SIX WAYS TO LOSE WEIGHT WITHOUT DIETING

HABIT 6 : BROADEN YOUR COMFORT ZONE

As you start tuning into your body and your eating behaviours, you'll probably start to notice your own personal habits that are keeping you overweight.

Perhaps you have several seemingly harmless habits that trigger overeating or unfavourable food choices.

Individually the habits and impulses might seem innocent, but combined they can have a cumulative and far reaching effect.

Although it may seem strange, one way to disrupt bad habits is to start doing everyday things in your life differently.

By changing your behaviour you disrupt your memory's associations, and many bad habits will begin to fall away naturally.

For example, if you normally snack while you are standing, make sure that you only snack while you are sitting down at a table from now on.

If you normally watch TV or read while you are eating, start eating in silence or in conversation .

As you focus more on your food, eating consciously, you will eat more slowly and probably eat less.


Your comfort zone comprises your collection of habits - the things about which you feel safe and certain.

When you step outside your comfort zone, you may feel uncomfortable at first. But, if you keep changing your habits, you can continually broaden your comfort zone, and the broader you make it, the happier and more confident you will be and the less you will need food to compensate for discomfort or anxiety.



HOW TO BROADEN YOUR PERSONAL COMFORT ZONE:

Think about the bad habits you have that you would like to change:

Disrupting old habits is a creative activity that allows you to break free of the binds that prevent you from moving on, and you can come up with limitless imaginative ways to shake off your old patterns of behaviour.

Each bad habit you have is triggered by a thought or feeling that, once started, follows set steps like a recipe.

Although the situations that create the trigger may differ, the recipe for that behaviour is the same.

For example, if you serve yourself a large bowl of macaroni and cheese filled to the brim, you know that as you're dishing it out that it's more than you need in order to be satisfied.

The pattern that starts with a serving that's too large will end with you eating all of it, and then feeling bad about it afterwards as you realize that you have eaten too much.

In fact the problem started before this when you made a decision about how much to cook.

The problem with habits is that they become ingrained and automatic. We act out our 'recipes' without any thought or awareness, so the first step in dealing with them is to become conscious of what we're doing.

Start observing yourself and your thoughts, noting the ones that are not helpful and looking a little closer into what's happening in your mind and your body when you react.

Then you can change the pattern, or mess up the 'ingredients' in your recipe, disrupting the sequence in which the behaviour normally runs.

The way you mess with your habits is totally up to you and you can be as creative and as outrageous as you wish.

(ie - have a bath when you come in from work instead of heading straight for the fridge; throw your napkin on your plate or spill water on it when you think you've had enough; keep putting your knife and fork down between mouthfuls of food; stand up and shout 'Hey! Wake up! You're full, you idiot!'; responding to the sound of the alarm clock with a smile and saying 'yes!')

Whatever you do, you need to send a clear message to your nervous system that a new behaviour is going to follow in place of the old, and the more often you repeat this new behaviour, the more it will become ingrained in your nervous system as the new recipe for behaviour.

The next time you go to serve yourself some food, you'll remember what you did last time and either continue to disrupt the old pattern, or lay down a new more sensible one in it's place.

If the old behaviour still feels quite strong, keep disrupting, until you feel free to decide on a better behaviour.

It may take some effort to broaden your comfort zone at first, and you may start off by doing things that require little mental or physical effort, but bit by bit ,as you persevere, you will find more time to start doing things that you really enjoy and you'll be amazed at the different opportunities that start to open up to you.


Eat Well


Mandy x