Why are you Eating?
Posted: Jun 01 in Obesity and your Health, Weight Loss Blog by Staff
Do you ever ask yourself this question? What is causing you to eat right now? Is it hunger? It is time for a meal? Or is it something else?
After weight loss surgery your stomach capacity will be greatly reduced, and this will limit how often you will feel hungry, and how much food it will require for your body to feel satisfied. But that isn’t going to change those mental cravings. So even before you undergo bariatric surgery, it is a good question to ask yourself: what is making you want to eat right now?
Raising Personal Awareness
Weight loss surgery can be a huge catalyst to lasting change in your life. When you make the choice to undergo bariatric surgery, you are choosing to put your health first and to take major steps in improving your lifestyle habits so that you can lose weight and keep it off.
One of the first steps here may be recognizing what food cues are encouraging you to overeat. Food cues are any incentive that inspire you to eat. While hunger is going to make you more susceptible to some food cues, identifying the unhealthy ones in your life and making adjustments to how you perceive those food cues can be a major step in building that supportive environment that you crave.
Food cues can be subtle or overt. Some, like advertisements for junk foods, are going to be pretty obvious—but can still inspire you to want to have a snack when you aren’t actually hungry. Other food cues aren’t as noticeable at first. This includes things like storing snacks out in the open, where you are constantly looking at them, or working in an office where doughnuts or bagels are handed out for free, giving you an incentive to make unhealthy food choices.
After weight loss surgery, you need to adjust the way that you interact with food, and this might mean rearranging your kitchen just as much as it might mean changing your evening habits. If it is difficult to watch TV without going for a post-dinner snack, then you may want to try other activities instead. Try going for a walk or reading a book, where you know you won’t be confronted with those fast food commercials.
If your kitchen is teeming with snacks, talk to your family about keeping their indulgent sweets out of sight and out of mind. Clear off your kitchen counter so that it isn’t temping you with sweets, and keep healthy foods out instead. Making small changes like these can have a lasting impact on your weight loss success.