Losing weight -- psychologically

In My Humble Opinion
1

Ok, so here’s the deal. I know darn well how to lose weight-- I know exactly what foods to eat and not eat, what ways to exercise, etc. But I find I have just so little will power. When confronted with a yummy looking fried food or an excuse not to go work out, I buckle easily. I tend to have an instant gratification problem in general, and I think this is related, but I’m sure others have the same experience. I truly, truly want to lose weight-- but apparently the overriding part of my brain doesn’t? Sometimes I get all excited and get gung-ho about making the right choices, but this invariably happens for a few hours at night and at lunch the next day the fries look awfully tasty… a few hours of zeal can’t sustain a lifestyle decision.

Does anyone have any tips on how to beat the part of your brain that’s won’t let you make the decisions you want to make to lose weight? I fear that everything baically trickles down into the domain of willpower that I don’t have.

2

Where willpower fails, routine can sometimes succeed. Over the course of a year, I managed to lose 65 pounds through diet and exercise, and the only thing that kept me going was the schedule I’d set. I had certain exercise classes I had to go to and a set of nutrition requirements I had to meet. I didn’t consider them optional. At the same time, there were some classes I could attend or not, as I wished, and some food choices I allowed myself once the basic requirements were met.

I’m still not quite sure how I got myself into the frame of mind to truly accomplish it, but I know that one thing saved me: if I failed one day, I didn’t consider myself to have “blown it”. One failure was not an excuse for another, in other words. If I let myself eat a chocolate bar when I didn’t have the calories to spare that day, I didn’t take that to mean that my diet was a lost cause. If I slacked off and didn’t go to an exercise class, that didn’t give me permission to miss the next one as well. I believe this is the same “one day at a time” attitude that works so well in recovery programs.

I also had some success thinking of my exercise and nutrition program (notice I try not to call it a “diet”) as something positive I was doing for myself rather than as a deprivation. This became easier to maintain as I started to feel more fit and healthy. The behavior became its own reward after a few months.

I still have to approach it this way, since successful fitness requires a permanent change in lifestyle. Since Christmas, for instance, I’d started to lapse into some of my old bad habits, like eating junk before I’d had a nutritious meal or skipping exercise when I just didn’t particularly feel like going to the gym. I’ve had to consciously recommit to my relatively new way of life in the past few weeks, but the process is easier because I’ve spent the last three years practicing.

Try not to think of it as “willpower”. Do you manage to get out of bed and go to your job or school most days, even when you’re not particularly enthusiastic about the idea? How do you manage to do that? If you can make yourself be responsible in some areas of your life, you can also make yourself be responsible when it comes to your health, which is, at the end of the day, what getting fit is all about. Believe me, if a person as lazy and lacking in willpower as I am can do it, so can you.

3

Different things work for different people, of course. Certain things I do could make you even hungrier, or they could work like a charm.
First of all, I have very set rules. I do not eat after 7 PM or before 7 AM. I do not eat sugar, except in fruit. I do not eat meat or dairy or anything containing either. I do not eat refined flour, hydrogenated oils, high fructose corn syrup, or any packaged food that has more than two ingredients I cannot picture in their raw form. I don’t eat anything with added oil. The list goes on, but the point is- they’re hard and fast rules. Not, “I should eat healthier” or “I should eat less.”

When I find myself especially tempted by a certain food, whether it fits the criteria or I just slip too often and eat it anyway, I go to the store and pick it up and tell myself, “no. Never again. You’d best just forget it because you’re never going to eat it again. Do you really like it enough to let it make you fat? Is it really worth that many calories?” The answer is always no. I did this because I’d resist, resist, resist, thinking in the back of my mind that eventually I’d break down and eat the forbidden food and it was just a matter of postponing it. When I decided I would never again break down on that particular food, I didn’t.

I document every morsel that goes into my mouth. Every single calorie, rounded up by five (or more if I didn’t consume all the food I measured out or if I’m afraid the measurement isn’t accurate) A cookie stops being a nice yummy thing and starts just being 80 nasty calories that I don’t need. It keeps me from going over my limit and it keeps me from mindlessly munching or eating because I’m bored or sad rather than because I need it.

