Week 5 - Psychology of Weight Loss

To make new habits or modify unhealthy habits, you need to practice the new healthy habit or behaviour regularly so that it eventually becomes something you do without thinking about it. We’re often asked how long it takes to make a new habit, generally this will depend on how hard the new habit is to learn, and how consistent you are. There’s no defined timeframe for how long it takes to create a new habit, but you're looking at weeks of repetition as opposed to days. Your motivation and how often you practise this new habit will influence your results (6).

How To Make New Habits

We suggest that you start by choosing a habit that you really want to change. Choose something that you feel is relatively easy to fit into your life. Start with a behaviour that you’ll find easiest to change; achieving this change can boost your motivation and self esteem - boosting these will help you to keep going with changing more habits. A large percentage of what you do each day is based around your habits. These subconsciously developed due to you repeating the same behaviour many times. Certain situations will trigger a particular behaviour. This is due to your behaviour patterns being “hardwired” in the neural networks of your brain.

The good news is, the brain can adapt and change, so new habits can be learnt and replace old ones. This is called neuroplasticity, which means your brain (neurons) is mouldable (has plasticity) - so you can change how your brain is wired by changing the things you do repeatedly, in other words your habits. Practice is a vital step in making new habits - repetition of a new pattern every day helps to create new brain pathways. Once you've repeated a new habit, give yourself a pat on the back - recognise the achievement and celebrate your success. Celebrating success will activate the release of dopamine, which will make you feel good and will make learning your new habits easier and help them to stick (7).

How to Change a Habit

If, for example, you currently nibble your way through the evening on treats, this could be a target activity to change. Research tells us it's easier to swap one habit for another, so instead of eating nothing you could aim to swap to eating a healthier snack such as carrot sticks, sliced peppers, olives or celery sticks with a spoon of nut butter and hydrate with sparkling water with lemon slices. Alternatively you could swap nibbling for an activity that occupies your brain, such as a puzzle, game, crochet, or reading etc. To turn this change in behaviour into a new habit that you don't need to think about, you need to repeat the behaviour many times. You’ll know when it has become a habit when you find yourself engaging in the behaviour without even having to think about it; when it becomes as automatic to you as the behaviour it has replaced.

Process to Follow to Make a New Habit

This is a simple diagram that presents the process of changing your habits. Try to make the new activity fun and something that you can enjoy. Set a reminder on your phone as a prompt. Once you've completed this task, celebrate that you've done it, really congratulate yourself in making this change and then repeat this cycle. The key really is repetition to make your new habit, your new normal.

How many new habits can I make at once?

We recommend that you only focus on creating one or two new habits at a time so that you don't overwhelm yourself with trying to change too much in one go. Just like it’s recommended to lose weight slowly to keep it off long term, make behaviour changes slow and sustainable too. The more that you're able to change your unhelpful habits to new, sustained healthy habits the more likely that you'll sustain and maintain your weight loss (5).

Self Esteem

Self esteem is a sense of self-liking and self acceptance. If you have low self esteem you're more likely to view yourself negatively. Research has found an interesting link between positive self esteem and healthy eating - with those people who have access to healthy food having a higher level of self esteem. Self esteem is an important factor in your health - with low self esteem being linked to having a greater risk of having an eating disorder (1, 6). If self esteem is something that you realise you need to improve, doing this will likely support your weight loss efforts.

Similarly to self esteem, self belief is a key factor in weight loss. We’ve mentioned understanding your “why”, but equally important is your sense of belief that you can do this, that you can succeed at achieving your health and weight loss goals. Interestingly, you can reprogramme your mindset and self belief by catching negative self sabotaging thoughts and changing them to positive affirming thoughts, boosting your self worth and self belief. Catch your inner critical voice and challenge it - change any messages to positive ones. Eg, “I CAN do this!” Repeating kind encouraging things to yourself is much more effective for helping you to lose weight and feel better about yourself than telling yourself off if you slip up.

Another important step in boosting self esteem is making time for yourself. Taking time out for yourself and making time to do activities that make you feel happy is a way of boosting your self esteem.

Emotional Eating

Emotional eating is strongly associated with weight gain, being overweight and obesity. Emotional eating is a term used to describe when you use food to cope with negative emotions, stress, anxiety or depression and feeling overwhelmed (8). If you’re an emotional eater, it’s likely that challenging situations will trigger an emotional response that you'll experience accompanied by a craving and you'll automatically use food as a way of coping with the emotions. Generally when you feel emotionally challenged you’re more likely to reach for less healthy higher fat/ high sugar foods that, when eaten regularly, are more likely to lead to weight gain (9). Stress can be triggered by many factors including, but not limited to, anything unexpected or challenging, from an alarm going off, to an argument with a friend or loved one, or a difficult work meeting.

When you experience stress, your body releases the hormone cortisol, which also raises your blood sugar. High levels of cortisol from ongoing stress are linked to weight gain and are associated particularly with weight gain around your middle and visceral fat (fat around the organs in your abdomen). Long term high levels of cortisol can lead to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. This means that managing stress positively is an important step in weight loss (10). Balancing your blood sugar is an important aspect of healthy stress management (11). Please watch the blood sugar balance video again from Week 2 to remind yourself of this important concept.

Gratitude

Actively practising gratitude can help to boost your self esteem. You can do this simply by being thankful for different aspects of your day or life (12). We really recommend practising gratitude by keeping a journal and writing down 2 or 3 things that you're grateful for each day before you sleep. Other options include keeping a gratitude jar and writing down things you're happy about or that make you feel grateful on a slip of paper and filling the jar with these. You can review your gratitude jar entries whenever you need a mood pick-me-up.