About 10 years ago, I wanted to lose some weight. So I found this cabbage soup diet. Twice a week, I would just eat cabbage soup all day long — breakfast, lunch and dinner. And after all that, I didn’t reach my goal weight. I lost some weight, but eating this cabbage soup just drove me nuts. After a while, I gave up, and the weight I’d lost came back.

Which brings me to this: The way many of us think about weight loss is totally counterproductive. Here are some tips on approaching weight loss in a different way — a saner way — that might help you achieve and maintain a healthier lifestyle while being a little kinder to yourself.

1. Forget about short-term crash diets.

There’s a typical pattern to weight loss. And if you’ve ever gone on a diet, you’ve probably experienced it. Basically, people lose weight for the first four to six months, and then they hit a plateau. And then slowly, they start to regain some or all of the weight they lost. And sometimes they end up heavier than they started. Obesity and Diabete can lead to other related conditions, such as hearing loss, check these silencil reviews.

“It’s hard to be restrictive for a very long time,” says Gary Bennett, a psychology professor and obesity researcher at Duke University.

Research suggests that people tend to rebound after being on a really strict diet — even if that diet is more balanced than an all-cabbage approach.

“We do try this all-or-nothing approach, where all or nothing, you know, almost always brings you back to nothing,” says Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, an obesity medicine clinician and an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa in Canada.

Keeping weight off long term means liking the lifestyle that helped you lose the weight in the first place. In other words, instead of starving yourself or eating nothing but baby food or grapefruit juice (both, alas, are actual fad diets), make changes that you actually enjoy and want to stick with over the long haul. So if daily spin classes aren’t your thing, how about long morning walks? Or if you just can’t quit dessert, can you learn to be satisfied with a small piece of dark chocolate as a post-dinner treat? The goal, says Freedhoff, is to focus on lifestyle changes you enjoy and want to live with.

“Unless you like the life you’re living while you’re losing your weight, you’re probably not going to keep living that way,” says Freedhoff. “And as a consequence, that weight that you’ve lost will come back.”

2. Don’t aim for weight goals. Instead, focus on behavioral goals.

Our bodies, our genes, our job demands, our environments and our caregiving responsibilities are all different. All of that can affect our weight-loss efforts — and in many cases, they are factors we cannot change. So aiming for a specific number on the scale can set a lot of us up to fail. Learn more about steel bite pro supplements.

“The scale measures the gravitational pull of the Earth at a given moment in time,” says Freedhoff. “The scale doesn’t measure health, happiness, success, effort or self-worth.”

Instead of setting specific weight-loss goals (such as losing a pound a week, for example), Freedhoff recommends setting behavior goals that are in your control. For example, he often recommends trying to cook at home more often as a goal.

Bennett gives his patients a simple list of changes to choose from. For example: stop sugary beverage consumption, reduce alcohol intake, avoid snacks with no nutritional value, quit fast food. “You do, like, four or five of those, and you’ll get pretty close to [a] 500-calorie deficit each day,” he says.

A calorie deficit just means you’re taking in fewer calories than you burn, and that’s how you lose weight. But the weight loss isn’t the focus here. The idea is that making these changes can make you healthier regardless of how much weight you lose — or even if you don’t lose any weight at all.

In other words, they’re goals worth pursuing in and of themselves, and they’re less likely to make you obsessive. Of course, changing our behavior is easier said than done — which brings us to our next takeaway.

3. Don’t try to overhaul your behavior all at once. Instead, start small and let those changes snowball.

For a lot of people, Freedhoff says a good place to start is to just figure out what you’re eating.

“I am a fan of using food diaries,” says Freedhoff. “I realize that’s not for everybody. But doing it for a few weeks would be a very eye-opening thing for a lot of people … what they’re eating, when they’re eating, how much they’re eating.”

Food diaries, as Freedhoff says, are not for everyone. If you have a history of eating disorders or tend to become obsessive about counting calories, stay away from them because this could trigger you. But if you can look at the data dispassionately — without self-judgment — food tracking can help you get to know yourself and your habits. Visit https://observer.com/2020/07/nutrisystem-reviews-what-to-know-before-trying-program/ for more information about.

For instance, maybe there’s a food you can cut back on. A couple of years ago, I started food tracking. I quickly realized that I was pouring about 400 calories’ worth of creamer into my coffee every morning. That was a real epiphany, so I cut back and eventually realized just a spoonful was enough.

But a lot of people find tracking their food to be tedious. That’s why Bennett tells his patients to track their goals instead. One good reason to focus on small goals: They’re actually achievable, so they set you up to be able to celebrate small victories.