Along those same lines, I measure EVERYTHING. It keeps me accountable to myself. I can’t lie to myself and say “I ate only one serving of carrots” when I ate a whole plate.
Make meal plans a week in advance and stick to them. Eat as much as you know you need, number-wise, and no more.

eat SLOWLY. Cut your food into little pieces and eat them one by one, savoring each bit. that way, you’ll get bored with the food before you’ve finished and you’ll eat less and not still be hungry afterwards.

Think about the ingredients while you eat. The oil. The sugar. Visualize each as though you’re eating them straight. When you visualize the oil, feel the oil in your mouth and on your lips. With the sugar, imagine granulated white sugar and you’ll be able to taste it. It’s gross. Chances are you won’t be able to finish whatever you’re eating.
This won’t work in the long run, but can give you a boost- try pills. Diuretics, diet pills, things that guarantee quick weight loss. They won’t help you keep off the weight, but sometimes that’s the motivation you really need. I know when I look in the mirror and think, “I’m so fat! I haven’t lost any weight! Losing weight is hard!” I want to go lay on the couch and eat ice cream (I won’t, of course, because it’s against the rules.) but if I take a diuretic and step on the scale with my dehydrated self and go, “whoopee! three pounds down!” it makes me want to go to the gym and lose more because, even though I know logically that it’s not “real” weight, I feel like I’m getting somewhere. (of course, after taking diuretics, I drink water. I’m not stupid.)

set incremental goal weights along the way. Trying to lose, say, 107 lb is a big and overwhelming idea. Trying to lose 14 is a lot more manageable. After you’ve listed your goal weights all the way down to your ultimate goal, write your next goal or how much you have to go unitl your next goal down on the inside of your wrist (it helps if you wear a wristwatch or long sleeves) where only you know it’s there and it’s peeking at you all day.

4

That’s something I’ve struggled with for a long time. Lately, I’ve been telling myself “just because you’re around food doesn’t mean you need to eat it.” You know, you can have the mozzarella sticks later, it’s not like you’ll never have the chance to eat them again. On some level, you have to be frustrated enough with the shape you’re in that the “it’s so tasty” excuse doesn’t work anymore. Which do you want more: to lose the weight, or have the food?

It’s that kind of a thing. Saying you want to lose weight doesn’t mean anything; if you want it, you have to prove it by doing.

5

The concept of willpower is a crock. It’s a negative thought cycle to begin with. (hmm, I’m going to focus really hard not to do something right now)

Find something else you enjoy to replace eating when you know you’re not really hungry, but need to get that feeling of satisfaction.

I’ve struggled with it too, and binge ate heavily for a while. I would eat loads of food and still not feel satisfied. It wasn’t that I was necessarily hungry for food, but I was hungry for the feeling of self-gratification, and I was trying to use food as a substitute.

It doesn’t work.

6

If it makes you feel better, very few people have that sort of willpower. Of people who diet, most don’t lose much more than 10% of their weight, and of those who do, the overwhelming majority (90-95% or so) regain it within a few years. The hypothalamus is a tough bastard to beat. After about 10% or so weight loss it slows down your metabolism and encourages you to eat more (regardless of how fat you were to begin with). cf leptin. It’s like what the brain does when the CO2 goes up in your blood - it makes breathing seem more and more attractive. Only with food the process is slower - over months or years. But the upshot is, if you think it’s hard to lose weight, it’s going to be even tougher to maintain weight loss.

This is why you get lots of advice from people who’ve lost weight in the recent past, but not so much from people who’ve lost weight a decade ago and kept it off. They’re like the yeti - hard to find to the point of being practically mythical. There’s actually a bunch of researchers out in RI or somewhere who set out to collect these specimens in an internet registry to study why they’re successful. IIRC, they began requiring like 50 lbs or so with 3 or 5 years maintenance, but they’ve since relaxed the requirements to 30 lbs and 1 year maintenance. One person I’ve heard claims that’s because people kept gaining out of the registry, but I think that’s very cynical.

