6 Simple Habits for Weight Loss (That You Can Maintain)
In James Clear’s bestselling 2018 book, Atomic Habits, he talks about how “Success is the product of daily habits — not once-in-a-lifetime transformations”. To succeed in your weight loss journey, work towards small changes that can together add up to something truly remarkable.
In addition to walking more, which you should already be doing, these are some habits that can positively influence your journey towards a healthy weight.
Cooking your food at home
Restaurants have one thing on their minds, to make the best tasting food. Sure, taste is a good thing, but with maintaining weight loss, it can be problematic. First, with a focus on taste, we basically give restaurants the license to put whatever they want in it, rightly so for taste, not so much for the weight. Restaurant food is typically high in fats and oils because, well, it can make things taste delicious and as a result, restaurant food can be a lot higher in calories.
Portion sizes can also play a big part. For instance, a serving of pasta in a restaurant can be about 3.5x the recommended portion size, and that, coupled with all the stuff you eat alongside it, can really add up in calories for a single meal. And they often aren’t too satiating either.
Finally, because they taste so good, you are encouraged to eat a lot more of it and this further reflects in the satiety of the foods. It’s easy to overeat the restaurant foods because of these reasons.
When you are eating at home, however, you are in control of what goes into your mouth.
What if I’m busy?
Meal prepping is a strategy that can help you significantly with this and plus, while preparing, you can listen to podcasts, call your friend or just give your mind some rest.
Keep a log of the food you eat
Calm down, I’m not telling you to track your calories, keeping a log on the food at its core, just involves a pen and a paper. All you have to do is to write down the foods that you eat on a day. Easy enough? One thing to keep in mind though, make sure you are tracking down every food that you eat. Foods that you just mindlessly eat are not considered “free”. Your body still counts the spoonful of peanut butter you snuck in when you mindlessly opened the fridge or the extra squirt of mayonnaise you added to your salad.
Simply being cognizant of what you are putting into your body will help you prevent the mindless eating that could contribute hundreds if not thousands of unaccounted calories.
Just doing this is likely to help you hugely, but there is another step that you could do which can help you even more; making use of the data you have collected. The process for this is fairly simple.
- Look through your list
- Identify foods that are easy to over consume
- Make a mindful attempt to overcome this
This step is more about mindfulness than anything else and is something that can help you significantly towards doing the same as well. Sometimes mindfulness isn’t enough, which is where improving your environment can help.
Fix your environment
One of James Clear’s rules for breaking bad habits is to “make it difficult”. You can apply much of the same towards weight loss. Your environment should not be actively making it easier to gain weight, unless that’s your goal, of course. Humans are born to be lazy, and as a result, by making things more difficult to do, you are less likely to do it. Simply moving a bag of chips from near the sofa to a cabinet in the kitchen will make you less likely to snack on those chips while sitting on the sofa.
Simply moving things into harder-to-find locations can help immensely in getting to eat less of it. Don’t sap your willpower by making it so easy to access these foods.
Plan while shopping
Ultimately though, the best way to stop eating foods that are interfering in your efforts to lose weight is to simply not have it in the house at all. Here’s where a plan comes in. If you go into a store and beforehand decide what you need to buy, you remain less susceptible to marketing tricks, flashy posters and salespeople enticing you to buy their product. They often engineer supermarkets to get you to buy food you might not think about buying by intentionally keeping those you really came in for, far from reach, so you have to cross through more aisles.
Of course, it’s also up to you to follow the plan.
But those Rice Krispies are on a buy one, get one free sale
It’s also on an if you eat one, you will eat another sale.
This is also where it becomes better to go shopping in the morning and usually after a meal because after a long day, you often suffer from “decision fatigue” in which after making many decisions during the day, the decisions that you make later in the day are worse. Think about when you come home from work and sit back on the TV and watch till late at night even though you know you shouldn’t. Furthermore, after a meal, you won’t be hungry (if the meal is semi decent), which prevents that from interfering with your ability to make rational decisions.
Avoid food late at night
Physiologically there is nothing wrong with eating at night, the nighttime calories don’t “count” more than the daytime calories and vice versa. There are some issues with consuming food late at night.
First, consuming food late at night can lead to interrupted sleep. This may not seem very significant but if you consume a heavy meal right before you sleep, it could cause some gastric discomfort, which can, at night interrupt your sleep. Sleep is essential during a fat loss phase, which is something this can interfere with.
Late night feeding can also reduce compliance to a diet because of the previously mentioned decision fatigue. After a long day at work, decision fatigue builds up and is at its weakest at night.
How convenient that I also have a bag of chips in the pantry next to my TV.
Because you are less likely to make good food choices late at night and it might affect your sleep, it makes sense to eat a bit earlier.
Set regular sleep patterns (and eating patterns)
This is something that can absolutely help immensely. The benefits of this comes from various sources including better quality sleep and less of a propensity for staying up late and eating more food.
Sleep has time and time again shown sleep to be a massive influence regarding preventing lean body mass loss, with a study showing just 1 hour less sleep a night to result in 5x higher percentage of lean body mass loss. While the effects aren’t likely to be this drastic for you, it can absolutely play a massive role. Your body has its circadian rhythm and a steady sleep cycle helps keep that in check. Evidence has also pointed to sleep deprivation leading to increases in hunger. Regular sleep patterns can also reduce the occurrence of late night binging, by reducing the actual time you spend awake at night.
Hunger has its own circadian rhythm as well, which is why consistent meal timing can help significantly. Having set times for meals will also reduce the propensity for snacking and further reduce the chances of nighttime binging.
Small habits can truly play a massive role in your weight loss and maintenance journeys. Not all of these will work for everyone due to the individuality of their needs, their situations, and their bodies, but this can work for quite a few people.
Everyone’s journeys are individual, experimenting with what works for one and what doesn’t is incredibly important. Remember that the key to sticking with habits is consistency, be consistent with your habits for them to truly play their role.
You just read another post from In Fitness And In Health: a health and fitness community dedicated to sharing knowledge, lessons, and suggestions to living happier, healthier lives.
If you’d like to join our newsletter and receive more stories like this one, tap here.
