I’ve found that you can do a fair amount of weight loss by making eating trivially inconvenient. This allows procrastination to work for you and helps discourage eating when you’re not all that hungry.
Examples:
Record everything you eat and how much of it you eat, unless it is something very healthy like raw fruits/vegetables or a calorie free item. This helps turn healthy foods into a lazy option.
Take a small serving of food rather than taking one big portion, and then put the container back, which makes not having a second helping into a lazy option.
As a more meta example, allow yourself to have a demotivated day periodically while not changing the overall habit of you being dieting. If you’ve eaten healthy for the past 3 weeks, and you cheat tomorrow, but then you go back and eat healthy for another 3 weeks, and then cheat again, the amount you’re eating healthy as a percentage is frankly still great enough that your health will be much better for it. You want thinking of yourself as “not dieting” to take a concerted effort on your part to break the habit, so that you can instead be lazy and continue to keep your habitual dieting, as opposed to thinking of dieting as a broken habit from only a brief lapse.
(Note: I was able to get this kind of thinking to work for weight loss, so I’m a lot thinner now, about a hundred pounds below my high weight and now at a healthy BMI range, but I’m still not that athletic or physically fit, so if being a good hiker is very important to you, this may not be sufficient even if it works for you just like it worked for me.)
I’ve found that you can do a fair amount of weight loss by making eating trivially inconvenient. This allows procrastination to work for you and helps discourage eating when you’re not all that hungry.
Examples:
Record everything you eat and how much of it you eat, unless it is something very healthy like raw fruits/vegetables or a calorie free item. This helps turn healthy foods into a lazy option.
Take a small serving of food rather than taking one big portion, and then put the container back, which makes not having a second helping into a lazy option.
As a more meta example, allow yourself to have a demotivated day periodically while not changing the overall habit of you being dieting. If you’ve eaten healthy for the past 3 weeks, and you cheat tomorrow, but then you go back and eat healthy for another 3 weeks, and then cheat again, the amount you’re eating healthy as a percentage is frankly still great enough that your health will be much better for it. You want thinking of yourself as “not dieting” to take a concerted effort on your part to break the habit, so that you can instead be lazy and continue to keep your habitual dieting, as opposed to thinking of dieting as a broken habit from only a brief lapse.
(Note: I was able to get this kind of thinking to work for weight loss, so I’m a lot thinner now, about a hundred pounds below my high weight and now at a healthy BMI range, but I’m still not that athletic or physically fit, so if being a good hiker is very important to you, this may not be sufficient even if it works for you just like it worked for me.)