Anyhoo. That’s not to say it’s impossible. I believe there are several dopers who say they’ve done it. But don’t torture yourself over your lack of willpower. The people who accomplish serious weight loss permanently are the mutants. Nature gave you a brain that wants you to eat like it wants you to breathe; goes apeshit when you lose weight; and doesn’t particuarly mind when you gain.

Oh, here’s the website for the registry. These people are very optimistic, and if anybody’s got good ideas, it’s them.

Bear in mind, that a small weight loss (5% or so) may be sufficient for maximum health benefits. For various reasons the epidimiological studies taht follow people who have lost weight are equivocal about whether a large weight loss is really good for you in the long run. There’s a lot of controversy over the issue. Put me in the camp that is decidedly uncertain.

7

I can relate a little. I was chunky for 6 months and still couldn’t stop the habits that got me chunky in the first place.

I don’t know what to say except that one day, something snapped in me one day and I got fed up with myself. You simply don’t desire to lose weight badly enough, one way or another. In my case, I began training for a marathon, and to get the necessary edge, I threw out all what little sugary & processed foods I had (I was eating outside the house most of the time), bought a TON of fruit & veggies. I cut them up & washed them as soon as I brought them home, right away, so they’re ready to serve. Mornings consist of packing 4 cups’ worth, no dressing, in a lunchbag. I’ve also left my purse in the trunk of my car so I don’t get tempted by restaurants at work.

Fruits and vegetables are quite cheap at the Costco here. $6.49 for 6 pints of strawberries, $5 for a 5-lb bag of mixed frozen vegetables, and so on. I’ve not only lost weight, I’ve saved lots of money over buying lunch. As a side bonus, I’ve gotten quite interested in cooking.

But, the main point is, you have to really, really want to lose weight before you can do it, and it sounds like you’re not doing it well enough. I’m not sure how to speed up the process, except to say that hating yourself is not the right way to go. On the contrary, if I see fried entries on a menu, I think about trans fats and heart attacks and tell myself I can’t be loving myself very much if I order that item.

8

Mine is a simple but effective mantra:

“Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.”
If you think about it, nothing really does. And once you’ve swallowed that last bite and the taste is just a memory, your body is busy storing it into fat and you feel guilty about having eaten something you didn’t really need. So it’s a bit of pleasure in the moment with an immediate two punch of negatives that last and last… :frowning:

9

These tips might not work for you, but it is how I lost the weight I did, and kept most of it off for over 2 years. The big thing that helped me to drop the weight was having a reason to lose it. For me health wasn’t a big enough motivator. What is your reason for losing the weight? It has to matter to you more than eating what you want when you want. My motivation was a lady I met one weekend. Try not to think I am losing weight to lose weight. Think I am losing weight to do X, and X is fun/worth it. If X isn’t worth the work then you will talk yourself into quiting.

Next tip for success is to start small. Don’t start with “I want to drop 75lbs!” Start with something like “I want to wear one size smaller clothes.” Once you hit that then pick another easy goal. Instead of one big goal that takes forever to get to, use a dozen small goals you can do in no more than a month. My first couple goals do not follow the less than a month advice, but there was no other way I could measure progress. I started out with the goal of being able to weigh myself on a scale that didn’t involve having to wait in line with semi trucks. Then the goal became being able to weigh myself on a bathroom scale. Then to no longer have to buy clothes at a big and tall store. Then the final goal was to make weight to be able to join the military. If your goal is achivable then you will see you can do it, you will feel good, and will keep going. If your goal is too hard to get to you will start thinking “I can’t make it”, and you will talk yourself into quiting.

