That’s right, eating less and moving more is the best, most popular strategy among those who successfully lose weight.
In contrast, the cavemen, the Atkins-ish and Ornish-ish, the liquid diets, the fasts, and all the specially designed diet foods—all those “reduced-calorie delivery systems” with appealing pitch people—just don’t work. As the article stated “Liquid diets, nonprescription diet pills, and popular diets had no association with successful weight loss.”
Plus, and this is really good hopeful news, more than half of those who try report losing clinically significant amounts of weight. Take this to heart: if you try, and if you avoid the hucksters and the fads and use common sense (move more, eat less), there’s a better than even chance you’ll lose significant weight. It’s a simple secret the diet industry does not want you to know: less in and more out.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that everyone who tries is on the road to supermodel-dom; that all the body-image issues our consumer culture inculcates will simply disappear; that cravings disappear and impulse-control all of sudden becomes effortless; or that our thirst for immediate results will be slaked by the slow, incremental day-to-day progress of weight loss. It’s just that if you set out to lose weight and adopt the “eat-less move-more” strategy then there’s ample reason to be hopeful.
But as useful as this research is there is still something important missing: How do you do it? How do you eat less and exercise more? How does one implement the “eat-less move-more” strategy? In other words, how to meet the challenge of making weight loss psychologically sustainable so it becomes your own personal “new normal?”
We know will-power alone won’t work; few have enough will-power to sustain deprivation and discipline for the long run. One’s “new normal” of fewer calories and more exercise has got to be a net positive in the mental wealth ledger; weight loss can’t be a long-term fixed-cost.
Part of the answer is “culinary mindfulness.” Being mindful of not just what one eats and how much one eats, but how and with whom and why one eats makes it possible to find additional sources of satisfaction. Eating less becomes an opportunity to eat better, eat slower, eat with more awareness, and eat with more fun. It’s becomes a joy to discover that there is more to enjoying food than rapidly scarfing as much salt, grease, and sugar as one can manage.
Culinary mindfulness includes both choosing food with the greatest potential to provide satisfaction and doing so in ways that maximizes enjoyment. It’s about both the food and you. For example:
• Expand awareness of the sensual pleasures food can bring. Slow down and appreciate the look, smell, feel, and taste of what goes in your mouth.
• Nurture the social pleasures that have always been attached to shopping, cooking, and eating. Feeling love and a good feed have gone together since infancy and there’s no reason to change that.
• Develop awareness of the meaning of what it is you eat so that eating becomes an expression of personal values. Eating is not just a political and agricultural act, it is an act of self-expression.
• Cultivate skills in shopping and cooking so they become opportunities for engagement and fun rather than remain meaningless, empty chores. Meals are not problems in search of solutions, they’re daily opportunities to do something fun.
The other part of the answer is finding ways to enjoy exercise. Finding joy in movement has fueled activity ever since we gleefully got up on our wobbly legs to toddle off after new adventures. Today’s key is the same, enjoy moving more rather than forcing oneself to participate in draconian gym rituals. Those rituals are fine if you’re a gym rat like me and you enjoy running and sweating and lifting. But there’s so much more, there’s an amazing world of movement options out there: dance, walk, hike, bike, take the stairs, yoga, pilates, swim, tae kwon do, rumba, skate, blade, aerobics and so on and so on. Find something you enjoy doing and do it so it can become self-sustaining so that the more you move the more you want to move.
I know no one likes change. And weight loss is change, big change. But it can be a change that is not just healthy, possibly life-saving. The weight loss strategy of “eat-less and move-more” can also become a joy and not a chore if you develop your own personal, psychologically sustainable approach. So, if you’re overweight and need to lose some pounds, be sure to seek more joy at the table and in the kitchen, as well as at the gym or studio or hiking trail or wherever. To lose, go and find some fun!
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