WEIGHT LOSS
Change your mindset to lose weight, says Dr Ali Novitsky, an obesity expert and founder of wellness programme, The Fit Collective, as she shares her top tips for sustainable weight loss.
BY 2027, IT’S ESTIMATED NEARLY one-third of the world’s population could be obese or over weight. As an obesity medicine physician, I know changing this outcome will take a collective commitment to creating healthier communities and empowering healthier choices. Here, I offer you my top five strategies that go against diet culture and are extremely successful for long-term, sustainable weight loss.
1 SCRAP ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING
All-or-nothing thinking is one of the greatest obstacles to weight loss. In diet culture, you’ve learned you have to be ultra-restrictive in your diet and overly aggressive in exercise regimens to see results. This puts a massive amount of pressure on you to be perfect. So, when you eat a cookie and then decide you’ve failed, you throw the towel in and eat the entire pack of cookies. This undesired action then leads to disappointment and shame.
You can’t have successful weight loss feeling pressured, shamed or disappointed. In fact, your weight loss routines will now feel like punishment and you won’t want to continue them. But when you become aware of how often you fall into the all-or-nothing thinking pattern, suddenly these thoughts are much less powerful and you can open up the opportunity to create new beliefs.
To do this, you need new evidence to support your new way of thinking. This is where the discomfort will occur and where growth will happen. But where to start? Identify one extreme thought you currently believe and try to find evidence for how it may not be true. Perhaps you believe that a long daily cardio session is necessary to lose weight. Are you willing to create evidence that less could actually be more?
Challenging these beliefs will help you to find the middle ground, which will allow you to overcome all-or-nothing thinking.
2 Stay grounded
Emotional eating creates a conflict when trying to lose weight as it prevents you from being in a calorie deficit, and is a symptom of emotional dysregulation. Think of an electrical circuit; it’s grounded so there is not an explosion. You must stay grounded so you don’t have outbursts of behaviour that hold you back from your goals.
The first step is to become aware of your stress levels and the symptoms you experience at those dif ferent levels. For example, a stress level of six is when many people feel restless and have symptoms of pacing back and forth, snacking when they aren’t hungry, or having massive thought spirals that feel out of control. However, when you identify your symptoms, you can have distraction or grounding techniques available to become