The third tip is related to the second one. Don’t over do anything. Don’t go from not working out at all to spending an hour in the gym every day. Don’t go from eating everything you want to eating 3 meals that would starve a hamster. Instead of spending an hour at the gym try walking around the block every day. Time yourself. Every couple days try to beat your best time. Once you get to the point where you can’t beat your best time then add a block to your walk. Repeat. Once you get to the point where leaving the house to work out dosen’t scare you then think about the gym. Instead of cutting your food intake all at once try to remove one thing that is bad for you. Stop drinking soda, and drink something else. Don’t take cash for the vending machine with you to work. Sit down and pay attention to your food when you eat instead of doing three things at once. I started out by giving up soda. I moved to unsweatened ice tea for the caffine without the sugar. Then moved to water. I stopped snacking and ate 3 meals a day, but ate whatever I wanted at those meals. Once I was used to doing that I cut back on the amount I ate at each meal till I was down to normal portions. I was still eating what I wanted. I just ate less of it, and paid attention to it. More enjoyment out of less food. For exersize I walked the block every night. Once I got it down to 6 minutes I couldn’t improve on that. I added a second block. Slowly increased it till I was walking a 9 block area. Then I started zig zagging through the blocks to add distance. I started to jog the first block then walk the rest. Then jog one walk one repeated. After that I started going to a high school track and used it. If you start small it will become part of your day, and you will keep doing it. If you start large you will think of it as something extra in your day, and it is easier to rationalize not doing something that takes an hour to do than something that takes 5 minutes.

Keep your reason to lose the weight. If your reason to lose the weight goes away then you will probably put it back on. Summer is gone, no more swimsuits. You put on weight during the winter with the baggy clothes hiding the gain. If you lose your reason find another. Even if you haven’t lost your reason to drop the weight always look for another reason. The more reasons the more motivation. When the girl I lost the weight for left me I gained 15lbs in about 10 days. I realized that I actually felt better at the lower weight, and the feeling was better than eating what I wanted. I got myself back into a positive attitude, and lost more weight. I met another lady (the current Mrs. Otanx), and also decided to join the military. That gave me several new reasons to lose the weight, and keep it off. If your motivation goes away then there is no reason not to eat that gallon of ice cream, and you will lose all the progress you made.

The final tip I can give is to fit the changes into your life. Don’t try to fit your life to the changes. Don’t deny yourself something you enjoy doing that dosen’t affect your weight to lose weight. Don’t deny yourself time with friends so you can go work out. You will just start to hate having to workout. Instead find another time to workout. Do it in the morning before work, or during lunch. Fit it into your schedule, don’t fit your schedule to it. When I started it was easy to walk in the afternoon becuase it didn’t take long. After awhile it became harder to find the time. Instead of denying myself time with friends I moved my workout to the morning before work. If your work out dosen’t take anything from you then you are more likley to do it. If you have to give up something for the work out you will feel the work out is denying you whatever it is, and feel that you can skip it.

OK, I lied. The final tip is not to think of it as a diet, but as a change of life. When people think of a diet they think of something they do to lose x number of lbs, and then they can quit. To keep it off you can’t quit. Try not to use the term diet. Instead think of it as finding new things you want to do that also help you keep the weight off. If you think of it as a change of life you won’t be thinking about how much you will enjoy being off the diet. If you think of it as a diet you will just think about all the “bad” things you can do once you lose the weight, and the more you think about them the harder it is to stay away from them. The main goal is to make your changes part of your life so you don’t even need to think about not drinking a 12 pack of soda a day. Change your life so that eating healthy is normal, and not something you have to think about.

The biggest psychological hurdle to losing weight is making it something you want more than what you are being denied by doing it. Once it is something you want then you will do it. All the tips above are geared towards making it easier to want to lose weight by reducing what you have to give up to lose the weight. The less you have to give up the more the balance tips towards weight loss being something you want.

-Otanx

10

I make it a kind of game with myself: how little can I eat and still be okay?

The first few days of this are sort of disheartening. But after those few days, when you get on the scale and you’ve lost weight, it’s a pretty powerful reward and motivating factor. I guess that’s my piece of advice: do it long enough to lose some weight, and see if that isn’t a really strong positive reinforcement.

My secret weapon is soup. Homemade vegetable soup. I can have a big bowl for lunch, and it has so much fiber that it tides me over till dinner.

I also let myself have a tiny bit of 85% cocoa chocolate every day. It’s so intense that it calms my sweet cravings (well, usually), and has way less sugar and fat than lower cocoa content chocolate.

11

Most of the others have covered the complex stuff so I’ll stick with the basics.

