When I come home in the afternoon, I am greeted by our two cats ( Make no mistake about it, I am a dog kind of person, but the females of the house brought the cats in) making meowing sounds indicating they know it is time for their afternoon feeding. I go into the pantry, pull out the can of cat food and then place this into their feeding cups. Oh, I forget to mention that pretty much every day I do this, I also see the various snacks in the pantry and wind up choosing to indulge in some candy or cookies that I purchased during my weekly shopping run.
This is just one example of my personal patterns of behavior that are not exactly the best for long-term weight control efforts. Okay, here is another: Mondays are “1/2 price burger” days at the various restaurants we go to for lunch. Yep, I allow the “deal” part of my psyche to always order the burger and fries to save the $$$.
We all develop patterns of behavior that impact on our weight control efforts. For some people, opening a bottle of wine at night is sort of a ritual. For others, it may be the bowl of ice cream when relaxing in front of a television screen.
During a successful long-term weight control journey, it is important to take a step back and analyze your own patterns of behavior that are predictable, routinized and repeated over and over. Once these patterns of behavior are identified as adversely impacting on weight control, then steps need to be taken to break those behaviors. For example, a simple way of breaking the wine/ice cream/damaging nighttime snack issue is to NOT have these foods/drinks in the home to begin with. Getting back to my personal example, I am now setting the cat food cans outside the pantry, thereby allowing me to not peruse the pantry snacks (that I should not be buying in the first place).
Deleterious patterns of behavior can be broken. This starts with pinpointing what these patterns are.