Make Small Habit Changes for Big Weight Loss Results

One of the most successful factors in losing weight and keeping the weight off permanently, is to change your habits around food. Making small changes to your daily lifestyle, is easier than you may think. Below are 3 top tips to support you in making small changes that will enable you to become slimmer and lighter.

1) TWEAK YOUR HABITS – The real trick to changing your habits is to keep the changes small. Tweaks rather than giant steps! You need to work around the conscious part of your brain, as the conscious mind is the part of you that will resist or run away from the new way of being! So you need to make the changes small enough that the conscious mind won’t really notice and then introduce these tiny changes one at a time.

So for example, if you are someone who has 2 sugars in your coffee, than rather than just going “cold turkey” and stopping taking sugar, think about how you could make that change even smaller: you could cut your sugar to one teaspoon for example, or switch to low calorie sugar, or drink one less coffee per day and replace with another non sugary drink. Whichever small change you decide upon, try that small change for a week. If you managed to keep to that change, and you haven’t really noticed any issues with it, then take the next step and may swap down to half a teaspoon of sugar, or swap two coffees per day and so on until you have stopped taking sugar in your coffee or have stopped drinking so many sugar laden coffees.

2) MAKE IT EASY – Whatever change you think about making, see how small and easy you can make  it at first. So for example, if you decided that you needed to eat more fruit every day, then set yourself the challenge of having a piece of fruit after breakfast. Now the next step is making it easy to stick to your new habit. So how can you do this? You need to ensure that you have fruit in the house, so stock up on fruits you like so that they are readily available first thing in the morning.

3) PLAN AHEAD –  One factor that makes a huge difference to my clients in changing their habits, is planning ahead. So if you are making the habit change above, of eating more fruit then you would probably need to consider and plan some of the following:

– working out which fruits you like and buy them

– plan for days when the fruit may be past its best, by stocking up on tinned fruit in juice, such as grapefruit, apricots etc

– if you know you are short of time in the morning, plan to eat fruit that is easy, like a banana or apple. Fruits like fresh grapefruit are more messy and time consuming to prepare.

– think about which healthy breakfasts will naturally go with fruit, if you cannot face a big juicy orange in the morning, so breakfasts like porridge or weetabix could easily be mixed with berries or bananas.

By making changes incrementally, and painlessly, no matter how small, means that you are taking action and taking positive steps towards creating the figure you desire.