The Slim Habit Blog

Do you know what is pure, white and deadly? It’s not some terrible poison, it is sugar!

We all eat a huge amount of sugar. It makes things taste good. It makes us want to eat more, but do we ever really think what it is doing to us?

Here are some facts about sugar.

• Each of us consumes approximately 135lbs (61kg) of sugar every year. A hundred years ago the figure was 5lbs (2.3kg), and cardiovascular disease, cancer and obesity were rare.
• Eating sugar upsets your blood sugar balance and triggers the release of insulin. The body uses insulin to keep blood sugar at a safe level. Insulin promotes the storage of fat, so when you eat food full of sugar, you’re promoting rapid weight gain.
• Sugar raises your insulin level which inhibits the release of growth hormones. This in turn depresses your immune system – not good if you want to be healthy and stay healthy.
• Sugar is a mojor contributor to many of our ailments and health problems such as: diabetes, osteoporosis, the aging, tooth decay, allergies, depression, coronary heart disease, increased harmful cholesterol (LDL), and reduced helpful high-density cholesterol (HDL).

Unfortunately too many food manufacturers love to add sugar whenever they can. Breakfast cereals are stuffed with sugar. So are baked beans, ready meals, snacks, sweets, chocolate, fruit juices, fast foods, biscuits, cakes, colas and fizzy drinks. One can of cola can contain as much as 7 teaspoonfuls of sugar.

From now on, try to significantly reduce your sugar intake. Become a ‘sugar detective’. Discover how much sugar you’re eating each day. Read labels and understand the sugar content in what you buy.

If you want to lose weight permanently and lead a life free from diets, you need to very careful about the amount of sugar you eat. Sugar is public enemy number one when it comes to losing weight. You need to get into the habit – the slim habit, of limiting the amount of sugar you eat. It will help you lose weight and do your health good too.

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When was the last time you had a really good laugh? Do you have fun? Have you really laughed – laughed out loud – this week? When was the last time you laughed until it hurt? Having fun and enjoying yourself is really important. You’ve got to have time in your life when you can ‘let go’ and have a good time. Life is far too serious for most of us and we have to find a way of ‘letting go’ occasionally.

Did you know that moods are infectious? That laughter and cheerfulness spread like wildfire – everybody wants to be a part of it.  It’s been said that “laughter is the shortest distance between two people”, and it’s true. It locks our emotional brains together. Laughter signals friendliness rather than aggression, trust rather than hostility. This is picked by our emotional brain – our limbic system – which recognizes there’s a relaxation in the emotional temperature, and an opportunity for the engagement of both heart and mind.

People who are trying to lose weight can be grumpy and grim. They’re not usually a bundle of laughs. There’s no need for you to be the same. Take time to go out and really enjoy yourself. Go and have fun. Laugh a lot.  It’ll do you good.

Far too many diets have a restrictive calorie regime and this has the effect of making us depressed and miserable. We are not nice to be around when we are losing weight. However, it needn’t be that way. The best way to lose weight is not to go on a diet. Does that sound crazy? Well, it’s not. Sure, if you want to lose weight and you don’t mind the weight coming back again, then a diet is fine because ‘weight rebound’ is what happens when you go on a diet.

If you want to keep the smile on your face and lose weight permanently, you have to learn new habits, slim habits. Only by changing your brhavior will permanent weight loss become a reality.

If you’re trying to lose weight permanently then you have to keep your morale up. Try visualizing a positive outcome when you’ve lost weight and you are able to enjoy a slim, healthy life. It can be a great motivator

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Did you know that your body talks to you? It supplies you with a constant stream of vital information, but are you listening? How good are you at listening to your body? Can you now recognize the difference between a hunger signal and a thirst signal? You may have discovered that most of them are thirst signals – over 70% of them are. If you can tune-in to your body, it is such a useful thing to be able to do. There is so much information for you to use – but you have to learn to access it.

There is absolutely no doubt that every day you will be faced with temptation when you are trying to lose weight. To eat or not to eat the slice of cake, to use a convenient excuse for not taking exercise – there’ll be many other similar dilemmas. When you’re faced with a set of positive and negative options, how do you come to your decision? Do you use your ‘gut feeling’?

 Do you know what ‘gut feeling’ is? Gut feeling is a sense of intuition that you can’t rationally account for. It’s emotional wisdom which you’ve gathered from past experiences. It flags up positive and negative alternatives which you are then able to consider with your reasoned thought. ‘Gut feeling’ and reason should actually work in parallel. When you learn to work with both, you start to make smart decisions.  For example: Your gut feeling might tell you that the three-mile run you are about to start will be hard work – disagreeable even – and that you’d prefer to avoid it. Reason tells you that it will do you good and help you to lose weight. You err on the side of reason, but it could easily have gone the other way.

 Gut feeling is an example of information that is available to you from within yourself. You have an ‘inner wisdom’ which you need to learn to understand, interpret and manage. Realize that you have these sources of wisdom, and you’ll take better and more informed decisions.

 Mobilizing your gut feeling and really understanding how it works is hugely useful when you’re trying to lose weight permanently. The more you are conscious of your powers of reason and your gut feeling, the more you will be able to mobilize them to help you succeed in losing weight.

