The right food and regular exercise are often considered the cornerstones of weight loss. It is, in fact, true. But usually, it is not enough. There’s more to weight loss and maintenance than just eating well and working out daily.

And actually, sticking to a healthy diet and exercise routine itself is a challenge for most. 

On top of this, you may have certain habits, thought processes, and behavioural patterns that promote unhealthy lifestyles.

So, if you are trying to lose weight, don’t just focus on healthy eating and workouts as it may not be enough.

Following are some of the challenges I have faced when I was trying to lose weight and focusing on these factors helped me create a healthier environment for effective weight loss.

Table of contents

1. 7 Factors To Keep In Mind When You Are Trying To Lose Weight
   1. 1. Habits
      1. Why It’s Important To Remember This?
   2. 2. Your Conditioning Plays A Major Role
   3. 3. Be Aware Of Learned Helplessness
   4. 4. Make Sure You Work On Your Unhealthy Eating Habits
   5. 5. Be aware of the people who surround you
   6. 6. Modify your surroundings to support your healthy living
2. How To Tackle The Behavioural Factors That Can Affect Weight Loss
3. So, what should you remember

7 Factors To Keep In Mind When You Are Trying To Lose Weight

1. Habits

Old habits are difficult to get rid of. No secrets there.

But, habits are not just something you like to do, they are neural connections formed over time due to repeated behaviour. 

When you perform any action repeatedly over time, your brain forms neural connections to perform those actions on autopilot. This is the reason why with practice, you get good at something— because these connections get stronger with repetition. 

However, this not only applies to the formation of good habits but also to bad habits.

• If you have a long habit of hitting the snooze button on everything, guess what, you will have a hard time getting over this habit to perform your tasks now. 
• If you have a habit of not exercising regularly, you will struggle to stick to your routine now.
• If you have a habit of eating a lot of junk food, you will struggle with healthy eating when you are starting out.

Why It’s Important To Remember This?

The reason is simple: this is a natural thing that happens with everyone and it’s not something that should be considered as an individual failure or lack of something good in you. 

Many people quit their efforts when they fail to follow their routine. But the thing is, everyone fails in the beginning. EVERYONE. 

So, don’t get demotivated when you fail to stick to your routine— just keep going. Even if you miss a day or two, don’t worry— start again. 

You are not a failure. You are going against your brain, and that is difficult to do. The only way to overcome old neural connections is to form new ones and repeat those actions to strengthen them.

2. Your Conditioning Plays A Major Role

Quite often the desire to lose weight comes from this conditioning that being a certain body type is better. Additionally, there are certain beliefs around food, like don’t eat carbs, don’t eat fat or oil, don’t eat too much, etc.

Such a thought process can affect your weight loss and overall health as well.

While I’m not one of those who believe fat is healthy (I’ve spent most of my life being overweight, but toxic positivity does more harm than good), these belief systems don’t help either.

When we have the conditioning to believe that being overweight is bad, it makes us look ugly or less desirable, we are more likely to adopt unhealthy ways to lose weight because we want to quickly drop pounds.

This way of thinking makes us more desperate.

You are more likely to skip meals and do things that are unhealthy if you think being a certain way is bad. And remember, if overeating is a thing, undereating is also a harmful thing.

If you skip meals or do extreme calorie cutting to lose weight, you will eventually start losing muscles. And when muscles are lost, your weight loss progress will stop too. 

Because of muscle loss, your metabolism suffers as well. As a result, you will quickly gain all the lost weight back as soon as you start eating normally because you can’t cut calories forever. It’s not practical.

3. Be Aware Of Learned Helplessness

In simple terms, learned helplessness is a belief you are helpless in a situation, even when there is a way out. It usually follows repeated trauma (or failure) which leads to the strong belief that things are out of your control and that there’s nothing you can do about it.

You can very commonly see this around you. Learned helplessness is the reason why many victims of domestic violence can’t get out of their situation, and why people quit making an effort altogether to lose weight or to quit smoking/drinking or to progress after a few failed attempts to do so.

If you have previously attempted to lose weight but failed, chances are you will start feeling like it’s impossible to achieve what you’re trying to achieve. 

How to deal with learned helplessness?

But, the thing to focus on about learned helplessness is that it’s a false belief.  There’s always something you can do to improve your lifestyle (and practically any situation).

Go back to point no. 1, remember habits take time to develop. So, stick to whatever you are doing. 

Keep doing what you’ve planned out.

When you remember that failure and falling back to old habits happen to everyone, you will not look down upon yourself. 

Building resilience is the way to prevent learned helplessness. Focus more on the solution instead of the problem, and remind yourself that there’s always something you can do about any challenge. 

If you’re having a difficult time right now, know that it’s just a phase of adjustment. You will overcome it soon, even if it seems it can’t be done.

