How To Change Your Eating Behaviour

Author
Ron Merk

Being obese doesn’t happen overnight. It often happens over years. Whether we realize it of not, it is a combination of many factors all coming together that results in constant sustained weight gain.  In simple terms it includes physiological drivers that cause us to eat, eating the wrong foods, eating too much food and lack of physical activity.

Most weight loss surgeons will want you to demonstrate a commitment to lifestyle change before they perform surgery on you. Whether you’re preparing for surgery or you just want to break your weight gain cycle, the info in this article will help you.

The 1st step in any change is to break the cycle of your current habits. Often people are rooted in their existing routine and find it incredibly difficult to make any kind of shift. Inertia keeps us in the same old rut because it’s easier to continue to do what we’re familiar with. Add on the satisfaction and rush we get from the physical and physiological drives that cause us to eat, and you face an extremely difficult challenge.

Great news! This challenge is not insurmountable if you use some simple techniques to help you shift your lifestyle to healthier choices. If you’re pre-op, demonstrating your commitment to sustained lifestyle change will persuade your surgeon that you’re serious and move you faster toward your surgery date. If you just want to loose weight, then these techniques will increase your success rate. After all, the statistics through diet alone are pretty disheartening, so anything that increases your success opportunity is a benefit. Right?

Lets begin. We’re going to look at the four main obstacles that prevent you from changing your lifestyle and losing weight. We’ll start with wrong foods, eating too much food, physical activity and last but not lease physiological drivers.

Wrong Foods – Making Right Choices To Change Our Diet

Everything thing in the food industry today is driven to get you to buy food that has high profit margin on it. Even the lay out of the average super market emphasizes poor food choices. Guess what? All the bad food for you fits this category.

Here are some specific tools to help you change your habits in choosing better foods:

• Stay out of the centre aisles in super markets. This is where most of the bad food choices are. It’s also where you’ll spend the most money. Try and shop around the parameter of your super market (except the bakery section – stay the hell out of there completely)
• Don’t buy “white” foods. This means carbohydrates and includes potatoes, flour, fortified wheat products, rice, pasta, pizza, crackers, cookies. etc …you get the idea. All of these add pounds fast and provide little or no useful nutrients.
• Don’t buy prepackaged foods and fast foods
• DO buy and eat in this order – proteins (chicken, fish & leaner cuts of meat are best), vegetables and fruit, preferable fresh. Frozen is the next best choice. Canned is not so good, because it usually contains too much salt and sugar. Deli meats are NOT considered a good choice of protein because of their high levels of fat and nitrates.
• No junk food. It’s in a centre aisle to start with, but once in your house, it’s also one of the greatest temptations to browse/snack on. If you must have something to nibble on, pop your own popcorn. Use PAM vegetable spray as a topping and your favourite spice/herb for seasoning
• Shop often and only buy what you’ll eat in 1 or 2 days. Our forefathers shopped every day. Mostly because they didn’t have minivans to carry 2 weeks worth of groceries and also because refrigeration wasn’t available and you needed to buy only fresh food. If you don’t have 2 weeks of food in your fridge and cupboards, you can’t snack on it in the evening. You’ll end up eating fresher foods, it will cost you less and of course you won’t eat as much.
• Stick to the 5/5 rule for any food you buy. Five or less grams of fat per serving and five or less grams of sugar per serving.

Too Much Food – Size Does Matter

Human beings are visual by nature. It’s no accident that marketing in the Fast Food industry over the last few years has steadily increased the portions size of their menus. Just look at the pictures and commercials. Every picture of a hamburger and french fries is deliberately staged to make them look as big as possible, dripping with fatty juice. People want “bigger”. Super-size it! Increase the price and tell the customers they’re getting more for their money. It still annoys me even now after my surgery. When I want a treat I’ll got to the Golden Arches and order 1 chicken wrap with no sauce on it and a small diet coke. Even though I can’t drink more than that small coke, the guy always asks if I want to super-size my drink. Then I’ll get 5 times the diet coke for only a few pennies more than the cost of the small drink.

So lets look at some strategies that can help with portion size of food we eat.