“Willpower” is not a total crock as you need to establish some basis for self discipline in your eating and knowledge of what you’re eating , but it’s a useless conceit if you think WILLPOWER is the main road to losing weight successfully, it’s not, your appetite will aways win.

You need to remember that concept, because no matter how you fight it - Your appetite will always win if you are hungry. You will never dominate your appetite, you can only satisfy it. Losing weight is all about appetite control and how you satisfy it .

So what to do if you want to lose weight and keep it off?

First, and this part involves work not will power. It can be fun or tedious, but it has to be done. You have to count calories in some fashion. Some diet programs like Weight Watchers make this easier with various “selection A+B” methods of portion control, but most successful dieters just record what they eat and the calories involved directly. For food made from scratch you’ll need a small calorie guide to make estimates, and after a month or two the calorie guidelines will mostly all be in your head and you can leave the book home. You can keep a running total in your head or enter it all at the end of the day. I just use a word processor document to keep a daily list of food and calories consumed and start a new one every 3 months when the doc starts getting lengthy. You can use a book dairy or whatever other method works for you, but the key is that if you need to lose some serious weight (10’s of pounds or more) you’ve got to keep a record of what you eat.

In gauging required calories you first need to answer the question of "How much do I need to eat to maintain, gain or lose weight? There are a number of purported metabolic requirement calorie calculators on the web, and they are mostly useless. This one is by far the most accurate and scientifically sound metabolic requirements calculator I’ve found, and will tell you what you can afford to consume in the way of calories with a high degree of accuracy.

As a side note, and something not a lot of people realize, is that planned physical exercise is not really necessary in this context with respect to losing weight, and excuses that “I’m not strong or well enough to exercise so I can’t lose weight” are really sort of silly, and a bit pathetic. Exercise is good and useful and should be a main component of a healthy lifestyle, but with respect to losing weight the amount of body fat burned due directly to exercise over and above the metabolic needs of a sedentary lifestyle is generally relatively small in comparison to the calories burned in the human body that are expended simply in keeping your body temperature around 98 degrees or so. If you look at the number of additional calories burned (vs being sedentary) by moderate levels of exercise it’s remarkably small unless you’re involved in fairly intensive levels of exercise.

So, exercise is very good for you and you should exercise if you can, but planned exercise is NOT necessary to lose weight, and if you are morbidly obese or prone to injury saying you can’t lose weight because you can’t exercise is just silly. What goes into your mouth is the main determinant of your weight not the number of crunches you can do or the miles you walk.
Once you have this number range of required calories you can construct a daily diet around it.

And here is the core concept and where most of the work in dieting is involved.

You can eat whatever you wish, whenever you wish, however you wish, but when you get to your approximate calorie limit you stop. You Just Stop. The commonsense goal is allocating your calories across the day in an a way that satisfies your appetite meal to meal. So the main question then becomes "How can I prepare, or manage to have, tasty, satisfying low calorie, healthy foods and snacks available to me all the live long day? Unless you have a personal dietitian and cook like Oprah the answer is “grunt work and preparation”.

You need to shop for low fat meats, salads, crackers instead of breads, vegetables etc. etc. etc. Stuff you like and can make a meal or a lunch around that will be filling enough to be satisfying so “willpower” is unnecessary. And I’m going to be brutally honest here, if you’re unable or unwilling to commit to the shopping, preparation, storage and overall effort of making tasty low calorie food available to you then you really are just fucking around, and your desire to lose weight is not as great as your desire for convenience.

The issue isn’t “willpower” it’s simply personal choice, and if the value of being less heavy isn’t (to you) worth the grunt work and prep involved in getting your food options arranged, then that’s ultimately your choice. And for a considerable time that was the dysfunctional choice I made, and it’s the choice lots of people make every day. In the end it’s not willpower or some grinding commitment to exercise, it’s simply the willingness to spend the time and effort shopping and stocking and preparing to have good foods ready to eat when you are hungry and that’s the bottom line for long term weight control.

An overweight person with a large appetite, who is disinclined to exercise can still make choices about what they eat and lose lots of weight. If you refuse to get involved in surrounding your lifestyle with healthy, satisfying choices that control your appetite then surgery is probably your only hope.

