Reprogramming your mind to lose weight is a strategy that helps you maintain focus on diet and physical activity on a constant basis, so that healthy eating and exercise become a natural habit in your daily life, which favors weight maintenance. of the appropriate weight for longer, avoiding the known accordion effect.
To reprogram the mind, it is necessary to identify bad habits and exchange them for a healthier routine that is also enjoyable, as only then will healthy habits truly remain.
So, here are 7 tips to help with this mental reprogramming process:
1. Believing that you are capable
Really believing that you are capable of losing weight and changing your lifestyle is necessary to make your brain predisposed to face difficulties and fight harder to achieve the desired dream.
On the other hand, when imagining that it will be just another failed diet attempt, the brain gets used to it and accepts defeat, not fighting enough to achieve victory.
2. Avoid weighing yourself all day
Weighing yourself every day generates constant anxiety about the result of the scale, which does not differentiate, for example, whether weight gain or loss was due to fat or lean mass. Furthermore, one or more bad results on the scale can lead to a complete abandonment of healthy eating and routine, generating a new cycle of weight gain.
Therefore, it is recommended that weighing be done at most once a week, but at least once every two months, to monitor body weight gain or loss.
3. Provide psychological counseling
Consultation with a psychologist helps to understand the reasons for uncontrolled eating and excessive weight gain, which can often be the result of problems in childhood or relationships.
Psychological support develops a greater ability to deal with emotions and helps to build new healthy habits to replace bad habits, such as consuming too much alcohol, fast food and soft drinks.
4. Remember and value each achievement
Valuing and maintaining focus on each achievement, even if small, generates a domino effect of motivation that increases the frequency of good achievements and better results. Thus, on days when the diet is followed, but physical activity is not carried out, for example, you should try to focus on the positive side of having followed the diet well, and not on the failure of the training.
However, despite having to value each achievement, it is also important to make a commitment to try to do again the next day that part that ended in failure or frustration, as this maintains the spirit of achievement and overcoming.
5. Don’t just focus on appearance
During physical activity, for example, it is important to focus on the feeling of pleasure and mission accomplished that the exercise brings, and not just on the still unwanted appearance in the mirror.
Remembering that following your diet and training well brings a good feeling to the body and helps you maintain positive choices more easily, as good memories give rise to the desire to repeat that action and, after some time, this repetition will become a habit.
6. Practice new patterns of behavior
It is natural for the brain to like routines and create habit patterns for actions that are repeated frequently and that bring a feeling of pleasure or achievement. However, you need to be careful because the brain also creates automatic repetition patterns for unhealthy actions, such as overeating and being too lazy to exercise.
Therefore, it is important to start the diet and physical activity with the determination to correctly follow what was planned for at least a few weeks, because the longer an action is repeated, the more it becomes automatic for the brain and the easier it will be for Keep it as a natural habit in your daily routine.
7. Set real goals
Setting real goals is important to generate a cycle of small victories, which together will bring more stimulus and determination to achieve the final objective. On the other hand, when setting very difficult goals, feelings of defeat and failure become more constant, bringing a feeling of incapacity and the desire to give up.
Talking to professionals such as a nutritionist and physical educator is a good strategy for planning real goals and facilitating the path to achievement.
