Tips for staying with the program
This week, I am featuring Tips for staying with the program from chapter 7 in my book, Becoming Slender For Life. If you are having any thoughts of faltering in your goal to lose weight, this post is for you.
Slender For Life™ Weight Loss Hypnosis can help you to lose weight, keep your commitment to yourself and have lasting weight loss success.
Your Hypnosis Health Info Hypnotic Suggestion for today:
I keep my commitment to myself and remain slender for life.
Tips for staying with the program
Some of these suggestions are courtesy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the American Dietetic Association.
- Diet Mistake # 1: Most dieters don’t eat enough.Result? They get so hungry, they give up.
- Diet Mistake # 2: Most dieters want to lose weight too fast. Result? They get so impatient, they give up. Because eating too little food makes us hungry, and hunger makes us miserable, to feel better we eat cookies and cakes. The result? Goodbye eating plan.
- If you get stuck at a weight plateau, hidden fats may be a cause. Some vegetarian food products add extra fat to compensate for lack of meat flavor. Always check the label. Another solution is to eat more vegetables and fewer starches.
- Increase your workout by 10-15 minutes AND change your workout routine. Changing the type of exercise you do, or the duration, gives your metabolism an extra boost and helps to burn extra calories.
- If you are an ovo-lacto vegetarian, don’t overdo the cheese and other calorie-dense dairy foods. Cheese is 30 percent fat!
- And don’t go hog wild with mayo. Mayonnaise is 80 percent fat!
- If you aren’t feeling full enough, maybe you aren’t eating the right things. Include regular helpings of complex carbs, like whole wheat bread, whole grain cereal, oats and rice in your weight release plan. These foods fill you up and prevent you overeating fattening foods like cheese pizzas.
- If you start to regain weight, examine your recent eating behaviors. Careless vegetarian dieting can cause low levels of dietary nutrition, which in turn may lead to a slowdown in metabolic rate and actually cause weight gain.
- You may be overeating because you’re wolfing down your chow. Slow down! When you eat too fast, you end up ingesting more food before your body has a chance to figure out you’re satisfied.
- There are conflicting reports on whether or not this is relevant, but it won’t hurt to test it for yourself. Don’t eat right before going to bed. Try not to eat within three hours of retiring. Your metabolism slows down during later hours and is very low while sleeping.
Tips for staying with the program (continued)
- Need a trick to help with that one? Brush your teeth right after dinner. Many people find they don’t want to eat after that point in their daily routine.
- Need a good visual rule to eat by? Eat big to get small. When you choose fruits, vegetables and hearty soups, which are bulked up by fiber and water, you’re consuming food that fills you up but without a lot of calories. Unhealthy foods are just the opposite-many calories packed into tiny, unsatisfying portions, such as cheese, sugary snacks, crackers and cookies. Many studies show that hunger tends to be satisfied by a certain volume of food-about four to five pounds a day. And it doesn’t matter how many calories are packed into each pound. So the goal is to reach that full feeling without eating an excessive amount of calories.
- Is exercise your downfall? Even making small changes adds up eventually-if you stick with them. Experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that if you spend 10 minutes a day walking up and down stairs, you could shed as much as 10 pounds over the course of a year.
- Avoid TV commercials like the fatty Sirens they are. Watching chocolate drip seductively off a spoon and into someone’s mouth puts images back in your mind that don’t reinforce your new eating plan. The same goes for the Food channel and other cooking shows-except for ones that teach healthy cooking and eating.
- If you just can’t resist temptation in grocery stores, have someone else do your shopping, or go with a friend you can count on to steer you away from the cookie and cracker aisle. One client explains that the fruit juice and ice cream are in the same aisle in her store, so she makes sure she always enters and exits that aisle from the juice end. Do whatever it takes at first to install new habits. Eventually you’ll be able to saunter past old Ben & Jerry without a second glance. But in the beginning, use all the tricks you need to stay on your new road.
- Make sure you’ve changed your attitude about all this. You are NOT on a diet. You can’t diet to lose weight, you have to alter your eating habits in a way that you can live with for the rest of your life. If you are still in diet mode, looking forward to a time when the diet will end, you are setting yourself up for failure.
Becoming Slender For Life pages 214 – 215
Since January 2, 1997
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