How to lose weight without losing your bad habits

Bet you have at least one bad habit that led to gaining weight.

There’s a good chance you have tried to lose the bad habits in a sincere effort to lose weight. I bet that you found that breaking habits forever is darn near impossible. You think they’re gone and then some unknown, perhaps even unlikely, trigger turns the bad habit into a boomerang, bringing the bad habit back!

When the habit comes back it brings the inevitable weight gain with it!

It’s discouraging to keep fighting the same battle and never winning. The logical thing isn’t fighting over and over with the expectation to come out as the victor. You tried that; it didn’t work. It’s time to try something different. This time, make your bad habits support your weight loss!

Here is common a bad habit that causes weight gain. How would you like to make the habit support reaching your goal and staying there?

If I can't be perfect why work at it at all?

Late-night snacking

Late-night snacking: Late-night snacking is usually caused by eating too little throughout the day or a means of handling emotions or stress, or both. It can add pounds because the foods that seem to lend themselves best to snacking late at night tend to be high in calories. It’s not the time of day that causes weight gain, it’s the calories from the snacking choices.

Depending on why you snack at night – don’t eat enough earlier in the day, or stress/emotional eating, your approach will be different and also the same.

The strategy that works for both reasons is to pay attention to what you’re eating during the day.

Spend those precious calories on foods that are packed with good nutrition and good taste. You’ll also want to ensure that your choices are high volume and lower calorie so that you get to eat enough to get full and stay feeling satisfied longer. That takes you to nighttime snacking hours with calories to spend on your most satisfying snacks.

The important rule to enable successful late-night snacking is don’t eat food you don’t like. Do do it! Not ever! There is no reason to eat food you don’t like, just plenty of reasons why you shouldn’t.

If you’re snacking away late at night for emotional reasons you can reduce the amount of snacking by finding some non-food ways to deal with your feelings in addition to managing your food to allow for some snacking. Here are some effective strategies for dealing with emotions without eating.

Combining eating planned late-night snacks with non-food strategies is truly the way to “have your cake and eat it too!”???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

There can be more bad habits getting in the way of your weight management. I’ll write future blog posts to share strategies to turn around other bad habits so that they support your goal weight instead of undermining it.

Please leave any habits you would like to have help reversing from weight gaining habit to weight losing habit in the comments!

Jackie Conn

About Jackie Conn

Jackie Conn is married and has four grown daughters and four grandchildren. She is a Weight Watchers success story. She's a weight loss expert with 25 years of experience guiding women and men to their weight-related goals. Her articles on weight management have been published in health, family and women's magazines. She has been a regular guest on Channel 5 WABI news, FOX network morning program Good Day Maine and 207 on WCSH.