SUCCESS LONG TERM INTRO

It's important that we look reality in the face and KNOW - YES maintaining weight loss is a challenge....so that we will take learning how to do it seriously. It's challenging because we have so many opportunities to eat thrown at us all the time, and so many opportunities to not make our health and body one of our main priorities.

If we fly by the seat of our pants that's pretty much a guarantee we will be putting the pounds back on in the future.

So instead, acknowledging this truth we will be inspired/motivated we FIND those PRACTICAL TACTICS that work for maintaining weight loss.

Have you seen memes on social media like Instagram or Facebook that say something like,

"I will never binge or overeat again. I'm worth it. That was the last time." Etc.

We do this right?

Before IG existed and before I was social media AWARE, I did my own form of this "affirmation" type thing in my private journal when I was overweight in my journal.

I wrote out a plan of what my new eating plan would look like. I wrote down how I knew I'd experience cravings but that they would pass. I wrote down other thing unrelated to food that I wanted to pursue and spend time on.

But does the act of writing these things out actually HELP us really make a change?

The idea that simply stating something like that for the world to see will make it easier to follow through would be nice, but in reality, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference- and I'm just being honest because I want you to have at your disposal actual TACTICS that will truly help you change for real, not just say you will, or not just change for 1 day.

Saying you want to do something often isn't going to be of any help at all in actually achieving it. I know because I tried MANY times to eat healthier "permanently" - I had many "last times" of eating a whole carton of cookies or pints or even 1/2 gallons of ice-cream.

CRAVINGS AND BINGEING

But the problem was my cravings and not having a way to combat or handle them got the better of me every time. We need plans of action for dealing with the difficult times in order to make gradual progress. Without that we have those lovely aspirations of positive things, but without being prepared to handle the punches to the gut, we fall.

The cravings I used to experience when I was addicted to sugar we're pretty much like a complete entity of it's own with a very strong personality inside me- didn't care about my new mental resolutions and what I wrote down. It's kind of like your kids- teenagers right - doesn't matter what you think they should do - they are a separate entity altogether and they're going to think what they want to do think.

The cravings would come anyway. Almost as soon as that happens your pretty little grandiose plans get left behind at the beach where you wrote them that 1 day you felt so sad you thought you could change. I can still picture in my mind that one particular day, being at this local marina, it was windy and getting dark, and I had likely binged earlier, and I had done some research online and found this way of eating that should help me and I wrote all the things in my journal about how I was going to change, permanently now.

Things only REALLY started to change when I made PRACTICAL adjustments both to what I did and how I thought about things, in my life to help me REALISTICALLY make those bigger changes that I wanted.

I will talk about a few of those in this section.

1. Emotionally Eat without consequences.

Finding ways to emotionally eat in a way that won't cause too much damage while you're learning to not emotionally eat- because it's like learning to walk- you WILL NOT get up once and never fall at least a little again at first.

So yes instead of condemning yourself every time you emotionally eat, you are going to find ways to do it more healthfully. And it's not kale smoothies, I promise.

2. Implement strategies that change how your body talks to you.

Implementing strategies that CHANGE how your body talks to you. The types of cravings I would get for sugary foods was like an army of 500,000 soldiers with weapons marching up towards me and saying "eat these 8 doughnuts or you're going DOWN." What I needed more than anything was not to be FIGHTING 500,000 soldiers as one little old me, but rather to get myself somewhere the soldiers were not located. So I did find a way to eliminate cravings instead of constantly trying to fight them.

Let me give you an example of an approach that didn't work: Journal entry about not eating REFINED sugar. What did work? Eating NO sugar, not even fruit, and eating as much bacon or other fat as often as I wanted while going through withdrawals and feeling cravings.

Even IF this initially caused weight gain because of who knows, TOO much bacon, which for me it didn't, it would be worth it initially because it would be giving me the state of being to have control over what I ate for the many months and years to come.

3. Trigger foods.

Acknowledge and find these and avoid them like the Devils they are.
I have found that I have trigger foods that change the state of my being physiologically- trigger foods that make those 500,000 soldiers instantly find my location and appear with their threats and bag of doughnuts in hand. What I found interesting about this is that trigger foods weren't necessarily ALL sugar, or ALL carbs, or ALL grains.

4. Learning to pinpoint lies I tell myself and call myself out.

It's learning to trust not what seems to be true at the moment but what you know to be true from your track record. We're going to use this not to be discouraged for the thing we weren't able to change but to look at our track record and engineer scenarios so that we no longer trust what we THINK to be true but what we KNOW to be true OVERALL.