4. Make Sure You Work On Your Unhealthy Eating Habits

Some of us have unhealthy eating habits. This can be something like emotional or stress-eating.

We crave things high in sugar when we are under stress or emotional triggers. The issue is, that a small amount of processed food contains very high calories. So, you may be eating right and working out regularly, but if you frequently eat unconsciously when subjected to a little bit of stress, you will not lose weight. 

So, eating well and exercising may not be enough. You will have to tend to these unhealthy habits side by side if you wish to be healthier.

Adopt your choice of stress-management techniques, and be more aware of what you are eating and when. 

5. Be aware of the people who surround you

Now, here’s the thing: When you begin to change your life, you will find people who may laugh at you and make petty jokes about you if you fail to make the change. 

You have no option but to grow a thick skin and become resilient. Never stop your efforts because of other people’s comments, because sometimes negative comments can provoke you to give up on your goals. You don’t want that. 

You can’t help what others say to you, but always remember, what others say does not define you in any way.

I know it’s not always possible to cut people off from your life, so the general practice of interaction-based-on-need is a good approach, especially if you are sensitive to negative comments. You don’t have to be rude and snap back. Just maintain distance and keep doing your thing. Eventually, you will grow a thick skin.

Spend more time with Supportive People

On the contrary, there may be another group of people who support you and encourage you when you are having a low moment. You need to spend more time with this group. 

You can even ask the people who support you to be your unofficial coach who keeps accountability in check.

The bottom line is to surround yourself with those who love you and maintain a little distance from those you feel are breaking your spirit down. The right kind of support can sometimes do wonders.

6. Modify your surroundings to support your healthy living

Let me take the example of stress eating here. 

If you are stressed, and you suddenly have a strong craving to eat something sugary, what will you do?

You’d likely be so emotionally and mentally charged that you will simply go grab some junk to eat. 

But what if you stop buying junk? 

This is what I mean by modifying your surroundings because it’s very effective! Doing this has helped me the most when it comes to cutting down on junk intake.

The trick for me is to not buy junk and let the feeling of cravings pass by, which it always does as cravings are a very temporary feeling.

A few other examples

Similarly, if you don’t feel comfortable going to the gym, start working out at home. Use the free resources on YouTube, and start with just 5 minutes of workouts. Clear up some space in your room and get started.

Another example could be keeping a jug or a bottle of water wherever you sit. This will ensure you drink plenty of water, and this is how I increased my water intake as well.

Signing up for free apps that help you log your workout and food intake details is yet another example. These apps also calculate the calorie intake, so staying within calorie intake targets is easier with these apps.

So, you get the idea. Eliminate what can be a trigger from your surroundings and make some changes that support your efforts.

7. Set Realistic Goals

I know this seems obvious, yet, most people make sudden drastic changes in their routine, which they fail to attain because, remember point no. 1, habits take time to change. And then they just quit! I have done this too!

If your plan is to lose 10 pounds in 15 days, let me tell you clearly, you will fail. 

So focus on building sustainable habits— habits that you can perform every day without feeling overwhelmed and without damaging your health. These changes should be subtle and simple.

Start small, and make changes along the way. Everything will not work for you. What works for me, may not work for you. And so, you need to keep experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t, and what is sustainable to you and what is not.

8. Sleep and Stress

Both inadequate sleep and prolonged stress can lead to weight gain.

I have written posts on both of these topics. You can find them below:

Can stress cause weight gain?

Can lack of sleep cause weight gain?

So, make sure you get adequate sleep and have a stress management routine in place. Find out about various stress-management techniques and other details related to sleep in the articles linked above.

How To Tackle These challenges

To have a healthy weight loss, you just have to do one thing to find out what problematic issues you have: write it down.

I always say that you should note down things when you’re getting started with healthy living. 

Write down every single thing you did in a day, how often you feel stressed, what you ate, how much you slept at night, log in your exercise details, etc— everything. 

You don’t have to do it forever, just in the beginning for a couple of days to find out your behaviours and patterns.

For example, if you see you very often feel stressed, you must ask yourself, what are the things causing you too much stress and what you can do to manage your stress. 

Similarly, when you write down what you ate, you will be able to see if you are consuming more than your recommended calorie intake, and how many calories are coming from junk food. 

Once you can see the problem, taking steps to troubleshoot it becomes rather easy. And writing things down will do exactly that: it will let you see things.

So, write everything down for a few days. It will help you see the problem.

So, what should you remember

As we saw in this post, some of the challenges you may face are:

1. Breaking old habits.
2. Your conditioning and belief systems.
3. Learned helplessness.
4. Unhealthy eating patterns
5. The type of people that surround you.
6. Getting rid of the triggers.
7. Setting realistic goals.

To tackle these issues, you will have to be a little more observant. 

So, write everything down. It will help you find out the issue and will also help you track your progress.