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It’s always difficult at the beginning. Whenever you begin a new task or a new challenge like trying to lose weight, you’re almost certain to have a little self-doubt. Self-doubt can be quite sneaky – it creeps in and quietly undermines your efforts to succeed.

If you want to prepare yourself for a new challenge, like losing weight for example, you need to consider your actions and your reactions. Inevitably, negative thoughts surface, particularly when there’s uncertainty and when the outcome is unclear. If you allow these negative thoughts to grow unchecked, your chances of achieving any degree of success will be reduced significantly.

Have you already experienced self-doubt about losing weight?  There’ll always be doubt somewhere in the back of your mind – but try to notice when you start to have ‘self-doubting’ thoughts. Make sure you don’t allow your negative thoughts to take over your thinking. Remember, you’re predisposed to think negatively.  If you allow your negative thoughts to go unchecked, they will multiply. Notice the way you think, and manage your thinking process.

The next time you feel self-doubt creeping into your thinking, try the following:

Take three slow, deep breaths.

Ask yourself:

·         What’s the reason behind my self-doubt?

·         What was the trigger that started my self-doubt?

·         What do I want the outcome to be?

Concentrate on making that outcome a positive one. If you want to lose weight permanently you have to try and banish self-doubt, because you can succeed. Getting out of the habit of self-doubt will definitely make your weight loss efforts much easier. The more you practice the easier it will become. Learning new habits is the only sure fire way to lose weight and for it not to return. Never doubt that you can succeed. Make the effort and you will win through.

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Okay, this is a raid! Go to the kitchen and open all your food cupboards, and take a good look at what you’ve got hiding there.

What have you found? Doughnuts…potato chips…candy bars…it’s a proper Aladdin’s cave of goodies!

Now, it’s time to be brave! Remove anything which know is going to work against you losing weight. Take out everything you would no longer buy if you went to the supermarket today. Put them on one side.

Let’s move on to the fridge and the freezer. What have we got here? Coke…a stable of Ben & Jerry’s cartons…a stack of ready meals…very revealing! It’s time for you to be brave. Take out anything you know will work against your weight loss efforts.  Have courage, put them on one side. Don’t be tempted to keep anything back.

Have a good look at what you’ve unearthed. Is it a bit embarrassing? If it is, here’s a way to make yourself feel much better about your little transgression… Get rid of everything. Difficult as it might be, give everything away, and don’t be tempted to buy any of those items again.

From now on, your cupboards, your fridge and your freezer need to take on a new look. A ‘new look’, designed by you. Before you go shopping again, sit down and make a list of the food you want to eat. Draw up a simple meal plan for the coming week. You should be thinking of foods with a low sugar content, and eating as much fresh food as possible.

Losing weight can be a bit of a rollercoaster ride if you allow it to be. By clearing out the food and drink that you should be avoiding, you’re doing yourself a great favour. By removing temptation life is going to become a whole lot easier. When you open the fridge door you’re not going to destroy all your efforts by one weak impulse. Out of sight is definitely out of mind.

If you want to lose weight permanently you have to make a real effort. You have to get out of the habit of eating bad foods. If you do, weight loss will become so much easier. Your new habits will gradually support you and help you to say ‘no’. Temptation will never disappear, but you will be in a far better position to resist it.  

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How good are you at listening to your body? Can you now recognize the difference between a hunger signal and a thirst signal? You may have discovered that most of them are thirst signals – over 70% of them are. Tuning-in to your body is such a useful thing to be able to do. There is so much information available to you – all you have to do is to learn to access it.

Every day you will be faced with temptation when you are trying to lose weight. To eat or not to eat the slice of cake, to use a convenient excuse for not taking exercise – there’ll be many other similar dilemmas. When you’re faced with a set of positive and negative options, how do you come to your decision? Do you use your ‘gut feeling’?

What is ‘gut feeling’? Gut feeling is a sense of intuition that you can’t rationally account for. It’s emotional wisdom which you’ve gathered from past experiences. It flags up positive and negative alternatives which you are then able to consider with your reasoned thought. ‘Gut feeling’ and reason should actually work in parallel. When you learn to work with both, you start to make smart decisions.  For example: Your gut feeling might tell you that the three-mile run you are about to start will be hard work – disagreeable even – and that you’d prefer to avoid it. Reason tells you that it will do you good and help you to lose weight. You err on the side of reason, but it could easily have gone the other way.

Gut feeling is an example of information that is available to you from within yourself. You have an ‘inner wisdom’ which you need to learn to understand, interpret and manage. Realize that you have these sources of wisdom, and you’ll take better and more informed decisions and find losing weight much easier

Mobilizing your gut feeling and really understanding how it works is hugely useful when you’re trying to lose weight permanently. The more you are conscious of your powers of reason and your gut feeling, the more you will be able to mobilize them to help you succeed.

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New Year is a time for reflection on what might have been, and a time to look forward and plan. It’s always a good opportunity to take stock of your life and to try and put right some of the mistakes you have made in the past year.