• Change you plate. Yeap. This will make the biggest difference on the quantity you eat. There is nothing worse than placing proper sized food portions on our traditional dinner plates. The food sits in a small pile in the middle of a vast empty expanse of plate. I sear some times the food looks like it’s shivering in loneliness.  Start using lunch size plates for all you meals. The portions you should be eating will fill the plate and your eyes will think you’re eating lots.
• Start measuring. Get yourself a good scale and set of measuring cups. There is a BIG difference in calories between a 12 oz steak and a 6 oz steak. You’ll find that after you use measuring cups for a while, you’ll be able to gauge how much a proper food portion is. This comes in handy when you’re out at a restaurant. Take a look at the plate when it arrives and push away those parts of the food that don’t fit your portion sizes.
• Serve your plates in the kitchen before bringing them to the table. No bowls of food on the table to get second helpings from.
• If you do have a snack after dinner, leave the food container in the kitchen. Bring only the serving size to your favourite recliner in your living room.

Move! Any Movement Is Good

We’ve all heard the message. Exercise, exercise, exercise! I thought I’d scream if I heard that word one more time from my surgeon during my journey. If only it were that simple. Everything becomes 100 times harder when you’re obese. Feet hurt, legs hurt, knees are excruciating, can’t breath, heart rate is 200+ and feels like it’s going to explode. Yes, exercising is more fun than the morning after your 1st mickey of Lemon Gin.

Put that together with the sight of all the jiggling fat jogging past the neighbours window and you have a perfect reason to hit the refrigerator, eat that piece of chocolate cake you’ve been hiding and go to your bedroom for at least a week of depression rehabilitation TV watching.

Once you crawl back out of your bedroom, you’re still going to have to increase you physical activity some how. The simple reason is that more activity equals more calories burned. Put it together with eating the right foods, eating the right quantities of food and you’re close to a “knock it out of the park” winning home run against obesity behaviour changes. Lets take a look at some reality suggestions to “get moving”.

• Set yourself an exercise goal, but start with a reasonable one. Remember, commitment and sticking to it is the single biggest success of your exercise program. No matter what you do, if you’re sticking to your commitment, you’re a WINNER!
• Don’t join the local “10 Milers A Day Club”. What ever exercise you choose, start with 20 minutes 3 times a week. When you can do 20 minutes, increase it to 30 minutes. When you can do 30 minutes increase the number of days to 4 or 5 a week.
• If you can’t walk, sit on a chair and move your arms, twist from side to side.
• A stationary bike is a great tool as long as you don’t let it become a clothes hanger in your bedroom.
• Walking is great, but most of us obese folks find it too hard on our lower limbs. If you can walk, it’s a bonus for you. Get out there and see the world!
• Bike riding is another great activity. It’s a lot easier on your lower limbs. Some of us however, are just too large for bike riding. If you fit that category then try ….
• Swimming! – Swimming is by far the best alternative for most obese people. It’s easy on the body, yet the constant resistance of the water gives you a great physical work out. Almost all public pool recreation facilities have a swimming program for YOU!.I know …you’re think how awful you’ll look in a bathing suit. Been there, done that, still do. I found out that nobody cares or looks. Half the place is filled with people who have the same problem as you and I do. I go to the “seniors fitness class” …not because I’m a senior, but because the exercise program they do is more suited to some one who is obese and has a limited range of motion with lower limb aches and pains. Beside, there were a bunch of other overweight people in that program doing exactly what I was doing

Am I Crazy? If not, Why Can’t I Control How Much I Eat?

If only we could answer this question. Who ever does, will be a very rich person. I do think we’re crazy. At least I’m suspicious about me! Many of my friends and family have accused me of being mentally deficient …although that might be something different than mentally deranged.

All kidding aside, most of obese people got that way because of some sort of internal struggle with their own personal demons.  Could be as simple as your mom to tell you to clean you plate or you might have been seriously abused as a child. What ever the reason, before you can move on you need to address it. Most of us will need professional help. Here are some tips to start you journey on discovering why you eat?

• Think back to the 1st time you remember being fat. What was going on in your life?
• Make a list of reasons you eat…be honest! Find a good friend you trust to go over your list. Don’t ask for solutions. The idea is to just let you verbalize why you eat.
• Find a Life Coach to work with
• Talk to your doctor about wanting to address the reasons you eat and ask her/him for a referral to a good eating disorder councillor.
• Ask for a referral to a physiologist or psychiatrist.

In the end, we all have to come to terms with who we are and why we eat. Lots of people have destructive behaviour patterns. Some parachute out of perfectly good planes, bungie jump off of bridges, go mountain climbing or motor-cross bike riding. People who eat too much food aren’t the only ones out there who are dealing with life issues. I say, lighten up on yourself. Make today better than yesterday and plan for a good day tomorrow. If you do that, you’re off to a great start on fighting your obesity.

 Print This Post

Related posts:

1. Mindless Eating Canada and America are nations of over-eaters. But according to...