By: Steve Avellino / Gym Director
When I was attending school to become a certified health fitness instructor, I had some really fabulous teachers. They spent so much time telling the honest truth about so many exercise and fitness myths that I felt as though I had to re-learn everything I ever thought I knew about the field.
One teacher, in particular, told us in a nutrition seminar, “I can get you to lose a whole bunch of weight in one month, but you’ll be sick as a dog when we’re finished.” These words resonated deeply with me, because, up to that moment, just watching the numbers on the scale get smaller and smaller was always my primary goal. As a guy who struggled with weight loss since childhood, I was obsessed with the scale.
Becoming a fitness instructor, however, taught me more about myself than I ever dreamed imaginable.
Let’s talk about this.
Losing weight is a science game. However, maintaining weight loss crosses over from science to psychology. In the beginning, let’s assume you’re losing weight the old-fashioned way – through proper nutrition combined with appropriate exercise. A few months later, you’re feeling pretty good as the scale smiles back at you. The science of weight loss is working in your favor. Things are good.
My concern is that, once you begin to encounter stress and are tempted to comfort yourself through old eating habits, the science of weight loss will mean nothing to you if you are not emotionally prepared with an alternate method of dealing with that stress. I think many of us can withstand a short-term separation from the “deliciousness” of a high-calorie diet. It is understanding your particular long-term relationship with food that will ultimately make or break your weight loss efforts.
I have been up and down the scale my entire life. Sometimes I’m not sure if the path I take is truly a road, because it feels more like a roller coaster; down 20 pounds, up 10 pounds, down 30 pounds, up eight pounds (and that was just last week!!!).
We have to understand (and I include myself here) that losing weight comes easier than keeping it off. We have to understand that it’s not enough to just count calories. We have to come up with long-term strategies to prevent the return of old patterns of behavior. (This is the psychology I was referring to.)
Stress can be dissolved through many different forms of expression – from Yoga to Tai-Chi, from walking to biking, from singing to dancing, from traveling to daydreaming.
You have to find the way that’s most appropriate and most reasonable for your lifestyle. The goal here is to dissolve the stress, by getting it out of you, not to silence the stress by stuffing it down with bagels.
Once you find all the better ways of dealing with the many challenges of your life, the food will begin to take its proper place. I’m fighting the good fight myself, and it’s working, bite by bite.
How about you?
Let me know how you’re doing; I’d love to hear from you.
Talk to ya next month…Ciao.
