Weight loss can be a complex journey, often fraught with conflicting information and emotional challenges. This article, inspired by Liz Braden’s approach, aims to provide a comprehensive guide to achieving sustainable weight loss by addressing both the physical and emotional aspects of eating.
Understanding the Basics of Weight Loss
To lose weight, it's essential to burn more calories than you consume. Many people find the sheer volume of weight loss information overwhelming, making it difficult to know where to start. A balanced meal is one that incorporates a good balance of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.
The Emotional Side of Eating
Many people turn to food for comfort, stress relief, or as a reward, often reaching for unhealthy options like junk food and sweets. Emotional eating is using food to make yourself feel better-to fill emotional needs, rather than your stomach. While occasional indulgence isn’t harmful, relying on food to cope with emotions can lead to a cycle of unhealthy eating habits and feelings of guilt and powerlessness.
Distinguishing Emotional Hunger from Physical Hunger
Before breaking free from emotional eating, it's crucial to differentiate between emotional and physical hunger.
Emotional hunger comes on suddenly. It hits you in an instant and feels overwhelming and urgent. Physical hunger, on the other hand, comes on more gradually.
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Emotional hunger craves specific comfort foods. When you’re physically hungry, almost anything sounds good-including healthy stuff like vegetables. But emotional hunger craves junk food or sugary snacks that provide an instant rush.
Emotional hunger often leads to mindless eating. Before you know it, you’ve eaten a whole bag of chips or an entire pint of ice cream without really paying attention or fully enjoying it.
Emotional hunger isn’t satisfied once you’re full. You keep wanting more and more, often eating until you’re uncomfortably stuffed. Physical hunger, on the other hand, doesn’t need to be stuffed.
Emotional hunger isn’t located in the stomach. Rather than a growling belly or a pang in your stomach, you feel your hunger as a craving you can’t get out of your head.
Emotional hunger often leads to regret, guilt, or shame. When you eat to satisfy physical hunger, you’re unlikely to feel guilty or ashamed because you’re simply giving your body what it needs.
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Identifying Your Emotional Eating Triggers
The first step in stopping emotional eating is identifying your personal triggers. Common triggers include:
Stress: Chronic stress leads to high cortisol levels, which trigger cravings for salty, sweet, and fried foods.
Stuffing emotions: Eating can temporarily silence uncomfortable emotions like anger, fear, sadness, anxiety, loneliness, resentment, and shame.
Boredom or feelings of emptiness: Eating simply to give yourself something to do, relieve boredom, or fill a void.
Childhood habits: Rewarding good behavior with sweets or using food as comfort during childhood can carry over into adulthood.
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Social influences: Overeating at social gatherings due to the presence of food or social pressure.
To pinpoint your triggers, backtrack whenever you overeat and identify the upsetting event that started the emotional eating cycle.
Developing Healthier Coping Mechanisms
To stop emotional eating, find other ways to fulfill yourself emotionally. Diets often fail because they don’t address the underlying emotional issues.
Acknowledge and accept your emotions: Allowing yourself to feel uncomfortable emotions can be scary, but it’s essential to managing them.
Practice mindfulness: Stay connected to your moment-to-moment emotional experience to rein in stress and repair emotional problems.
Slow down and savor your food: Eating mindfully, focusing on the tastes and textures of your food, can help you appreciate each bite and feel full on less.
Avoid distractions while eating: Eating while watching TV or using your phone can prevent you from fully enjoying your food and lead to overeating.
Building a Balanced Meal for Weight Loss
Here’s how to build a simple, balanced meal for weight loss:
Step 1: Choose Your Protein
Protein is crucial for weight loss because it keeps you full longer and has the highest thermic effect, meaning you burn more energy digesting it. Aim to include a source of protein with every meal.
- Examples: Chicken, turkey, salmon, lean red meat, eggs, Greek yogurt, tuna, white fish, cottage cheese, whey protein powder (if whole foods aren't an option), nuts (predominantly a fat), beans, legumes, and tofu.
