How does your environment affect your weight loss goals!
It’s a familiar story, you have the best of intentions while establishing a weight loss or health goal. You may have even carefully designed a plan to achieve those goals, but something always derails you!
Maybe, you don’t need to revise your goals, maybe what you need is to adjust your environment!
This frustrating predicament of environments’ effect on behavior and weight was depicted on the famous reality show, “The Biggest Loser”. While on the show, contestants successfully lost weight in a completely controlled and artificial environment. They didn’t have to make the hard behavioral changes while having to deal with the environmental triggers that may have contributed to their weight loss struggle.
Unfortunately, when they returned home to the real world, old habits returned and along with them, all of the weight they lost. Consequently, no reunion show, as the majority of contestants gained all the weight back or more!
What are the top environmental influences affecting your weight loss goals and what can you do to combat them?
1) Visual triggers:
• Seeing temptations such as candy or popcorn in a glass bowl versus an opaque container can influence your determination to avoid them!
• Watching endless streams on social media of ascetically pleasing and tantalizing prepared meals can cause you to respond physically such as salivating and releasing the fat storage hormone insulin, in preparation for consumption of food!
• Eating out of a package makes sticking with a reasonable portion size difficult, people eat more from bigger bags and bigger plates!
2) Smell: scents of foods have been demonstrated to directly increase appetite, trigger salivation and release gastric acid in preparation for digestion. Maybe this why the Cinnabun company places their ovens near the door, filling the air with cinnamon, sugar and butter?
3) Social connections: This may be the most powerful of all environmental influences. According to research a person’s chance of becoming obese increases by 57 percent if a close friend is obese, 40 percent if a sibling is obese, and 37 percent if a spouse is obese. Apparently, obesity is contagious; however, so is eating healthy and being fit.
How can we combat these powerful environmental influences?
1) Do not rely on willpower: put temptations out of site, make the unwanted behavior more difficult. Ie: hide the cookies, chips or ice cream. Make the desired behaviors easier ie: keep cut-up fruit or vegetables easy to grab.
2) Planning: the best time to stop an unwanted behavior is before it happens. Start by packing your first meal of the day with a combination of protein, fat and fiber and then plan ahead for Lunch and/ or Dinner. The least decisions you have to make about what to eat, the more successful you will be at adopting habits that support your goals.
3) Create your support group: communicate to your close family and friends what you need specifically from them to support your personal goals. They are not mind readers and you may be pleasantly surprised by their positive responses!
Finally, while we cannot always control our environment, we can adopt the skills that allow us to engage in behaviors that more powerfully support our goals and allow us to live more authentically.
If you want to know how a personalized plan could be the missing link in achieving your goals, please call now 941-685-8074 or click here to schedule a free 15 minute discovery call.
