Guest blog from Lorraine Harris, @simplicityhealthandweightloss
People want to lose weight for a variety of reasons; fitness, health or to make sports easier. Focusing on why you want to lose weight is key to getting started. Being clear about your end aims, and the reasons behind it, ensures that you can make short term and long term goals to work towards.
Once you have established your goals, it’s time to start making habit changes to get you there. Changing everything at once, giving up all things that are “unhealthy” and replacing it entirely with healthy food can work short term, and you may see quick results. But this is unsustainable and often leads to weight regain, which can be more than any initial losses.
By picking 2-3 things a week to implement, you make small, sustainable lifestyle changes which are easy to maintain, and more importantly, if you have a few days or weeks off plan, then they are easy to fall back into because you’ve made them achievable. In the first week or two, I will get clients to focus on a couple of things; firstly water intake and aiming for 2-3L of water a day, secondly trying to increase their normal weekly step count by 10% and thirdly keeping a food journal.
On the days or occasions where they have made poorer food choices I ask them to note down the situation, and any circumstances or emotions that accompanied this choice. This gives us area’s to focus our CBT techniques on in later sessions.
Finally, I ask them to weigh and measure themselves (chest, narrowest point of waste, largest point of hips and any other area’s they want to focus on such as arms/legs etc) and take before photo’s. Measurements often change before weight and so this is important to do at the start.
Lorraine is a health & weight loss consultant. She uses nutrition, exercise and CBT to help people get healthier and lose weight.
www.simplicityhealthandweightloss.com
© Sue Palmer, The Horse Physio 2021
Treating your horse with care, connection, curiosity and compassion
