Part 2: Your Weight Loss Journey- What to Expect

September 30th, 2021

Last month we talked about changing your mindset about weight loss into making it a long game, making the focus more about health and wellbeing than just numbers, and staying focused on a long-term goal by breaking it up into smaller goals.

Here are our 8 top issues that we find holds our clients back from being at their optimum health and losing weight.

1. Not being aware of your eating

Put your hand up if you love food! Of course you do, it’s rare to find someone who doesn’t! And how could you not - food is awesome!

The best things about food are sometimes the worst things about it when we are trying to take care of our health. It’s easy to eat more than we need, and in our fast-paced modern lifestyle, it’s often easy to lose our ability to listen to our body when it tells us it’s had enough.  Sit to take your meal or snack break.  Slow down and take your time with meals, enjoy and take notice of how hungry and how full you are feeling. With a bit of practise, you will be able to recognise more sophisticated signals, where your body is “satisfied” without feeling “full”.

Some people find that keeping a food diary for a few days is a great way to get a handle on what, when, how much, how often and why they are actually eating.  It’s very easy to forget foods (and drinks too!) especially if you have a busy lifestyle.

Measuring your portion sizes can be helpful in making sure you aren’t having more than you need.  A good rough guide we recommend is the “handy” portion sizes: a serve of non-starchy vegetables is about enough to fit into a large handful; a serve of carbohydrate foods is about the size of your fist; and a serve of protein foods is about half the size and thickness of your palm. You can use these and the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating recommendations to work out what is best for you to eat for good health and sustainable weight loss.

2. Forgetting about nutrition quality

In my consults I talk about getting “bang for your buck” when planning what you are going to eat. This means that choosing mostly food and drinks that are high in nutrition quality, containing all the good things we need – protein, fibre, carbohydrates, healthy fats, vitamins and minerals – and low in all the things we don’t need a lot of: saturated fat, salt, alcohol, refined carbohydrates and added sugar.  Your body will respond by feeling satisfied and energised.

3. Poor meal timing

Do you eat most of your energy later in the day?  Or skip meals, then overeat? Or do both?  If so, this is a great way to train your body to build up its fat stores. 

Our bodies are designed to go through feast and famine situations. When we are awake and not getting enough carbohydrates to fuel our brain it will down regulate its metabolic rate to do everything including burn fat slowly.  When your brain and muscles are getting the fuel it needs when they are working, such as when you are awake, your metabolic rate will increase.  So, it makes sense to fuel your body with energy foods when you are the most active over the day and timing meals around exercise sessions.

4. Emotional eating

If there has been one good thing to come out of the pandemic, it is the great leaps forward that many people have made in mental health awareness and acceptance. Just like our bodies, our minds can feel different at different times of our lives, even differently from day to day.

We see a lot of clients who have some sort of emotional eating challenge in their journey to good health, and that’s why we often ask our clients a lot of questions that seemingly have nothing to do with their diet. Exploring the emotional aspects behind our eating is important in recognising ways that we can make sustainable changes. Your Dietitian can also work with a clinical psychologist to ensure that you can work through emotional and psychological challenges to give you the greatest success of overcoming them.

5. Sugar cravings!

Sugar is an important food for us on a primeval level because it is our source of fuel – our muscles and brain prefer glucose (the broken-down product after you eat sugar) to any other source of energy - in fact, our brain insists on using no other source of fuel. Knowing this, it’s easy to see why it can become so important in our lives and begin to occupy our thoughts in a way that becomes very hard to resist, especially when we are stressed, upset or unwell.

Thinking about meal and snack timing, making wiser food choices at the typical food craving times and earlier on in the day such as choosing foods that fill you up as well as keeping hydrated are a few strategies to start with.  Your Dietitian can assist you further to understand your sugar cravings and implement some more strategies that will work for you.

6. Lack of physical activity

Regular physical activity is an important part of a healthy lifestyle.  It has many benefits to your body, your mind and general well-being, that go far beyond weight loss.  Some benefits include feeling energised, strong, flexible and mobile, avoiding injuries or aches and pains, good posture, helping us to self-regulate our emotions, improving our mood, a sense of achievement, social connection, having ‘me time,’ connecting with your mind, body, breath and nature.

The best time for exercising is the time you are going to do it! Choose a time and an activity that you like, and that will work for you. If you are not a fan of the gym, consider other forms of physical activity, such as joining a sports team, exercise class in person or virtually, or walking with some other component added such as geocaching or bird watching.

If you cannot engage in physical activity in the “traditional” way there are people who can help you. 

A physiotherapist helps people with injuries and if it was a serious injury it is likely that you will need to be doing your physio exercises every day for the rest of your life in order to be able to keep building on your fitness levels. 

If you have a chronic health condition such as but not limited to heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, arthritis then an exercise physiologist will be able to help you to use exercise prescription to manage your health condition just like medication prescription by a doctor.  They will guide you on what exercises are best and safe for you and help you increase your fitness levels so you are able to then participate in more enjoyable activities. 

On the flip side being too sedentary and having too much screen time has it’s down falls including muscle aches and pains, low energy levels, poor fitness, muscle and joint stiffness and lack of mobility and ability to do self care tasks or even inability to do enjoyable activities, low mood, poor sleep.

7. Lack of sleep

Getting adequate sleep is so important.  Having a good sleep routine is integral to our eating and physical activity habits. It is like the foundations of a house. If sleep is disturbed so are our daily behaviours and our emotional well-being and what we are able to accomplish that day.  Sleep is also important for weight management. Our body needs to repair and re-build its muscles when it is asleep and it burns fat to do so.

Have you heard of a hormone called Ghrelin? It’s a hormone in our body that tells us we need fuel. It tells the stomach to feel hungry so we respond by finding something to eat.  When we don’t get enough sleep, our body tries to make up for the lack of energy by producing more ghrelin to ask us to eat more food. We eat more, but we are tired and sometimes lack motivation to exercise.  By now I am sure you can see where having enough sleep is so important for supporting sustainable weight loss!

If you have trouble going to sleep, planning to go to bed at the same time every night is ideal. Doing a relaxing activity, avoiding screen time and dimming the lights for 1/2 hour before bed is also recommended.

If your mind is busy and you have trouble ‘calming the farm’ there are many strategies around medication, deep breathing and sleep visualisation that you could use.  A psychologist can also assist in this area too so don’t hesitate to ask for some help if you need some.

8. Failing to plan

“If you fail to plan, your plan is bound to fail” is an old saying but an important one. We are busy, and change is hard. Planning means not only that you have a guide on what you want to do, but you also have a point to start from if you have a setback.

Some tips for planning:

• Using a diary, calendar or online planner usually works best to plan your meals, shopping and activity sessions.

• If you are not well-practised in planning meals, try using an existing weekday menu and shopping list. Try the free magazines put out by major supermarkets, or online or just ask your Dietitian.

• Consider alternative methods for shopping, such as home delivery or click n’ collect from major supermarkets, joining a food hub or co-operative, or having a go at growing your own food!

• Be realistic with your goals, as well as your plans. Look carefully at your working hours, social life and family time, as well as your budget, and work around them. Your plan will not work if it does not work for your responsibilities or finances.

• Remember that stuff happens, and sometimes plans have to change. If you have a setback, pick up where you left off (this is where having something written down comes in handy) and keep going.

We understand it takes time to make changes, but you can do it.  And we will be here to help you every step of the way so please reach out for support if you need it.