Habits and Attitudes Drive Your Weight Loss Efforts

Most people have the wrong attitude for losing weight.

They go in with an “it’s impossible for me to lose weight” kind of viewpoint.

Drop the idea of wanting to lose weight quickly and focus on your attitudes, your reasons and forming healthy habits first.

Relax, drop the diet mentality and create an optimal lifestyle.

We usually think of weight loss as purely a physical journey. Eating the right foods and engaging in more exercise.

What’s often forgotten is that there’s a major psychological component as well. Your habits and attitudes contributed to your weight gain. They also play a significant role in your weight loss efforts.

How your attitude affects weight loss

Your attitudes aren’t necessarily more important than habits for losing weight. But if you consider your attitude first, it can help you develop healthier habits. We’ll get to that later.

Weight loss requires a certain attitude. It takes time and it takes effort. If you begin with the wrong attitude, you won’t be successful. Most importantly, you need patience. If you’re not very interested or confident about losing weight, it’s probably not going to go so well for you.

If you’re in a hurry to lose weight, you may become disillusioned with the rate of your weight loss. You’ll feel like a failure and lose your confidence in your ability to lose weight. You must be passionate about losing weight, but you need to understand that it’s going to take some time.

You need to put the right attitudes in place so you can build the habits that will help you maintain weight loss over the long haul.

How your habits affect weight loss

Habits play an extremely important role in sustainable weight loss.

The hardest part of weight loss is in the beginning. You need to constantly learn new things, incorporate those things into your lifestyle, and fit them into your schedule. Your weight loss goals must be a priority for you to achieve them.

After a while you’ll begin to develop habits that contribute to better health. All of those complicated things that you needed to work at and consciously do become internalized. You don’t need to think about them anymore. They become part of your lifestyle.

Habit forming separates diets from lifestyle

Here are some ways you can form these healthy habits?

Creating habits through scheduling

Habits are psychological as well as physical. Some habits are formed when your brain tries to take shortcuts in decision making. Everything that you do is something that your brain needs to think about unless it can create sequences of events.

So, when you wake up, you have to make the decision to brush your teeth. Doing it every morning makes your brain ingrain brushing your teeth after you wake up as a habit to save time and energy.

You can create new healthy habits that contribute to your weight loss by deliberately doing them as part of a routine or after you’ve done something else. Working out after work is one example.

Creating habits through action

There’s a much easier way to develop habits and that’s to let your body do all of the work. That’s the physical aspect of habit forming that we mentioned earlier.

When your body encounters various stimuli, it responds by releasing chemicals called neurotransmitters. These chemicals change the way in which our bodies work. But they also change the way we feel.

For example, a number of feel-good chemicals are released when we exercise. This is the “high” a lot of fitness gurus talk about. It feels good so they want to do it again and again. Getting to this stage will help you exercise regularly. It’ll be hard to stop.

When you have the right attitude towards weight loss, it keeps you on track. You must have an undeniable reason you want to lose the weight. Set goals for yourself that aren’t too easy or impossible to achieve.

Your habits are very important for long-term weight loss. It can be said that habits make long-term weight loss possible. Fortunately, forming new and healthier habits is easier than you think.

Get busy establishing the right attitude today. Find a good reason or several reasons why you want to lose weight and get busy creating healthy habits that will drive you to the results you desire. The more desire you have for losing weight, the more successful you’ll be.