The mental aspects of weight loss are critically important. Without mental strategies for making wise food choices, dealing with stress, making physical activity a priority, and dozens of other actions, weight loss is virtually impossible. Successful weight managementlosing weight and keeping it offrequires a commitment. Some people call this commitment willpower.You have to commit to making smart choices and sticking to your choices for weight loss to be successful. Knowledge is power. The more you know about food, physical activity, and the path to sustainable weight loss, the greater your ability to make smart choices. Knowing which foods are satisfying for you and also happen to be lower in calories makes weight loss attainable. Likewise, knowing how to exercise in a way that helps your body build muscle, burns a lot of calories, and is enjoyable can boost your weight-loss efforts.You can’t lose weight without knowing what to do.

Rebecca Hill was slim when she started working as a postproduction coordinator on the first American Idol show. Work-related stress caused her to change her eating habits and eat virtually nonstop. Rebecca gained between 30 and 40 pounds and was heading higher. “My weight issues reached a turning point after I ate two whole boxes of cookies in the time that it took my husband to do some banking at an ATM. I decided to join Weight Watchers because my mother had been on Weight Watchers for years and made it a part of her life. “I have the least willpower of anyone I know. I need structure to help me stay focused, which is why Weight Watchers works so well for me. Because of the plan that I am on, I have concrete structure that helps me make my wise food choices every day.

At the same time, I enjoy the flexibility that Weight Watchers provides. I can eat anything and everything, which I still do! “Self-monitoring also is key for me. I’m an emotional eater, so I have to take life meal by meal and day by day to stay on top of my eating. If I didn’t monitor my eating, I would be lost at sea.” Rebecca reached her goal weight by losing over 41 pounds.

Willpower Is Only One Part of the Answer

Believing that weight loss and weight maintenance are simply a matter of willpower can be dangerous.Yet it’s a very common conviction.When describing their history of weight loss, many people talk about the vast amounts of energy spent on exerting willpower. If weight loss does not occuror more commonly, the weight that is lost snaps backblame is put on a lack of willpower. This pattern is self-defeating. Getting over the hurdle of believing only in willpower and into the process of establishing a comprehensive weight-loss method is the answer.

Knowledge Isn’t Everything, Either

Knowledge is about more than numbers. Knowing how many calories are in a cookie does not tell you whether to or how to include that cookie in your eating plan. Knowing how many calories you burn in an aerobics class does not tell you whether that amount of physical activity will help you lose weight. Successful weight loss requires understanding the big picture, not just knowing pieces of information. However, knowing about weight management behaviors, making wise choices, eating healthfully, enjoying food, and doing physical activities that you enjoy can be a powerful set of tools for taking control of your weight for good.

Learn Flexible Restraint

Let’s define one aspect of willpower as the ability to hold yourself back from eating or overeating when you’re around food.Weight-loss scientists call this dietary restraint. It describes how tightly a person regulates her or his food intake. For example, highly restrained dieters are very precise about how much they eat, say, 200 calories for breakfast, 300 calories for lunch, 700 calories for dinner, and no snacks.You probably know people who add up the calories in every bite, read every label, and talk a lot about how they watch what they’re eating. These are highly restrained eaters. Do you often wish that you could be more of a restrained eater? You may be surprised to learn that a very high level of dietary restraint is associated with obesity, not with successful weight management, and is also linked to a lack of success in weight-loss attempts. The flip side of dietary restraint is dietary disinhibitionlack of inhibition when eating.