Examining our errors is something we try to avoid. We don’t like to be reminded of where we have gone wrong. We don’t like to be faced with our weaknesses. Most of us have very low levels of self-awareness purely because we do not confront things in our life. The result is that we allow things to build from being something manageable, to something that mushrooms into a big problem.

We are the way we are because we have accumulated lots and lots of bad habits. A habit is just a learned response, something we carry out automatically. We have good habits and bad habits, but it is the bad habits which, if allowed to go unchecked, start to rule our lives.

We run our lives on habits, things we do automatically, without thinking. Habits make our lives easier to live. We don’t have to constantly think what we are doing. All very useful, but if we don’t audit our habits and weed out the bad ones we lose control of our lives. Things start to happen to us over which we have no control. If we have become overweight because we have lapsed into bad eating habits we lose control of our ability to control our health and well-being.

This New Year you have an opportunity to really examine your habits – particularly your bad ones. Why don’t you make a list of all your bad habits? It will pay you to be honest with yourself. What do you think you need to change?

Having made your list, you need to make change. You can’t change a habit, but you can learn a new one. Learning new habits is the key to changing your behavior. If you want to lose weight permanently you need to learn new habits – slim habits. Wouldn’t it be great next New Year not to be able to say that you have said goodbye to diets forever?

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Getting a good night’s sleep is very important. As your eating habits improve and you continue to work through your exercise program, you may find the thought of an early night increasingly attractive. After a good night’s sleep you’ll feel more alert, better able to deal with the things the coming day will throw at you. Most important of all, it’ll help you in your efforts to lose weight.

How good a sleep do you have? Do you sleep all the way through the night, or do you have an interrupted sleep? It’s important you get a good uninterrupted sleep. Why? Because of the way we sleep. When we go to sleep, we experience five different stages of sleep in what is called a sleep cycle. Each cycle lasts for approximately 1½ hours. In a normal night we will probably go through five cycles. You get most benefit when you can complete five full, uninterrupted cycles. Interrupting a cycle significantly reduces the benefit you get.

Here are some tips to help you have a better sleep.

·        Eat early, not late.

·        Make your evening meal a small one

·        Keep your alcohol consumption low. Alcohol is a stimulant. You might fall asleep easily, but you’ll be wide awake in no time.

·        Don’t have anything to drink that contains caffeine. Caffeine blocks the production of an enzyme that helps to produce the hormone melatonin. Melatonin helps to bring on sleep, and has a positive effect on sleep patterns.

·        Give your brain a rest. Let it stop buzzing before you turn in.  Don’t go straight from the computer screen to the pillow.

·        Try some stretching exercises before you get into bed.

If you want to lose weight permanently and say goodbye to diets, the sleep habit is a very important slim habit to learn. It will help make permanent weight loss a reality.

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When you decide to lose weight there are many other topics that come to mind. You need to think about your behavior and the behaviors that helped you to become overweight in the first place. You need to become aware of all your bad habits and the effect they have on you and those around you.

When you live your life on autopilot, you get out of the habit of noticing. Life passes you by in a blur, and one week fades seamlessly into another. When you stop paying attention to yourself, you put on weight ounce by ounce, pound by pound, until one day you realize your weight is starting to seriously affect your life. By not being aware, you’re unconsciously building up a mass of bad habits. Try to notice your bad habits – particularly in relation to what you eat and your general health. Over the next few days, start to make a ‘bad habit’ list, and take time to study it.

Underline those that you’d most like to do something about.

Learning new habits is all about repetition and practice. You can learn a new habit very easily indeed. It will be of enormous help is you are trying to lose weight permanently

Remember: if you practice your new habit for 10 minutes each day for 21 days, you’ll have completed 3½ hours’ worth of practice! Before you know it, your new habits will become automatic.

Learn new habits that will transform your life and you can say goodbye to diets forever.

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Do you get enough sleep? How many hours do you get every night? If you’re getting under 7 hours’ sleep a night you’re not getting enough. Does it matter? It certainly does – particularly if you want to lose weight!

Over the past fifty years we have reduced the number of hours that we spend asleep every night by nearly two hours. That’s quite a lot. Why has this happened? Mainly because we have so many other calls on our time, we’ve become busier. We’ve also become less good at getting ourselves organized – and of course there’s the ‘mustn’t miss’ television show that goes on until midnight.

What effect is this lack of sleep having? Scientists would have us believe that it is making us unhappy, inefficient and fat. They point to the fact that over the past fifty years we’ve gotten into the habit of sleeping less and we’ve also become more overweight. Is this coincidental? They say not.

When we don’t get enough sleep, our body sends a message to our brain to say that we’re tired. This message is interpreted as being a lack of energy. Lots of sweet carbohydrate will soon redress the ‘energy’ imbalance…so we think. We eagerly tuck into a large plate of sugary cereal at breakfast time, pop in a large candy bar on our way to work and the problem is solved…but not quite!  The result is weight gain.

If you want to lose weight permanently and say goodbye to diets forever, you have to have a good nights’ sleep. You have to get the habit – the slim habit, of getting 7-8 hours’ sleep every night. It’s a habit that will transform your life.

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