What Are You Doing Wrong When The Weight You Lost Comes Back? 3 Mistakes
What else can be written about weight loss? Over the past 30 years, since the sciences of nutrition and exercise appeared and began to actively develop, nothing radically new has been invented except for ozempic. And even with ozempic, not everything is smooth.
Speaking of traditional methods, there are thousands of approaches, but all are based on creating a calorie deficit and high protein consumption, offering one or another combination of products. Although awareness of even such basic things has not reached every person trying to lose weight, there is still work to do. And yet, discussing only these topics becomes at least incomplete.
Almost everyone has learned to lose weight. Many have done it more than once. Only a few manage to keep it off. This is the main problem now.
It turns out that it is not enough to just diet and exercise properly. You need to think ahead, anticipating not only your physical condition, but also your emotional one.
Here is my bingo blitz “What are you doing wrong to stay slim after losing weight”. True, only 3 points, but detailed. And you put a tick, whether it applies to you or not.
The “Everything for Weight Loss” Approach
If you smoke or have smoked, say that you will quit after just smoking, when you don’t feel like smoking (yet).
If you were a heavy drinker, you told yourself you would never drink again, when any thought of alcohol was disgusting.
The thought “it’s time to lose weight” also comes on a full stomach. This is on a small scale.
On a larger scale, when you don't just want to lose weight by going on a diet, but also make serious life changes, with the understanding that “This can’t go on any longer”all this comes at the moment when you are most motivated and not yet burdened by the side effects of your decision.
Motivation is great. It gives you the opportunity to start, but at the same time it does not allow you to adequately assess the upcoming difficulties and prepare for them.
And it is this concentration on the good that switches something in the head, as if the creators of the matrix reinstalled the program while the person was sleeping. The “Oh, cutlet!” mode switches to the “Now my favorite food is water” mode. All the healthy lifestyle postulates, useful and harmful, are combined together to direct a concentrated beam of effort to burn fat.
The weight decreases and then is maintained for a while.
But along with the fat, willpower burns and the conflict grows!
The conflict between the new diet with weight loss activity and the previous lifestyle, which does not accept such quirks. Weight loss is going on as long as there is strength to contain the conflict. Everything goes wrong when you once again deny yourself a cake, making such a sacrifice of your satisfaction, without receiving additional results.
Containing a conflict does not eliminate it, but accumulates it.
Who will win?
Many people expect that the new right thing will win, and the old wrong thing will fall off as a rudiment. They will somehow fall in love, they will get used to eating salads, and the new figure should certainly motivate them to follow a healthy diet even more. However, these are all expectations, and in reality, the newly arrived and still alien attributes of a healthy lifestyle fall off one by one with each new conflict, until the diet turns into the usual one, which created weight problems, and activity is again reduced to zero. It turns out that a healthy lifestyle is very difficult to fit into your lifestyle.
This is the second problem with the “Everything for Weight Loss” approach. It prevents the new from merging with the old.
Losing weight is a temporary condition that is observed until a certain goal is reached. But weight loss tools are not temporary and should become part of your lifestyle.and for this, at some point, the way of life must be adjusted to these tools. Then they will turn from alien to natural, reflecting you permanently, not temporarily.
But the “Everything for weight loss” approach initially implies the end of the undertaking. It warms the thought that somewhere there, at a certain number on the scale, there is a point to which you can reach and a moment when you can finally relax, ending this dietary agony.
If the idea is finite, then there is no point in looking for solutions to make new nutrition and activity a part of life. They will remain unpleasant tools for achieving the goal, a forced condition that must be endured and nothing more. There is no reason to build your life around balanced nutrition and activity if in 2/3/4 months they will no longer exist.
However, your appearance is a direct reflection of your lifestyle, which means all the tools you used to create this appearance now need to be maintained.
While there is a sense of temporariness, finitude, new healthy lifestyle postulates feel like a limitation. Living with constant restrictions in the world of dietary permissiveness is difficult. This increases tension every day, which does not at all contribute to the combination of new habits and lifestyle.
So it turns out that all the created results fall apart over time.
The “anything to lose weight” approach leads to the second problem.
Striving for the ideal
Since weight loss tools are temporary and do not reflect your natural behavior, and will never become so due to an unresolved conflict, and the conflict takes a lot of energy, you understand that you do not have much time before the next breakdown, so losing weight must go perfectly!
There is a good example – a special type of trainees who have not done anything their whole life, but when they start training, they take the maximum from each one. They want to do this, and do that, and an optional extra to the main program, and one more exercise, and still have strength left.maybe cardio then?
What is it? Motivation? Enthusiasm? The ideal athlete, a future champion! No matter what you give him, it's still not enough!
If only. These are clear signs of internal uncertainty in one's commitment. A person feels that he is not in training for long, which means he needs to do as much as possible while he is going strong. There may not be a tomorrow, you need to cling to what you have. But such an approach only accelerates the beginning of the end.
