In the majority of cases, losing weight is not an easy task. For some people it even works in an opposite way – the more they are trying to get rid of their excessive weight, the more weight they are putting on. Usually, the culprits of many failures to lose weight are various psychological issues. Multiple studies have proved that your mental condition is extremely important for maintaining a fit body. Let’s look at these popular psychological issues which don’t let people lose their weight.
Emotional hunger
Many people tend to feel cravings for a particular type of food even though they have just eaten a full meal and actually feel satiation. Usually, these cravings are one of the reasons a person can’t lose weight or even put on more weight. What are these cravings and how exactly can you fight with them?
A need to eat something tasty which is usually a sweet or fatty product even if you are not hungry is caused by emotional hunger. Emotional hunger is the sign that our brain needs to feel some comfort which can be brought by eating something delicious. Undeniably, one of the most popular situations in which people are experiencing emotional hunger is being under the stressful conditions. Eating tasty foods is one of the easiest ways to soothe the anxiety. Because of this fact, people suffering from depression find it rather difficult to maintain healthy weight and depression actually one of the causes of an excessive body mass.
It is important to learn to distinguish when you really want to eat and the craving is not caused by some uncomfortable feelings inside your head. A good tool you can use for this purpose is keeping a dietary dairy. Here, you should list not only the food you are consuming during the day but also the reason why you doing it. Thus, you might find out that you are consuming some meals not only because of hunger or stress, but also for other reasons, for instance, because you are simply bored at work and need a destruction. When you limit the food consumed because of your emotional hunger, you will be able to control your weight better.
Too rigid discipline
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, gaining a fit body is almost always impossible without disciplining oneself. Still, you should be aware of the adverse effects that are usually caused by too harsh discipline of regular exercises and cutting down calories.
One of these effects is definitely known to anyone who has ever tried implementing strict rules in their life with a view to getting rid of unnecessary pounds. As you might know yourself, the more low-calorie diet you are using, the higher is the risk that you will eventually end up in the frenzy of uncontrolled eating. Certainly, the risks are even higher if you diet also hardly contain any of your favourite food.
Another side effect of a strict is less obvious and, unfortunately, many people are completely unaware of it. This effect is based on the ability and of our bodies to store calories under stressful conditions. The mechanism was developed by evolution in order to allow people to live during the time of famine as long as possible. Even when our distant ancestors were not starving, they still didn’t have such access to food as we enjoy today. For that reason, a human body learnt to store energy and use it in a more effective way. Undeniably, this is a great feature of our organisms.
Yet, people whose eating discipline is too rigid usually notice how quickly their bodies stop losing kilogrammes. At the beginning of a diet, the weight loss is usually gradual and stable, albeit in a short time there comes a moment of the weight stopping decreasing even though you are trying to minimise the amount of food consumed even more. This happens exactly because your body starts feeling stressed and doesn’t understand that cutting the calories down is your conscious decision rather than a sign of inescapable famine.
Finally, the stress also increases the level of cortisol in your blood which is itself harmful for weight loss.
Inappropriate attitude to food
You have definitely heard a popular expression claiming that people should eat in order to live rather than live in order to it. According to this principle, many fitness gurus promote the eating style in which we are looking at food as at a set of nutritional substances in the first place. This can be a good approach, however, it usually leads to the ignorance of the taste of the food itself. Should we try to be completely oblivious to the way our food tastes and focus only on the benefits it gives to our bodies?
In all likelihood, such an attitude doesn’t allow us to build a healthy relationship with the products we are consuming. We can’t completely ignore our food preferences and the best option is trying to combine both the principles of healthy eating with the food we really enjoy eating.