Using Psychology
to Lose Weight
When you set out to lose unwanted weight, you are making a conscious decision to do this. Then as you go on, lots of what you do when it comes to the actual process of weight loss requires your conscious attention as well. For example, you decide to go on a particular diet. You choose where, when, and how much you eat. You regulate your daily life so you aren’t distracted from your weight-loss goals by outside events or internal states.
Having to be especially conscious of what you are doing to lose unwanted weight often turns out to require too much conscious effort. To lighten this load, you can turn to the psychological process of priming. An example of priming is being in a “place” literally or psychologically that you associate with trying harder and doing better. You could be in a classroom or sports arena, and just being there gets you to feel like achieving or winning. Or, you might get the same effect by seeing a movie, or reading a story, or even reading certain words (achieve, strive, accomplish, win), and then without realizing it, you take this influence with you and are likely to act on it.
You can look for what will prime you, and make the weight-loss process much easier and less effortful. It could be getting some extra achievement motivation from somewhere. This is where your exercise routine could be of help—psychological help, that is. Sticking to your exercise routine is a big achievement. Increasing your exercise routine as you master the earlier steps is yet another achievement. The endurance you build for exercising may be something you carry with you into dieting.
If you are not the exercise type, you can prime yourself in a thousand different ways. You could, for instance, develop a more loving relationship with your spouse or partner. The elements of that relationship may be just what the doctor ordered for successful weight loss: feeling worth it, getting love from a person (not from food), feeling special, feeling deserving, feeling satisfied. You get the idea.
There may be primes already in your life that you don’t have to work hard at, that you don’t have to develop; they may just be there. Take a look around and see what influences are available to you that would help you not have to work so hard at the tasks involved in reducing your weight. Anything you can do to lighten your load so you don’t have to resort to such tight conscious control will make your end goal that much more achievable.
