Those who are interested in losing weight successfully spend a lot of time looking at different diet plans to find the one they think will work best for them. You may relate. Maybe you’ve considered trying the Keto diet, intermittent fasting or going gluten-free.
As a weight management specialist who has spent nearly the last 4 decades helping thousands of people achieve a healthier body weight and maintain it, you may be surprised to know that I don’t recommend restrictive diet plans that can help take weight off but are hard to stick to.
That’s because these food-focused diet plans are one-size-fits-all and don’t take into account who you are and how you live your life.
Managing weight starts with YOU – your lifestyle, your habits, your mindset.
To be successful losing weight and getting healthier, mindset matters.
Your mindset encompasses your thoughts, beliefs and values that influence how you think about yourself and approach life challenges.
As we all know, managing weight long term can be quite challenging.
In my practice, I emphasize how the right mindset is essential for successful weight management.
Here are some mindset tweaks to help you also:
- Adopt a holistic approach to total health that includes being able to appreciate and treat yourself better.
- Once you recognize that you have a right and responsibility to self-care, it will be easier to make a plan to fit the things you deem important into your life.
- Drop the perfectionistic mindset which can lead to frustration and weight regain; instead, be more flexible by bringing moderation and balance into your healthy weight loss program.
- When the going gets tough, remind yourself of the values (e.g. I want to live a long life, I want to be around for my children, I want to be able to play with my grandchildren) that inspire and motivate you to engage in the healthful behaviors you may initially find less pleasurable.
If you’re interested in learning more about how your lifestyle habits and mindset relate to your weight struggles, I encourage you take my scientifically-validated 5-minute Six Factor Quiz online here and get your personalized results.
Your quiz scores for each of the six factors form the basis for making a personalized plan to improve your lifestyle habits and mindset and ultimately lose weight in a healthy way, as outlined in my self-help book, Six Factors to Fit: Weight Loss that Works for You!
The six distinct factors (Convenient Diner, Fast Pacer, Easily Enticed Eater, Exercise Struggler, Self-Critic, All-or-Nothing Doer) that emerged from my research reflect the most important features of lifestyle and mindset that are linked to weight gain.
When undertaking a weight loss program that takes into account your current lifestyle, habits and mindset, the goal is to follow strategies that will feel more natural and easier to sustain as they’ll be personally targeted to you and your life.
Since a restrictive diet is something you go on and off of, your dieting mindset tends to be a short-term undertaking.
And yet for successful weight loss, having a longer-term mindset is what works best.
Mindset matters when it comes to managing your weight.
RK
Robert Kushner, MD
