Do You Have a Bad Relationship with Food? 5 Ways to Create a Better Relationship and Lose Weight

Is weight loss hard for you?

Do you feel frustrated by how much effort it seems to take to live a healthy life?

Do you feel like you have to give up all the foods you love in order to lose weight?

Well losing weight does not have to mean the end of your love affair with food, in fact with just a few adjustments and a fresh perspective you can create a better more fulfilling relationship with food that allows you to lose weight with very little effort. Here are a few tips on how you can lose weight and build a healthy relationship with the foods you love.

1. Find a really good reason to lose weight.

There are many reasons to lose weight, you want to feel better in your clothes, you want to improve your health, you have a reunion coming up and you want to look your best...There is nothing wrong with these reasons, but do they resonates with your heart and spur you to action?

Sit down and write out a long list of reasons you want to be successful at weight loss. Don't judge your reasons as good or bad or even silly just write whatever comes to mind. As your list grows you will likely uncover reasons that had been hidden or unspoken before and these reasons tend to be the ones that pack emotional intensity and give you the drive and motivation to eat healthy and exercise.

2. Create a system that fits your unique lifestyle

If you are trying to follow everyone else's dieting advice and eating style you are not being true to your own personal tastes, likes and dislikes. A Consumer Report survey of 37,000 who were trying to lose weight revealed that the majority of people who succeeded at losing weight and keeping it off did not follow any commercial weight loss plan. Instead they developed their own way of eating and exercising that complimented their own unique lifestyle.

Finding that way of eating and exercising that is pleasing but also allows you to lose weight will be a matter of trial and error but in the end you will have created a system that allows you to weigh your ideal weight and live the life you want.

3. Don't get mad, get curious

One of the main determining factors in whether you stick with a diet or not is how you treat yourselves. Everybody has good and bad days. If you have a bad dieting day, instead of getting mad at yourself get curious. Ask yourself why you overate today. When you pose a question to yourself you are more likely to seek and find an answer that will allow you to continue toward your goal. On the other hand, when you beat up on yourself you are more likely to falsely determine that you failed and quit.

4. Eat mindfully

Our fast-paced world lends itself to convenient, fast and mindless eating. But mindless eating leads to the consumption of a lot of unwanted calories. Try a mindful eating experiment with yourself. For today eat with all five of your senses. Take a moment before eating your next bite to really notice the food. Take a good hard look at it, smell it, hear the sound it makes when you take a bite, note how it feels in your mouth and really taste it. When you are mindful of what you eat you will be surprised by what types of food really appeal to you and you will naturally slow down and eat less.

5. Decide what to eat with your stomach, not your head

Eating is a natural response to physical hunger (a.k.a. stomach hunger) but it can also be a response an emotion or feeling (a.k.a. head hunger). Learning to tell the difference between stomach and head hunger is critical to long-term weight loss success. If you have lost touch with your ability to tell the difference between the two you can recapture it with a simple exercise. Imagine your hunger is rated on a scale of 0 to 10 with "0" meaning that you are absolutely starving and "10" meaning you are stuffed. For the next 2 days take a few moments to rate your hunger before you eat. You will begin to see times when you are tempted to eat but you are not physically hungry. You can then use this new found knowledge to make better eating decision.

By mastering these five skills you will find that you are able to continue eating many of the foods you enjoy yet you will naturally eat less of them and accomplish weight loss without losing your love affair with food.

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