- 1. Believe that you are capable
- 2. Avoid weighing yourself every day
- 3. Do psychological counseling
- 4. Remember and value each achievement
- 5. Don't just focus on appearance
- 6. Practice new patterns of behavior
- 7. Set real goals
Reprogramming the mind to lose weight is a strategy that helps to keep focusing on diet and physical activity on a constant basis, so that healthy eating and exercise become a natural habit in daily life, which favors maintenance adequate weight for longer, avoiding the known accordion effect.
To reprogram the mind, it is necessary to identify bad habits and exchange them for a healthier routine, but one that is also pleasurable, because only then will healthy habits really remain.
So, here are 7 tips to help with this mental reprogramming process:
1. Believe that you are capable
To really believe that you are able to lose weight and change your lifestyle is necessary to leave the brain predisposed to face difficulties and to fight more to obtain the desired dream.
On the other hand, when imagining that it will be just another frustrated attempt at dieting, the brain already gets used to it and accepts defeat, not fighting hard enough to win the victory.
2. Avoid weighing yourself every day
If you weigh every day, you are constantly anxious about the result of the scale, which does not differentiate, for example, whether weight gain or loss was due to fat or lean mass. In addition, one or more bad results on the scale can influence a complete abandonment of food and healthy routine, generating a new cycle of weight gain.
Thus, it is advised that the weighing is done at most 1 time per week, but at least once every two months, to monitor the gain or loss of body weight.
3. Do psychological counseling
The accompaniment with a psychologist helps to understand the reasons for an uncontrolled diet and excessive weight gain, which can often be the consequences of problems in childhood or with relationships.
Psychological support develops a greater capacity to deal with emotions and helps to build new healthy habits instead of bad ones, such as consuming too much alcohol, fast foods and soft drinks.
4. Remember and value each achievement
Valuing and maintaining focus on each achievement, however small, generates a domino effect of motivation that increases the frequency of good achievements and better results. Thus, on days when the diet is adhered to, but not physical activity, for example, one should try to focus on the positive side of having followed the diet well, and not on the failure of training.
However, despite having to value each achievement, it is also important to make a commitment to try to perform again the next day that part that ended in failure or frustration, as this way the spirit of conquest and overcoming is maintained.
5. Don't just focus on appearance
During the practice of physical activity, for example, it is important to focus on the feeling of pleasure and mission accomplished that the exercise brings, and not just on the appearance still unwanted in the mirror.
Remember that following the diet and training well brings a good feeling to the body, helps to maintain positive choices more easily, because good memories make the desire to repeat that action arise and, after some time, this repetition will become a habit.
6. Practice new patterns of behavior
It is natural for the brain to like routines and create patterns of habits for actions that are repeated frequently and that bring a sense of pleasure or achievement. However, care must be taken because the brain also creates automatic repetition patterns for actions that are unhealthy, such as overeating and being lazy to exercise.
Thus, it is important to start diet and physical activity with the determination to follow correctly what has been planned for at least a few weeks, because the longer an action is repeated, the more it becomes automatic for the brain and the easier it will be for keep it as a natural habit of the daily routine.
7. Set real goals
Establishing real goals is important to generate a cycle of small victories, which together will bring more encouragement and determination to achieve the final goal. On the other hand, when setting very difficult goals, the feelings of defeat and failure become more constant, bringing the feeling of incapacity and the desire to give up.
Talking to professionals like the nutritionist and the physical educator is a good strategy to plan real goals and facilitate the path of achievements.
See tips on how to change the fat thinking to take the focus off the food.