We have all opened a bag of cookies, eaten a couple, then thought, since I started them, I may as well finish them. Interestingly, although disinhibition is the opposite of restraint, high levels of dietary disinhibition are also associated with obesity and lack of weight-loss success. So here is the quandary: If dietary restraint is linked with overweight and unsuccessful weight loss and dietary disinhibition is also linked with extra pounds, what should you do? The answer is to find the middle ground with a strategy called flexible restraint. Flexible restraint means moderately controlling your eating. After all, eating as much of any food as you want and doing so whenever you feel like it is not going to help you with weight loss

.Your eating plan needs enough structure to give you the security and comfort that you are in control of your eating. But the plan also needs enough flexibility so that you won’t feel trapped, deprived, or restricted by overly strict rules. The key is to find a balance you can maintain. If you have recently gone out to dinner, gotten together with friends, or attended a gathering where food was served, you know that there are times when a little overeating is inevitable. A strategy of flexible restraint allows for slight overeating one day followed by eating a bit less the next meal or the next day and/or increasing physical activity to make up for the overeating. Flexible restraint allows you to adapt to the ups and downs of daily life. No more of the I’m on my diet/I’m off my diet mentality that is a common weight-loss downfall.

An eating style that incorporates flexible restraint takes away the pressure of needing superhuman amounts of willpower for dietary restraint. It also helps avoid the total loss of willpower associated with dietary disinhibition. Sound too good to be true? Not only does flexible restraint work but it also appears to be connected to long-term weight management. Researchers measure levels of dietary restraint and disinhibition with detailed tests. To find out if you are a restrained or a disinhibited eater, have an honest chat with yourself about how you regulate your eating. The questions below can help you get started. There are several ways to look at or define eating flexibility and structure, and the same approach does not work for everyone.

Successful weight loss is not simply a matter of exerting mind over matter. It requires knowing who you are, what you want, and having specific goals and strategies about how you are going to get there. The following steps will help you translate what you want into the will to make it happen:

• Evaluate your current eating habits as they relate to dietary restraint and dietary inhibition. What are your strengths and weaknesses?

• Choose a weight-loss method with a food component that supports the concept of flexible restraint. Extreme diets or diets that lend themselves to on-again, off-again eating can lead to dietary disinhibition and uncontrolled eating.

• Define what you want for yourself in terms of weight management. Evaluate the methods you are considering in relation to their ability to give you what you really want.

• Create a set of short- and longer-term goals. Determine what will motivate you to get from one goal to the next. Develop and implement strategies that will feed the motivators and help make them a reality.

• For each of the basic components of a comprehensive weight-loss method, think of at least four strategies you can implement today. Now implement them for a few days and see if they work for you. If they do, keep them. If they don’t work for you, develop and test new strategies.

Should I focus mostly on exercise?

Most diets fail because they focus on the wrong thing. Successful weight loss is not really about food; it is about exercise. The main focus of a weight-loss effort should be exercise because it will make the pounds come off faster and the loss will be maintained. With all the technological changes in our daily lives, most of us are not getting enough exercise. People, especially guys, start gaining weight in their late 20s, then continue to gain weight into their 30s and 40s as work and family take up more of their time. With less time to exercise and be active, of course they gain weight. So it makes sense that getting back into exercise will melt away the pounds. The commitment to exercise is not very demanding.

Getting to the gym just a few times a week will make a huge difference in weight loss. And the more time spent at the gym, the faster the pounds will come off. It should take only a couple of hours a week for the next two or three months to lose the weight that has accumulated over the past ten or so years. Going to the gym tones the body, flattens the stomach, and firms the thighs. It changes the shape of the body. Losing weight through dieting can’t do that. So even if the pounds on the scale stay the same, that is okay; it just means that the fat is turning into muscle. Numerous kernels of truth support the myth regarding exercise and weight loss. Let’s start with the most obvious one: the average North American does not get enough exercise.We are all daily users of a variety of work-saving devices, like garage door openers, television remote controls, cordless telephones, and riding lawn mowers.

A study done in Australia showed that we would need to walk 10 miles a day to make up for the decrease in the number of calories burned by daily activities since the 1800s. Most people do not spend their free time being physically active. In 1997, less than one-third of adults in the United States got the recommended amount of physical activity and 40% of adults engaged in virtually no leisure-time physical activity. Lack of exercise contributes to weight gain.Weight goes up when more calories are consumed than spent through activity.