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Is your weight stuck? Are you bouncing up and down the same few pounds? Use these helpful strategies to get your thinking right so the weight stays gone forever.
1.Eat when you are hungry.
Eating when hungry is the most basic tenant of mindful eating and also one of the hardest for people.
Many of us have attempted to override hunger, turn off or ignore hunger and even feel ashamed or guilty for feeling hungry.
If you are early in your weight loss journey or have had many failed weight loss attempts, I encourage you to aim to rarely getting hungry vs. half-starving yourself. You’ve probably gone on diets thinking you need to drastically cut your calories, but this only leads to overeating and binging later.
2.Stop eating when you are full.
When your body signals that you are full, stop eating.
This is another basic that is actually quite challenging if you are out of touch with your body’s hunger and fullness signals. I still have a ways to go, but I’ve made tremendous progress in the last year with this.
This is a primitive, instinctual signal from your body that most people miss. When your body is almost to the point of fullness, you’ll give a small sigh. By paying attention, I’ve discovered that I do this at every single meal but I never noticed it before.
Start to pay attention and when your body gives that small sigh, either stop eating right then or after 1-2 more bites. Your body is telling you it’s had enough for this eating experience.
4. Eat as little as you can to be satisfied.
I’ve always lived my life with the idea that I would try to eat as much as I could or “as much as I could get away with”.
I was raised by a father who lived through the Great Depression when there truly wasn’t enough food available for their family with 8 children. Both my parents were obese. In my family of origin, the unspoken belief was that everyone eats as much as they can get away with eating.
I’ve carried this thinking into my adult life without even realizing it. When I was at my heaviest, I binged on foods in secret and compulsively overate to manage my emotions.
And quite frankly, sometimes I overate simply because I could.
When I started Weight Watchers, I loved gaming the system to get the most out of every point. I looked for high-volume, low point foods that I could eat in huge portions. While there’s nothing wrong with this in some sense, I also see now that it kept me stuck in overeating habits because I wasn’t tuning in to my natural hunger.
A question I ask myself when I sit down to eat is, “How can I eat as little as possible and still be full and totally satisfied until my next meal?”
These mindful eating techniques, which guide you to tune in to your body's hunger and fullness signals, will help you break a weight loss plateau.