The same applies to the desire to lose weight through control of nutrition and living conditions. By collecting as many ideal conditions as possible, you only show and make yourself understand that the fight against excess weight is temporary and as long as it is convenient.
If you need a vacation, and the kids at grandma's, and complete peace of mind to start losing weight, then to maintain your weight you'll have to quit your job, the kids should move in with grandma forever, and the bakery around the corner has stopped selling bread.
The new does not merge with the current way of life. There are too many changes, too many at the same time, not all of them are effective and necessary.
Too many restrictions though research shows that the degree of restrictions does not correlate with the result. Regularity and consistency are more important.
But how can you maintain regularity and consistency if you learned to lose weight in hothouse conditions, while 90% of your life is going wrong.
This does not mean that you should start when life has put you in a tough spot. All this again brings us back to the fact that balanced nutrition and exercise should stop being tools for losing weight. All efforts should be directed towards making them a natural part of your lifestyle. A lifestyle that gives you a body weight and appearance that you are happy with.
As long as a healthy lifestyle is a temporary exercise for losing weight, it will be an annoying restriction that will prevent you from leading a “normal, fulfilling life.”
One of the tools that helps to establish a new lifestyle, and which the vast majority ignore, making another mistake – planning.
Short-term planning
The habit of planning your diet is not just a useful life hack. If you are overweight, your weight is gradually increasing in uncontrolled conditions and you want to lose weight, the skill of planning is a fundamental philosophy of future changes.
It's normal to be skeptical about this. After all, you can plan a year of non-stop workouts and not do a single one. You can plan a perfect day and then gorge yourself on pizza for dinner.
That's the whole plan for starting a new life.
Just don't confuse a plan with reproducing a dream out loud or on a calendar. I'm not talking about visualizing an ideal day in which all events push you to take the right actions, and the stars align so that your hand automatically reaches for the cabbage.
A real good plan is when you have no other choice.
Why is it that in movies, Plan A always fails, forcing you to implement a more complex and daring Plan B?
Plan A is that very same dream-playing out loud and visualizing ideal events. That's why it doesn't work. And also because it leaves the possibility of moving on to plan B.
Plan B is a dead end. It works because the hero can't do otherwise.
A simple example.
In the evening you come home, feel tired, and your hunger is growing. It was that typical day when everything started out so well, and in the evening all the perfection is under threat again. You have no strength to plan and make the right decisions, self-control is at zero.
All you want is to relax and get rid of your hunger, devoting at least a small piece of the remaining day to yourself. But there is nothing at home.
Plan A is to continue with your weight loss plan, go grocery shopping, and cook a balanced dinner to keep you on track with your weight goals.
Plan B is to order something that is tasty, fast, filling, but most likely will not meet the nutritional requirements and goals.
You can really want to lose weight and eat right, but with the remnants of motivation, with accumulated fatigue, it is difficult to make strong-willed decisions and it is very easy to convince yourself that “Okay, today it's like this, but tomorrow it will definitely be different.”
Plan B implemented, another attempt at a perfect day failed.
Second example. The same evening, but the conditions have changed. A prediction was made in advance about possible evening events and an attempt was made to avoid this situation. A balanced reception was prepared at home in advance, so that upon arrival it could be eaten without hesitation. Thus, the ideal day is not only planned, but also prepared for its implementation.
Once you're home in the evening, your options are:
Plan A – order something tasty, fast, filling and most likely will be past the KBZhU and goals. But you have to wait.
Plan B is to continue with your weight loss plan, but skip the grocery store and just eat what you have at home.
I know, Plan A is still tempting, too. But Plan B is now more accessible. Here it is – food in front of you. Eat and forget about hunger, do your own thing, enjoy, rest, prepare for the next day.
In this example, Plan B is one that makes it difficult to do otherwise.
Therefore, it is not enough to plan, you need to make sure that the plan is implemented. Not to plan the transition to healthy food, but to buy it and not to buy unhealthy food. To face bad days, when everything does not go according to plan, but to gain experience and prepare for the next ones.
Don't just plan a healthy snack at work instead of your usual trip to a cafe/canteen/restaurant, but have it with you.
If you don't have it, then know which cafe/canteen/restaurant has food that suits your goals.
If you don’t know which one, find out and implement it tomorrow.
Know what to say to your coworkers when they ask why you don't go to lunch with them at your usual place.
Know what you'll say when you refuse to go with them for the seventh time, which will already look strange, but simply “Don't want” it won't work anymore.
Know how to deal with fit-shaming and fight off offers to eat “normal food, otherwise you'll soon become like a vegetable, or even start crowing.”
So on and so on.
“I will definitely do the right thing when I have to make a choice” This is a reassuring, indicative thought of a person who is thinking about his future.
The plan is to make sure that such a choice does not exist, and that the only correct one is implemented.
That's how it is, friends. I hope this helps make your next weight loss your last.
And if you decide to act, I'm waiting for you yourself in the TG channelwhere I share tools on how to live a healthy lifestyle in the most rational way, how to form a healthy and reasonable approach to strength training, making it effective.
