Mindset, Fat Loss And The Move From Diet Thinking To Lifestyle Thinking

November 13th, 2012 by

If you approach a task such as losing weight with seemingly automatic negative thoughts it’s likely doomed to fail right from the outset.

It’s a mindset issue, and it’s one that needs a major overhaul and a move away from deprivation, diet prison, isolation, etc., if your journey is going to be an enjoyable, sustainable and maintainable one – one where you come out on top successful as opposed to failing … again.

Yes, a caloric deficit is a fat-loss requirement, there’s no getting around this dietary fact and yes, deficits will lead to hunger, which is a biological imperative when it comes to the context of successful fat loss/getting lean. You simply have to eat less than your body requires. No argument here.

However, the issue is the ‘food rules’ you, the media and the industry have created. It’s the mental act of identifying foods as ‘bad’ or ‘forbidden’ and restricting consumption of all these ‘bad’ foods. THIS is the root of the issue.

Come on, I think most of you if you’re honest with yourself would have to admit that you have labeled foods good and bad. And when you cave, what do you go for? The ‘bad foods’. You rebel!!!

Fat loss is not about good vs bad foods; it is about primarily about less – the energy deficit. In the context of fat loss, quantity trumps quality. Don’t read what i am not saying here though … i know at least some of you will come back with some silly comment like – “so i can just eat only Ben & Jerry’s and get ripped?” Not what I said.

It’s the difference b/w restrained eating (rooted in the dietary rules of good and bad which facilitate the mindset of deprivation) vs simply eating in an energy deficit; again it’s the dietary boundaries associated with restrained eating that wind up causing people issues and draining ‘willpower’.

The tighter the rules, the bigger the binge when you crack. Look what happens to these fish and vegetable contest dieters once the show is over? They go ballistic on anything they can get in their mouths. Well no wonder!!

Resist, resist, resist – want, want, want. Cravings anyone? A mindset issue – wanting what we think we can’t have and then given our ‘food rules’, when we do? The flood gates open and it’s eat, eat, eat. “I already blew it anyway, might as well make it count.” (Flat Tire Phenomenon?)

Start to look at food as food, ALL food as food. And begin working on abandoning the food labels of ‘good/healthy foods’ vs ‘bad/off-limits foods’.

This is one important step in the move from the diet prison to the freedom of a lifestyle.