Wow. What a powerful study. A CNN.com article titled: Weight loss is all in your head details that Inga Treitler, Ph.D studied the behavior of 10 people from the National Weight Control Registry. The people with the greatest weight loss success are:
…controlled, methodical, disciplined sticklers for structure and routine. Punctual and neat, they always have a plan, timetable and calendar with appointments penciled in….
Now, not everyone thinks this way. Some of us are emotional gut thinkers, some of us are visual thinkers, some of us are analytical and mathematical thinkers.
How does this help us with weight loss or weight gain?
First, identify your personality type to help you succeed with your weight loss . I did this by reading books by Dr. David Keirsey: Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types and Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence.
If you don’t want to read the books, there are many other ways to determine your behavior habits by searching the web for Type and Temperament surveys.
Second, Use your behavior type to your advantage. Some examples include:
- If you are a Visual Thinker, then you could take time to visualize weight gain, draw pictures of your weight management, make collages of you exercising, visualize eating properly, visualize yourself at your ideal weight, and draw mind-maps of your weight management goals.
- If you are an Emotional Thinker, then use your emotions. Ask Friends to talk about what’s best for weight loss. Teach someone about exercising. Design activities that arouse your emotions and Use Anger, Happiness, Fear, Peace, Worry, Satisfaction, etc. to support your weight gain or weight loss goals.
- If you are a Mathematical Thinker, then you could think of your weight loss as a math problem, and devise multiple solutions and proofs. Calculate the calories at each meal designing an analytical solution for your day’s meal plan
- Finally, if you are an Organized Thinker, Make To Do Lists, Organize, and Add to your Calendar when you are going to lose weight. Make a recipe plan daily of what you plan to eat.
I’ll expand on these topics in a future post.
Third, Modify your behavior and thinking to help you become a more Organized Thinker.
Now, here’s the detail, I think is important, is that your temperament and type will likely change. I can see in my past activities, there have been periods of times where I was very much an analytical thinker, visual thinker, emotional thinker, and even the structured thinker.
Even if you are not an organized thinker, we can apply the practices of David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time to our weigh management life.
When you are practicing organizing behavior, you are firing neurons in the part of the brain that helps with successful weight loss.
If you have been procrastinating on cleaning out the garage. Plan to do it now while you are managing your weight.
If you need to schedule a dentist appointment, doctor’s appointment, or gambling appointment with your bookie. Do that now.
If you are notoriously late, then learn to wake up early and become punctual!
The mere action of organizing and building a structure to your life will help with your weight loss.
Finally, Use an online Weight Management Tool to help you organize your weight goals and to assist building organizing behaviors. As the CNN.com article states, perform activities that are adding to your organizing behavior. One way to do so is to track what you eat, track what you do, and track what what you weigh everyday!