Understanding How to Lose Weight Permanently

Many weight loss programs emphasize a so-called ‘cold turkey’ approach to food, or a restrictive diet. Both of these approaches fail to factor in long-term goals. You may have tried weight loss programs like these, but had little or no success staying fit. Simply put, it is exceptionally difficult to deal with deep-seated cravings, when what we crave is not actually what we need. In our culture, it is easy to develop an unhealthy relationship with food, but seemingly impossible to reform that relationship. How do you change the way you eat when it is such a vital part of your life?

Usually, weight loss programs focus primarily on short-term weight loss goals, such as dropping a given amount of weight in time to wear a bikini for summer. While this is a laudable accomplishment, it is a short-lived goal that has no real long-term sustainability. What happens after you lose the weight and wear the bikini? How do you keep the pounds from returning?

While exercise, calories, and healthy foods do play an important role in losing weight, the key factor to establishing a good relationship with food is how you conceive of eating. Your goal should be to reorient your thinking and your behavior so that you no longer crave food as a source of comfort, but rather as a source of nutrition. People who have successfully learned how to prevent weight gain agree that only by changing our unhealthy attitudes can we take the steps to make a lifetime commitment to healthy eating, and establish a fulfilling, healthy, and happy relationship with food.

The first step in effective weight loss is to identify the unhealthy ways in which you currently perceive food. If you are eating primarily as a way to feel safe, as opposed to a way to abate your hunger, no matter how many weight loss programs you participate in, your overall eating patterns will be motivated by that basic urge. In this instance, you have to radically alter how you think about food, and shift your attitude from an emotionally based place to a physically based place.

Instead of participating in a standard short-term diet/weight loss program, your goal should be to find a weight loss program or philosophy that can help you begin to change your perception of food, so that you can change your behavior, and learn how to eat when you are hungry, and how not to eat when you are lonely or sad. By focusing on a longer-term goal, and not merely short-term surface results, it will become incredibly easy and satisfying to eat to sustain one’s health, and not to cover up one’s emotions.

Ultimately, a good weight loss program should help you to understand how your feelings toward food have shaped your consumption habits and corresponding weight gain. By changing your core relationship to food, you can change those habits so that you not only lose weight, but discard a lifetime of unhealthy attitudes.