The Mental Game of Weight Loss

December 8, 2016 | All Articles, post-tsb-team |

By JSCepeda

The scale and your feet meet for the trillionth time in the last thirty-five years. Meetings include, but are not limited to the night before a blind date and your favorite dress couldn’t zip. Distressed, but determined to get into the dress, you duct taped the zippered sides together and paired it with a black sequined cardigan, which is suddenly two sizes too small. When did that happen!

The next meeting was in the height of your thirty-pound weight loss, all by doing the right steps or so you thought: 60 gallons of water a day, two hour workouts and no carbs! Everything is great when you see how well you’ve done, until you decide to reward yourself with two for one margaritas and ten cent tacos at the local Mexican dive bar. Feeling bloated and downright disgusted with yourself, you embark on another quest to shake the binge eating monster that often gets the best of you and ultimately, most of us.

How can we confront the struggles of weight loss, when the real menace is our brain? Our mental state is the biggest contributing factor in our quest to quit binge eating. To gain control of our eating habits, we need to identify the triggers which cause us to over eat. Keeping track can help us confront the triggers that leads us down the slippery slope of weight gain and putting us on the path to permanent, long term weight loss. Here are some tips we can use to help face the hindrances of achieving successful weight loss:

Keep a Journal: By keeping track of what triggers your binge eating, you can identify those critical moments that has hindered your weight loss success in the past.
Get Rid of Bad Habits: Even with any amount of weight loss, our past mistakes like rewarding ourselves with food after a success is an overall bad habit. Instead, treat yourself to a spa day. A hot bath. A good book. The point is to replace the need for food with something mentally fulfilling.
Get Moving- Going for a walk can be very mentally gratifying when the need for food takes over. A long walk can help put our thoughts into perspective and release happy endorphins, which contributes to overall mental calmness.
Meditation- Another way to help relieve stressful binge eating is meditation. Focusing your attention to your thoughts and breathing in as little as five minutes a day can help people manage stress, a contributing factor to binge eating.

Being able to persist when faced with road blocks and pushing through when the desire to give up is overwhelming is the most important foundation to successful weight loss. By following the tips, you will help relieve the stress of unnecessary binge eating and eventually gain a healthier mental perspective of your weight loss journey.