If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, you’ll know that it’s a “think more than one” situation.
Staying motivated to stay on track is often the hardest part of the journey.
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It starts with a weekend full of indulgences, and before you know it, you’ll be back to your old ways without any spark to get back on the wagon.
Graeme Tomlinson, better known as The Fitness Chef, reveals some strategies to help you stay fit in his new book, Lose Weight, without losing your mind.
His approach to weight loss is to learn new, healthy habits to stick to for the long-term, while avoiding extreme diets at all costs.
But as we all know, change takes time.
Here’s how Graeme recommends addressing these mental lapses:
red dot
The “red dot” method is a way to refocus the mind.
Graeme says it was adapted from classical conditioning, first developed by Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist.
“Before the 2010 British Open, South African golfer Louis Oosthuizen was not able to focus before he took every shot,” says Graeme.
In order to help him regain focus, he adopted what is known as the ‘fixation’ technique.
This is how it will work:
- Think of a time when you played a great round of golf
- How did you feel when you played this round?
- How was your mood like?
- What is the level of focus?
- Give this peak performance state a color
- Put a drop of this color on your golf glove
- Before each shot, look at the point and use it to refocus on what you want to do
“For Oosthuizen, the point was red. He looked at it before every shot at the British Open, and he won.”
So what does golf have to do with weight loss?
Graeme says, “The above seven steps often seem to have to be absorbed mentally before every golf stroke, or every meal you choose.
“But even if you keep one or two points in mind at a time, it can help you realign your focus and improve the quality of your decisions.
“The anchor doesn’t have to be a red dot but having something you see every day can help remind you of why you’re trying to make changes in your life and what you need to do to make them happen.”
One for each center
Graeme says long-term change isn’t rooted in willpower, but slowly changes your ways in achievable steps.
He calls these “one per center”.
“For fat loss, sustainability isn’t about having willpower, it’s about finding ways to make it easier for it to work,” says Graeme.
“In a cheeseburger, replace 100g of regular cheddar with 100g and 50 percent of low-fat cheddar provides 167 calories.
“Let’s say you like cheese sandwiches so much that you eat 100 a year.
“By switching to low-calorie cheddar, you’ll save 16,700 calories, which equals 4.5 pounds of body fat.
“That’s a third of a stone, or about 2kg of fat, that is lost by eating roughly the same serving of the same food.
“The secret to creating long-lasting results is to never stop making continuous one-percent improvements, and to combine these small improvements over time.”
piling habits
We’ve all tried sticking to a new habit just to watch it slowly infuse after a few days, whether it’s 10 minutes of daily meditation or a glass of water upon waking.
Graeme has a trick to help with that, from James Clear’s bestselling book Atomic Habits.
It’s called habit stacking, and it quickly became a strategy for forming and sticking to new healthy habits.
The idea is to introduce new habits by piling them into something already ingrained in your routine.
“Associating something new with something you already know increases your chances of sticking with and benefiting from this new habit,” says Graeme.
“Stacking a new behavior and pairing it with an existing one means that you don’t need to put in as much effort to implement the new behavior.
“If it’s one habit that’s already ingrained, it’s the perfect place to pile a new habit that you want to make permanent.”
For example, if your goal is to drink more water, you can drink a big glass after brushing your teeth — something you do every morning and evening without fail (hopefully).
If you want to go to the gym more often, you can tell yourself to put on your workout clothes just by taking your work shoes off.
This will encourage you to leave the house and go to the gym.
Extract from the fitness chef: lose weight without losing your mind By Graeme Tomlinson (Ebury Press, £16.99).
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