Your body tells you a lot of things but most of us tend to ignore the signals it sends.
If you decide to listen to your body more often then you can lose weight much more easily.
But if you’ve been ignoring the signals your body sends out for longer than you’d care to admit, this can be easier said than done.
How do you start listening to your body again?
A lot of the signals our bodies send to us are subtle.
The less subtle ones are normally to do with hunger – your stomach rumbles, that kind of thing.
But if you’ve ever felt full whilst you’ve been eating food then that’s the kind of signal you should be aware of.
If you’ve been used to wolfing down your food or eating it almost mindlessly whilst you do something else then it’s time to change!
Treat every meal as though it’s a restaurant meal
If you went out to a nice restaurant for a meal, you wouldn’t eat it whilst reading a book or magazine.
You wouldn’t eat your meal whilst you were paying attention to the television.
You’d pay attention to the food you were spending money on.
So why don’t you do this at home?
At this stage, all the usual excuses come out.
A restaurant meal is different
You haven’t got the time to do everything so you have to multi-task
Your home food is just “fuel”, it’s nothing special
And a host of other reasons why it’s different
But, truth be told, whilst it’s easy to pay attention to what you’re eating at most restaurants, it’s even more important to pay attention at home.
If you’re like most people, you eat more of your meals at home than you do elsewhere…
Breakfast (if you eat it) before you leave for work or school or wherever.
Maybe you prepare your lunch ready to eat later
Evening meals – the ones that used to be the focus for the whole family but nowadays tend to be juggled around all the different other things that need to happen
Weekend or days-off meals
Snacks
Drinks
And maybe more
And if you’re on auto-pilot when you’re eating, before you know it the food on your plate has disappeared into your stomach.
But you don’t consciously remember eating it – it’s just something you did whilst you were doing whatever else it was that you deemed more important than thinking about what you eat.
That means you miss the full signal
The “full” signal our body sends out can be easily missed, especially if you’ve spent the last few years training yourself to ignore it.
By concentrating on what you eat, you can start to notice those signals again.
They might be subtle – the feeling that you’re getting full, an idea that you ought to stop stuffing food into your face sooner rather than later, that kind of thing.
And you may not notice them every time.
That’s fine.
You’re re-learning how to eat so there will be glitches every now and then.
But, over time, you’ll notice more of these signals.
And, over time, you’ll act on more of them as well.
Which is the important thing.
The more often you stop eating when you cease to be hungry, the better!
You’ll automatically cut down portion sizes.
Contrary to what your mother probably told you when you were growing up, it’s OK to leave some food on your plate.
Especially with our modern gigantic portion sizes.
Our portion sizes have grown over the years.
When Coca Cola was first launched, it was served in 6 ounce bottles. That’s about 150ml if you’re metric.
The size of serving that you might get on a plane where they’re conscious about the weight they’re carrying.
But elsewhere the amount you’d probably leave alongside the melting ice in that super-size cup.
Most everything else has gone the same way.
So it’s almost essential to leave something on the plate if you’re not cooking your own food as often as the television cooking programs would like to think you are.
Drink a glass of water about 30 minutes before each meal
Don’t get hung up about the size of the glass of water.
Anything from 6 or 8 ounces right the way up to a pint (half a litre) is good.
Make sure it’s just water.
Not water that’s been turned into coffee or tea or some other beverage.
Plain water.
With or without fizzy bubbles – they don’t add calories!
This has the benefit of filling your stomach slightly and decreasing your hunger.
It’s an easy way to eat less at each meal without feeling deprived or hard done by.
Try it.
By the way, the 30 minutes isn’t precise either.
It can be longer or it can be shorter.
It’s certainly not precision timing – just an indication of roughly when to drink that water to help you feel fuller faster.
Get help to listen to your body
There are lots of different support options to help you listen to your body and lose weight.
They range from local groups through to internet groups and umpteen different programs that you could use to help.
One of the least intrusive methods I’ve found is hypnosis.
It works nicely and all you need to do is set aside 15 or 20 minutes to listen to a hypnosis track.
It can drill down to the problem that’s affecting you today – whether that’s binge eating, boredom eating, cutting down on all those fast food calories or lots of other things.
So you play yourself the track that best meets your needs today – that works really nicely for a lot of people.
Or, if you’re that rare person with only one way that you put on weight, you just get the one track that meets your needs.
A lot of the signals our bodies send to us are subtle.
The “full” signal our body sends out can be easily missed, especially if you’ve spent the last few years training yourself to ignore it.
