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9 psychological ways to help you lose weight
Revisit what you know
Energy balance is the first key to achieving one's ideal body. It's a way of saying calories in versus calories out. Your body needs a certain amount of calories to maintain its current body weight.
Once you understand energy balance, you might feel less tempted to eat more than you really need.
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Key Ideas
Steer clear of opaque food containers
Don't eat out of food containers, boxes, and bags that aren't clear.
Our brains are highly visual. We take visual cues as to how much food we’ve eaten to help us know when we should stop. When you can't see how much food you’ve had, you never get that visual feedback and you end up eating way too much.
Ditch dieting
Dieting limits one's mind-set.
Once you're off your diet and have lost weight, you might revert back to eating poorly, not exercising and ultimately regain pounds. Instead, focus on your long-term eating habits.
Trick your stomach
Choose vegetables such as carrots and celery over sugary treats when you're having a snack craving.
Not only do they have fewer calories; they are also fibrous and can make you feel full faster.
Exercising can be fun
Finding an exercise that's fun matters most, because you'll be more likely to incorporate it into your weekly routine.
Working out with friends or in a group can be motivational, making exercise less of a chore and more of an enjoyable pastime after work or between errands.
Understand what causes obesity
More cases of obesity are reportedly caused by lifestyle decisions rather than genetic factors.
Promoting the notion of genes as a cause for obesity may increase genetically deterministic beliefs and decrease motivation to engage in healthy lifestyle behaviors.
People who believe that obesity is caused by unhealthy habits are likely to become proactive and re-think their actions.
Ask challenging questions
Consider tapping into your competitive side by turning weight loss into a challenge.
Can you lose this weight? Are you up to the challenge?
Be kind to yourself
See yourself in a positive light. Envision your future self, six months to a year and consider how great you'll look and feel.
Get more sleep
When we are sleep-deprived, high-fat and sugary foods seem much more attractive, probably because they give us a quick burst of energy.
To avoid temptation, adults should strive for at least seven hours of sleep every night.
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
People struggle to keep weight off
Researchers have observed weight regain following weight loss across a range of populations and types of weight-loss diets.
Why long-term weight loss is so hard
The brain’s response to caloric restriction tends to be to increase cravings for foods that are highly rewarding and reducing our perception of being full.
Diets frequently fail because they have an endpoint and are not a real lifestyle change. Maintaining a lifestyle that promotes a healthy weight and metabolism is often a lifelong journey.
Maintaining weight loss
The actual food you eat isn’t the main thing that enables you to keep weight off.
Maintaining a weight-reduced state is a lifelong journey and many dietary approaches can work to facilitate weight loss and keep it off.
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Key Ideas
Calories burned every day
The calories we burn every day include not only movement but all the energy needed to run the thousands of functions that keep us alive.
Exercise and health
Exercise is like a wonder drug for many health outcomes: reducing blood pressure, reduces the risk of diabetes of heart diseases and slows developing cognitive impairment from Alzheimer's and dementia.
But as for losing weight, it helps more in weight maintenance than in losing the actual weight.
Human energy balance
Exercise alone has a modest contribution to weight loss. But when you alter one component, cutting the number of calories you eat in a day to lose weight, doing more exercise than usual, this sets off a cascade of changes in the body that affect how many calories you use up and, in turn, your bodyweight.
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Food cues
When we are hungry, the hormone ghrelin stimulates the brain. Our brains pay more attention to cues for unhealthy foods—those which are high in sugar and fat—than healthy foods when we are hungry.&...
Forbidden foods are more tempting
Dieting often involves “giving up” more pleasurable foods in an attempt to reduce calorie intake. But if we are asked to avoid eating the food we enjoy, researchers have found that we will crave it.
The behavioral and cognitive response to deprivation may inadvertently be creating more temptation.
The “what-the-hell” effect
A problem with dieting rules is that only a small violation—a sneaky slice of cake, for example—is enough to derail the whole diet. Researchers call this the “what-the-hell effect”.
Diets that require the dieter to follow rigid rules or forbid them from consuming foods they enjoy appear to be problematic, as they paradoxically increase the risk of overeating.