Maintaining your weight
If you find yourself in the enviable position of being a healthy weight, it's a situation that you definitely want to be in for as long as possible. Weight can creep on with very little difficulty at all, a few pounds here and there, a holiday, a few nights out, and before you know it, your jeans don't fit any more.
Losing weight is difficult, and the last thing that you want to do is find yourself seduced into the world of dieting.
Everyday eating traps - emotional eating
Most women will attest to the power of comfort food, but it really is just an illusion. Comfort eating is just eating food that you don't really need, often just to avoid dealing with the problem or the emotions that are stressing you out. If you have a bad day at work, why would the answer to, "Where exactly does my boss get off talking to me like that?" lie in a packet of biscuits?
If you can get a handle on emotional eating, you will probably go a long way towards keeping your weight stable. A study published in Obesity (October 2007)1 found that people who gave in to emotional eating lost less weight when they followed a behaviour-based weight loss program than those who didn't use food to cope with their feelings. The study also found that people who did eat for emotional reasons were more likely to gain weight back after losing it.
It's not just emotions that lead us absent mindedly towards the kitchen – boredom is another trigger for non-hungry eating. Who hasn't found themselves mounting a kitchen raid on an evening when there's nothing on TV? It's easy to say "find a distraction" but if you're truly only eating because you have nothing to do, you will still have nothing to do when you've finished that sandwich, won't you? If you're hungry, eat. If you're bored – do something else.
Eating out
Eating out, having people over for dinner and generally being sociable can play havoc with your waistline. Nobody wants to be a party pooper, but if you try to apply the same rules to social eating as you do your everyday food intake, you can't go too far wrong.
Only eat what you're really hungry for. If you're in a restaurant and the bread basket comes round, you don't have to eat it just because it's there. If what you really crave is a chunk of warm buttered bread, that's fine, but maybe you won't need a starter? Listen to your body and decide what you really want from the menu, and don't let friends dictate whether you have dessert or not. They will all be far too busy with their own food choices to care whether you're opting to sit out the cheesecake.
When you eat out, don't feel that you have to clear your plate. Of course this also applies to eating at home, but we're all more inclined to get our money's worth when we eat out. If you overeat you will gain weight, no matter whether the food you are eating more of is prepared by a Michelin chef or your own fair hands.
References:
- Internal Disinhibition Predicts Weight Regain Following Weight Loss and Weight Loss Maintenance - Heather M. Niemeier, Suzanne Phelan, Joseph L. Fava and Rena R. Wing
Leave a comment
To leave a comment, you need to login or register:
Login...
Register...