Reframing Your Mind For Sustainable Weight Loss
As you’re making changes to lose weight and to improve your health, remember…
You’re not dieting…you’re making changes to your lifestyle.
I know this sounds like I’m playing a word game, but this distinction is actually very important and challenges a lot of what “diet culture” has ingrained in us.
When a lot of people think about losing weight, they often think:
“I’ll just cut out fruits, carbs, and desserts for x months, lose the weight, and then I can go back to my normal eating habits” or…
“If I go to the gym and hit it hard for 2 hours a day, then I’ll lose weight, and then I can cut back on that gym time or stop going to the gym all together” or…
“I just need my doctor to prescribe me weight loss medicine for a couple of months to get me going so I can lose weight and get off my diabetes meds.”
Now, there’s nothing wrong with trying some of these techniques in the immediate phase of your weight loss and health improvement journey, but you have to make sure you transition from those techniques to ones that are sustainable in the long term, because
Whatever you do to improve your health and lose weight, you need to keep doing to maintain those changes.
If you go back to the habits and lifestyles you were living before, then it’s likely you’re going to end up where you started, because the changes you make don’t cure obesity, they manage it.
The lifestyle changes you make don’t cure obesity, they manage it.
Learn more: Why Defining Obesity as a Disease Matters
Think about a person with diabetes, for a minute. When they adjust their nutrition, increase their physical activity, and take their medications as prescribed by their healthcare provider, their blood sugar control usually improves. However, if they stop taking their meds, no longer do their physical activity, and/or revert back to their old nutrition plan, then their blood sugar control will likely revert back to where it was before. This example helps reinforce the very important concept of:
Whatever you do to improve your health (or to lose weight), you need to keep doing to maintain those changes. If you go back to the habits and lifestyle you were living before, then it’s likely you’re going to lose the progress that you made and return to where you started.
This is why some individuals have trouble maintaining the weight loss and health improvements they’ve made.
Along with the fact that good habits can be hard to maintain, this is also due, in part, to diet culture teaching us that once we do __(blank)__, we fix the problem that caused us to be overweight and have obesity…but that’s not how it works, unfortunately.
Alright, let’s look back at those examples I used earlier and see how we might change them from ones rooted in a dieting mentality to ones that are more of a lifestyle change:
Instead of thinking, “I’ll just cut out fruits, carbs, and desserts for x months, lose the weight, and then I can go back to my normal eating habits”…
A healthier mindset would be: “I should increase the amount of fruit in my diet, make sure that I eat highly refined and processed carbs more sparingly, and make dessert a treat and not an everyday thing.”
Instead of thinking, “If I go to the gym and hit it hard for 2 hours a day, then I’ll lose weight, and then I can cut back on that gym time or stop going to the gym altogether”...
A healthier mindset would be: “I should first check with my doctor to make sure what physical activities are safe for me to do, and then maybe make sure I do at least 60 minutes of aerobic physical activity every day. It’s ok if I build up to that slowly and do it in multiple bouts throughout the day because my work schedule and my kids’ schedules are hectic!”
Instead of thinking, “I just need my doctor to prescribe me weight loss medicine for a couple of months to get me going so I can lose weight and get off my diabetes meds”...
A healthier mindset would be: “I need to talk to my doctor to see if there are any medications that will help me with my goal of losing weight and will be safe for me to take long-term so that I can decrease the amount of medications I’m taking for my other health issues.”
I hope these examples help you change your mindset from one focused on “dieting” to one that’s focused on creating healthy, sustainable lifestyle changes.
This mindset shift is also important because treating obesity, losing weight, and maintaining that weight loss is more complex than just fixing something you’ve done “wrong,” such as following the wrong diet, missing an intense day at the gym, slipping up and having one cookie, etcetera, etcetera.
Finally, I hope hearing this helps you change your mindset about which weight loss strategies are going to be sustainable for you and help you achieve the life you want.
Similar reading: The Truth About Weight Loss