12

Thanks for all the psyching, guys, it’s really helpful so far. :slight_smile:

Woah there, let’s not get too drastic here, I’m only about 30 pounds overweight. :wink:

13

A few people have touched on it, but to make it blatantly obvious: One of the easiest ways I found to lose wait is not have high-calorie junk foods around. I blame my mother (ok, not really…she and my sister are thin enough that Little Debbies aren’t hurting them any).

When I went off to college and even moreso when I got my own apartment (and thus my own kitchen), I had to make decisions every time I went to the store, what would be good for me and what would pull me away from my goal. I decided to not buy things that were bad for me. If it’s not there, you can’t eat it.

Following that basic advice:

Find good-for-you snack foods, and keep them around instead of (not along with) the high-calorie foods. The calorie concept astro mentioned is the basis, but good-for-you snack foods generally have fewer calories, so you can eat more of them. A handful of baby carrots has 100 calories or less (depending on your hands. . .). A big dill pickle, you can eat those things all day long, pretty much. A big one has 25 or fewer calories. A grape has about two calories. An orange has less than 100. You get the idea. Three 400 calorie meals per day plus three 100-calorie snacks per day is only 1500 calories total.

Don’t drink your calories, they won’t fill you up. Don’t buy regular pop/soda, and don’t keep granulated sugar around (for sweetening drinks) unless you bake (and then consider Splenda’s baking blend). Drink diet soda/pop, if you aren’t already. I find when I’m sitting at home, I drink like a fish, whether it’s water, pop, koolaid, whatever. An 8 oz can of Mountain Dew has about 110 calories, and it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for me to drink four or five of them in a day. A cup of sugar has 774 calories, and it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to make a pitcher of iced tea or kool-aid and drink all or most of it in one day. So, drink diet and use Splenda or Equal or whatever for tea or kool-aid, if you drink it. I still go through as much beverage as I used to, I just get no calories from it. Or just drink water . . .

14

This sounds counterintuitive but have you tried thinking a lot about the unhealthy food you want to eat? I do this all the time, not because I’m trying to lose weight but because I’m a cheap-ass and it stops me from buying junk food all the time. Suppose you want to eat a chocolate cake. You imagine the cake… mmm, chocolate. And then you imagine the taste, the texture, how it feels in your hand and in your mouth, the sweetness, going back for a second slice, the slightly sour aftertaste, feeling a little sick and bloated because you’ve had too much cake, etc. For me if I think about a food for long enough I stop wanting to have it.

15

Fred Anderson wrote a book called ‘chunk to hunk’, he also has a website

http://www.chunktohunk.com/main

His view is similiar to yours, that willpower is not very effective. He felt that using psychology to change his self image was a better way to lose weight & get healthy. instead of fighting his urges he tried to rebuild his self identity so that he felt compelled to eat healthy and it required willpower to not eat healthy.

Think of it this way, when was the last time you ate seal meat? Probably never. However if your neighbor was raised in Alaska he probably eats seal meat all the time since his sense of identity is tied into that kind of lifestyle.

So he tried to change his identity and he lost alot of weight. To be fair his wife tried the same thing and didn’t lose nearly as much weight. However it can be more effective than using willpower.

What helped me learn to eat healthy was different motivations. A junk food diet is tied into numerous mental problems like depression & schizophrenia due to the poor quality of fats and vitamin deficiencies in a junk food diet. So once I realized that in order to be happier I had to eat healthier to build a better brain my motivation shot up alot to eat health(ier). Fred Anderson addressed this fact a bit in his book when he said “I don’t want to live in the body that big macs built”.

16

My worst lapses tend to occur when I let myself get too hungry and/or low blood sugar. It’s like I fall into a hole and need to eat my way out, preferably with lots of carbs. So remembering to have things like an apple, carrot sticks with cheese, or yogurt with nuts around for a healthy snack can prevent me from a big slip up with an entire pan of spaghetti, etc.

17

That’s kind of like another thing I do. I am both trying to lose some weight and a cheapass, therefore I often imagine the dollars draining out of my pocket when I go to buy food, and it makes me less eager to go through with it. :slight_smile: