to eat emotionally, read the list and think if you still value the benefits of losing weight. Tell yourself you’re not really hungry and remind yourself how bad you’ll feel if you give it. Read my post Let’s Stop Fooling Ourselves for how to be ready with answers when we try to convince ourselves it’s OK to eat something we know we shouldn’t.
Practice relaxation techniques. Stress releases the hormone cortisol which causes weight gain. This happens as cortisol mobilizes triglycerides from storage to visceral fat cells and by suppressing insulin levels which causes the body cells to be starved for sugar. That triggers cravings for high-calorie food. Cortisol causes other health issues, such as blood pressure, depression, and the list goes on. Have a glass of beverage (no- or low-calorie) to drink slowly, practice yoga, guided imagery, deep breathing, meditation. Find what makes your body relax.

Motivational Quotes

Let’s Stop Fooling Ourselves

It’s so easy to cheat. Here’s a situation: It’s dinner time, and the kids are not that hungry. They left a whole 1/2 toasted bagel with cream cheese completely untouched. As I’m clearing away the dishes, I can tell how good it smells. I think to myself, OK, just one bite, I really don’t want to throw away so much food. On the first bite, I realize the bagel is still warm, and it’s delicious. So I figure, OK, just because it’s still warm, let’s have just one more bite. This time, I take a large bite, as I don’t want to throw away food of course. After the 2nd bite, I see that almost half the bagel is gone, so it makes sense to just eat what’s left, as 1/2 of half bagel doesn’t make a lot of difference anyway, and hey, I’ll just eat a bit less tomorrow.

Are you familiar with the situation? Situations where you’re trying to convince yourself that it’s OK to eat something on the spur of the moment? That you tell yourself all these convincing arguments of why it’s not a bad idea? We can come up with so many reasons:

I really want it and will probably end up eating it in the end anyway
I don’t want to throw it away
I’ll compensate by eating less later
This doesn’t have too many calories
It’s only half a piece
I deserve this as I’ve really watched what I ate this week
It really doesn’t matter
I’m allowed to as I’m celebrating

And so on and so forth… You get the idea. When we really crave something, we’ll convince ourselves that all these reasonings are valid and that it’s OK to give in to them.

What to do ? How to overcome these thoughts, when we want the food so badly?

We can be better prepared so we know how to respond to these thoughts when they creep in. When we’re calm and not hungry, we can think about a good response for each of these hindering thoughts. For example, a response to “I really really want to eat this, and I’m fed up with this diet anyway” can be “well, now I feel I’m fed up, but when I lose weight I’ll feel very good. I will feel bad if I give in and eat this. I knew this process will be difficult, and this is one of those difficult moments. I will feel very proud if I resist the temptation”.

A response to “it’s a very small piece, it will not make any difference” can be “Little small pieces add up. I need to stop the habit of eating food that I didn’t plan on in advance. I need to be able to not give in to cravings and this is an opportunity for me to practice and strengthen my resistance power. ”

Think of what convincing stories you may be telling yourself when you feel like eating something you know you shouldn’t, and come up with good answers.

You can even write down the responses on paper. Sometimes seeing something written makes a stronger impact. Eventually, you will have these thoughts and similar ones, and being ready can make the difference between giving in or conquering your impulse. The important thing is to be ready.