Another Key to Weight Loss: Listen Closely to Your Body

One of the keys to effective weight loss is being tuned in to your body.

The body knows what it needs but many times we force our will on it..

It’s time you listened to your body.

Successful weight loss and maintenance doesn’t involve following a strict list of rules and constant deprivation and listening to what your mind tells you. Diets often fail because you’re allowing your brain to control your eating habits. Instead, if you want to learn to control your weight and remain healthy, you must learn to listen to your body.

You have a natural intuition that tells you when you’re hungry and what nutrients your body needs most. But, when you mask these signals and stop listening to these messages, you gain weight and find yourself engaging in unhealthy patterns of eating.

Your Body Knows

This may be a hard truth to accept because you have diet commercials and experts constantly telling you differently, but your body knows exactly what it needs to be healthy. You just have to learn to listen to its cues.

Instead, we are most often listening to our minds and our emotions, which then guide us into unhealthy eating patterns that cause us to gain weight or we lose weight only to regain it (and then some). If you instead listened to the intuition of your body, you would find health and a healthy weight that comes with less effort and less hardship.

The simple truth about learning to eat healthily is this. If you eat when you are physically hungry, if you eat what your body (not your mind) is telling you it needs, and if you stop eating when you are full, you won’t have weight problems. It’s really that simple.

If you’ve been a dieter for any length of time, this probably goes against everything you’ve heard about how to lose weight, because the diet industry keeps telling you to listen to your mind, not your body.

Listen to Your Body to Lose Weight

Learning to listen to your body requires that you ignore the eating signals and cravings that are coming from your brain. It requires you to push aside the emotional eating cues that are telling you to eat to soothe your feelings. It requires recognizing the difference between physical hunger and emotional hunger. It needs you to listen to the cravings of your physical body, not your emotional brain.

First, you must learn how to listen to your body. You must think carefully about what you really want when you decide you’re hungry. If you’re physically hungry and your body needs nourishment, any healthy food you suggest eating will sound good.

If you’re emotionally hungry and eating to sooth yourself, specific foods will come to mind when you consider what sounds good to eat, probably comfort foods high in starches, fats, or salt. Ask yourself what seems good to eat, and the answer will tell you whether you should be listening or not.

Next, you need to learn to identify real hunger. Physical hunger begins gradually and builds over time. Physical hunger is a growling stomach or a pang in your middle that steadily gives stronger signals to make you pay attention. Emotional hunger starts suddenly and is usually in your head, sending clear messages about the types of foods you should eat. You may even be thinking about specific textures or tastes to satisfy this hunger.

Finally, you must become attuned to your body’s natural needs and learn to stop eating when you’re full. This requires mindful practices of eating instead of mindlessly stuffing your mouth. Keep attention on noticing the cues your body sends when it’s had enough.

Final Thoughts

Learning to listen to your body requires a honing of your intuition about your physical needs rather than your mental or emotional issues about eating and food. It means listening to a different set of cues and paying attention to the parts of your body that know the most about what you really need to be healthy. Recalibrating your intuition is something you can do when you learn to listen to the right signals about what you are really hungry for.