Mind Games

Half of the battle in my weight loss story has revolved around what goes on in my head so I thought I'd focus on this for tonight's post and then resume the food entries tomorrow because quite frankly the human mind is a funny thing (well at least mine is).

Getting myself in the state of mind to sort out my health, my diet and even starting to think about exercise was a matter of getting my mind in the right place initially, this was helped in a big way by my boss making a bet with me that I couldn't loose weight and be in a healthy condition by July this year (I might also note at this juncture that he now claims not to remember what the reward for winning the bet was).

We are programmed by nature to enjoy fat and sweet food, to stock up in times of plenty so that when food is scarce we have some reserves in place, but the only problem is that in modern first world countries it's always a time of plenty so if you loose sight of what you are doing to yourself it is very easy to get into the habit of over eating or filling yourself up with junk food and the trouble with habits is they are very hard to break especially if you like them; as I mentioned in a earlier post you won't be able to give up smoking unless you actually want to and this is also true of eating unhealthy food.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't have chocolate or ice cream or chips but if you are in the situation of wanting or needing to loose weight then you will have to be prepared to give it up for a period of time and then when you reintroduce it to eat it in a different way than you did before and the more disciplined you are with yourself the easier this will be.

If you are having treat days every other day then you are not going to achieve very much other than frustrate yourself or lose heart and give up altogether as in my experience you need to almost perform a factory reset on your brain and then relearn to eat different foods in moderation. If you truly want to loose weight for the long term then you should be making sustainable changes to your lifestyle that you can cope with for the foreseeable future otherwise you'll be forever swinging between being on a diet and not being on one.

I used the cut it out completely method for junk food and this was successful for me, I've lost the craving for sweet junk food to the point where I don't miss it, if I'd said this last year I would have thought myself crazy due to the amount that I was getting through each day! My sweet food is now fruit and low fat yoghurt and I find that I enjoy it and look forward to it just as much as I did a bar of chocolate.

I won't try to pretend that it was easy as it wasn't and I found that at times I had to quite literally grit my teeth to get through the day, prepare myself for the potential temptation that would be around me to the point where I wouldn't touch healthy option desserts or individual biscuits with relatively low calorie counts just in case they triggered me off into my old ways.

The funny thing is that my mind is playing other games with me now that I've got myself into the situation where I've modified my life style to a manageable level. For example tonight I had to finish off some prawns that were going out of date, but I managed to convince myself that I was going to have reheated cooked chicken in my stir fry and this lead to me realising half way through the meal preparation that I would need to use both and this realisation caused me near panic as this was now in my mind twice the amount I should be eating (never mind that by then end of the day I'd still have 454 calories of my 1810 calorie allowance left), in my head this was massively over eating and it caused me quite some distress, but it's not like I'm going to be putting a stone on because of 136 extra calories of prawns is it?!

So it's worth bearing in mind before you commence your health drive that you are going to be your own worst enemy and it's going to be potentially at both ends of the spectrum: "oh I'll just have some sausages tonight, one night won't matter" then the sausagess will become biscuits the following night and so on, or you will crack it and then become paranoid about every little self perceived over eating incident like my prawn issue; another example of this is setting you mind on a specific food from a supermarket and then having a panic attack when they're out of stock as happened to me last week where I'd set my mind on an M&S ham and egg salad and when I got to the shop they only had the version with potato and I didn't buy it because it had an extra 20 calories in comparison when the one I was going to get only had 145 calories in total anyway so 20 extra calories would have made no difference whatsoever!

Now that I'm nearly at my goal weight I've realised that I need to start thinking about eating enough calories to sustain my weight without putting any back on or continuing to loose weight and this is also causing me some worry as I'll be going from eating less than 1810 calories to around 2500 calories a day and I have a genuine fear that I will just resume where I left off and put all the weight back on. Also from my experience of taking the weight off I know that I'm going to have worries about eating too much. Fortunately MyFitnessPal has a maintain weight option so I will still be able to log what I eat until I feel that I can safely trust myself not slip back into my old ways.

So as I said at the beginning of this post half the battle is in your mind and I suppose I could also say that winning this half of the battle is down to knowing that this will happen, being prepared for it and identifying when you are being to lenient or too harsh with yourself.