If not now, when?

In any given moment we justify eating snacks or increased amounts of food, not based on health or our weight, but simply because we desire them.  In that moment, we lose sight of how we want to look or feel tomorrow, or next week, or next year.  We just eat! Be always mindful, or aware of why you want to eat better or less.  Whether it be today or ten years from now, you want to learn to be resilient, to be able to say no to foods that are not going to improve your health, or how you feel about yourself. It struck me today as a client, yet again, wanted a diet “to lose weight fast”.  Of course, we can all do something quickly.  But we then never develop the mental or emotional skills to keep eating and exercising properly over the long term.  Instead we end up continually losing and regaining the weight.Look at each ‘challenge’ as an opportunity to practice that resilience to say NO to a snack or treat that isn’t consistent with the person you want to become.It truly becomes easier and easier.  We can’t procrastinate about making good choices for our health or our eating any more than we can procrastinate about some project that needs to be done at work.  You must remain focused on yourself, and your future, and your health.There are many ways you might work on helping develop good habits.  Likely one of the best is to work on “time restricted eating”.  Rather than constantly worrying about each meal or snack, maybe you could think of eating only between the hours of 10am and 6pm.  Nothing before, nothing after. Meaning 8 hours of eating time and 16 hours of not eating.  At very least, this pattern of eating would allow the hormones that cause us to store fat to settle down. Ideally we wouldn’t eat endlessly throughout those hours.  In reading studies done by Dr. Panda (https://www.salk.edu/scientist/satchidananda-panda/) it seems that after some time of eating in this fashion, our hunger signals settle and we become much less likely to snack. We are confronted with so much food availability, most of which has no nutritional value, so I realize how difficult it is to ‘deny’ ourselves.  At the same time, 40 years ago, when these snacks were not so prevalent, we certainly didn’t suffer.  I might equate restricting food snacks with practicing restricting the time we spend looking at our smart phones or tablets.  Both snacking and screen time are pleasurable, but neither of them lead us into a healthy intellectual or physical self. Keep trying to work on what works for you.  Keep focused on the person you want to become.  It is not easy, but you can do it. Never give up trying! Dr. Doug