Step 2: Choose Your Color (Vegetables)
Vegetables and salad items provide fiber, vitamins, and minerals. Fiber is essential for digestive health and helps keep you feeling full.
- Examples: Tomato, capsicum, radishes, beetroot, cabbage, eggplant, asparagus, carrots, sweet potato, pumpkin, corn, squash, spinach, broccoli, peas, green beans, lettuce, celery, cucumber, cauliflower, mushrooms, garlic, onions, and parsnips.
Aim to add some color with every meal.
Step 3: Choose Your Carbohydrates
Complex carbohydrates are digested and absorbed slower, making them a healthier option. They provide sustained energy and prevent energy crashes.
- Examples: Sweet potato, rice, pumpkin, white potatoes, rolled oats, quinoa, bananas, buckwheat, whole-grain tortilla/bread, and all colorful fruits.
Carbohydrates are recommended to be eaten with most meals, but not all. Super low-carb diets aren't sustainable for long-term weight loss.
Step 4: Choose Your Healthy Fats
Fats are calorie-dense, so moderation is key. However, some fat is needed in the diet as it provides us with fat-soluble vitamins and essential fatty acids.
- Examples: Almonds, coconut oil, avocado, chia seeds, pecans, extra virgin olive oil, almond butter, salmon, and pumpkin seeds.
Fats are recommended to be eaten with most meals, but not all.
The Importance of Physical Activity and Lifestyle Changes
In addition to diet, physical activity and lifestyle changes are essential for weight loss. When you’re physically strong, relaxed, and well-rested, you’re better able to handle stress and avoid emotional eating.
Make daily exercise a priority: Physical activity does wonders for your mood and energy levels, and it’s also a powerful stress reducer.
Aim for 8 hours of sleep every night: When you don’t get enough sleep, your body craves sugary foods for a quick energy boost.
Make time for relaxation: Give yourself permission to take at least 30 minutes every day to relax, decompress, and unwind.
Connect with others: Don’t underestimate the importance of close relationships and social activities.
Addressing Executive Function in Weight Loss
Behavioral weight loss (BWL) is a recommended treatment for obesity, but it's not effective for everyone. BWL requires executive function (EF), higher-order cognitive functions such as planning and problem-solving. Lower EF may be associated with attenuated weight loss, and targeting EF in treatment could improve outcomes.
The Role of Executive Function
Executive function skills are required for successful adherence to BWL program recommendations. These skills include:
- Remembering to self-monitor
- Being able to obtain information (e.g., calorie information)
- Recording information consistently
- Planning meals in advance
- Problem-solving challenging situations
- Resisting temptations
Individuals with lower socioeconomic status (SES) may face additional challenges due to constrained financial resources and time.
Cognitive Training for Weight Loss
Cognitive training is a psychosocial intervention that teaches skills to optimize cognitive functioning. It can be employed as a stand-alone intervention or in conjunction with other psychiatric rehabilitation components.
Inhibitory control training (ICT): Improves inhibitory control capacity to suppress reward-driven behavior.
Attentional Bias Modification Programs (ABM): Trains attention away from unhealthy food cues and towards healthy food cues or neutral non-food cues.
Compensatory Cognitive Training (CCT): Teaches skills to compensate for and work around cognitive deficits.
Novel Executive Function Training for Obesity (NEXT)
NEXT adapts Compensatory Cognitive Training to be delivered in conjunction with BWL. It teaches internal strategies, such as organization of information through categorization, and external strategies, such as developing associations with environmental cues.
The sessions incorporate both skill learning and practice, with an emphasis on practice time and the goal of turning skills into habits that can be applied in the real world.
Liz Braden: More Than Just a Meteorologist
Liz Braden, a meteorologist, also understands the importance of community and helping others. Her volunteer work and mentorship reflect a commitment to supporting individuals in achieving their goals.