How over desires impacts our ability to lose weight

As you have heard me say, the problem with most weight loss programs are that they only deal with the symptoms of weightloss, and often focus on just creating a calorie deficit. Whilst food is part of the equation, the importance of the food plan is ensuring it is one that balances out your hormones and reduces any inflammation that could be holding you back. For a lot of my clients, this sees them actually increasing the amount they eat.

The second part of the equation, which is not addressed is solving for the times you eating for reasons other than hunger. For emotional reasons. For many of us, we have built a life where we avoid feeling a certain way by eating, likewise we try and create more pleasure in our life also by eating. 

There is a lot of research on the pleasure centre of our brain. As humans pleasure is part of our experience, and so while some weight loss practitioners will suggest that food should not be a source of pleasure, I personally don’t align with that in my life. There are going to be times that I want the food I eat to provide me with pleasure. For me that might look like enjoying a delicious glass of red in front of the fire, or a glass of champagne while eating sushi.  

Equally though, I don’t want food to be the only place that I get my pleasure from and so I want to ensure that I am building in other things into my life that bring me joy and pleasure, such as bike rides along the beach with my son, reading a great book, going to yoga, catching up with my girl friends. 

If food is your main source of how you generate and receive pleasure you can understand why keeping to a diet becomes so challenging. 

Not only are are you removing all of the pleasure in your life, but because our brain doesn’t like change, it will kick up a fuss, telling you that you will never be happy again if you don’t eat (insert food of choice) it will make you feel terrible, which will only increase your need to feel better and therefore make that (insert food) seem even more important.

If you want to be able to lose weight for good, you need to understand the times you reach out for food for reasons other than hunger and you need to identify what you are really after and then create a plan so that you can support yourself in those moments.

If you want to try this out, I recommend choosing one time of day that you find yourself eating something that you don’t really want. For me it was 3.00pm. I would have school pick up at 3.30pm and I would have spent the day working and running from meeting to meeting. I used to set my day up to get as much in as I could before school pick up, so come 3pm I felt shattered and would find myself seeking out sugar and caffeine to give me some energy before pick up.

When I really assessed what I was after, it was more energy, relief, wanting to feel better. In the 30 minutes I had before school pick up there was little that was as effective in the short term as a pack of chips, some chocolate and a coffee. 

But I also knew that the relief was short lived and the consequence of the snack, which ended up being me writing off the rest of the evening with dinner, wine, popcorn, more chocolate thinking I will just start again tomorrow was too great.

So I chose one day a week to try a different way, one that wouldn’t have me desperately reaching for a snack. I started simple, by just giving myself something else to do at that time. For me it was making myself a cold glass of herbal tea with sparkling water and then getting outside for a quick walk ahead of school pick up.  Hot tip, initially you won’t want to do it. Your brain will object, it likes consistency and so it will just want the chips, but do it anyway. After a few days of consistently doing it, it will become easier, your brains objections less noisy.

Once I felt confident with taking that action, I then started looking at how my day was laid out, and worked out how I could build in more breaks so that I wasn’t so desperate when 3pm came along. Initially I was reluctant as I thought this would mean I wouldn’t get enough done, but actually I found the reverse was true. 

I actually got more work done, as I was more refreshed throughout the day. I also was on to myself. I noticed that I had a tendency to work through the breaks I had planned, but I stopped myself from doing this, as I noticed that when I didn’t honour the plan I created for myself I lost trust and confidence in myself and what I have found is to be able to lose weight, you need to be able to trust yourself, and so even though it felt like skipping a break was such a small thing, it was actually what was preventing me from achieving my goal.

It might seem small, but if there is one thing that I have learnt, it is that the giant changes in our lives are made from the small changes we make and do consistently everyday.

So have a go, if there is a time of day you find yourself reaching for food, for relief, for energy, think of something you could do to replace this and still provide yourself with what you want.