How to Beat Obesity – A Food-First Approach

Over the years I have dealt with a number of morbidly obese people – those with a BMI of over 35. Despite the clients being from all kinds of backgrounds – ethnic, socio-economic, educational etc, they are all linked by one common theme – a desire to successfully lose significant amounts of weight and beat obesity. This article will show you how to beat obesity with a food-first approach.

Usually, by the time I am brought into the weight loss equation the client has tried everything under the sun to lose weight – visited the doctor, seen a dietician, started a misguided exercise routine, taken slimming pills, followed countless fad diets etc etc. Over the last 10 years there are few diets or weight loss approaches I haven’t seen or heard about from people who are trying to figure out how to beat obesity.

As I mentioned earlier, by the time I deal with a person, they have usually been in the hands of numerous other ‘experts’, each with their own answer to the obesity problem. That being said however, there is a common approach shared amongst many practitioners – stop the client from focussing on food – the rationale behind the advice being that obsessive behaviour around food is a major cause of the problem in the first place.

I am not a psychologist, nor am I a therapist. My approach is based on successful experiences with different people with an obesity problem. It is however, the polar opposite to many people who claim to successfully treat obesity….

I encourage my obese clients to focus on the food they eat. Not just pay attention on it, but to focus on it with an obsessive intensity. I want clients to look at their behaviour around food, their triggers – are there certain times of day, certain social situations, certain actions that bring about an urge to eat? I want them to make conscious decisions around food when shopping, preparing and eating meals. I want them to understand how the food the eat affects their physical and mental state.

Why?

We assume obsession to be a bad thing, but that isn’t always the case. An obsession with improvement will pay dividends when learning how to beat obesity.

Investing time and effort into learning about nutrition, preparing suitable meals, understanding how the food choices you make affect your health and wellbeing will be time well spent.

The purpose of this isn’t to remove an obsession with food, more to change the direction in which the obsession is focussed.

Bear in mind that obesity is a problem with food and all that surrounds it – food shopping, food choices, food cravings, food metabolism and food in a social setting. A fundamental lack of understand and lack of control around food creates obesity, so why try to beat obesity by ignoring the root cause of it? It’s an approach destined to fail.

My aim with a food-first approach is to teach my clients that food isn’t something to be confused about. With knowledge comes power, so by educating clients rather than babysitting them, I empower them to take control of their own actions around food, which ultimately teaches them how to beat obesity. This teaching about food is the approach I have taken with my Handy Plan weight loss group.

Food isn’t a mystic puzzle, and weight gain isn’t an inevitable by product of advancing years. So, if you are obese, what is the outline of the food-first approach?

The Food-First Approach….

Take a week and record the answers to the following questions…

• When do you typically eat badly? Breakfast? Lunch time? Evening? All the time?!
• Why? Is it lack of better alternatives? Peer pressure? Laziness? Cravings?
• How often do you cook fresh meals?
• How much alcohol do you consume?

These questions will give you an idea about your patterns around food – you may discover easily-rectifiable behaviours that cause you to eat badly, such as lack of healthy food preparation or a dysfunctional social life.

Use the answers to make plans to make healthy eating a much easier option, such as avoiding social situations where you feel forced to eat badly, or give yourself extra time to prepare a healthy meal for situations where you may be left without a healthy option.

When you have established your potential problem behaviours around food, you can then look deeper into your choices…

• Are you aware of macronutrients? (Protein, Carbs, Fat).
• How much water do you drink?
• How is your digestion?
• How much energy do you have?
• Are your energy levels/mood/digestion affected by particular foods?

The answers to these questions will then lead you on to identifying problem foods, arming with you information about what works for you and what doesn’t. Using this process I discovered that I really didn’t do with gluten in my diet, and that I was much better suited to a meat and plant based diet.

The point of these questions is to make you look at your food intake with more awareness. All too often we eat without thought, and that is a sure-fire way to allow your weight to creep up over time with that western inevitability – most westerners over 40 are overweight, but it doesn’t need to be like that.

Making decisions based on information, not guesswork is the key to a successful food-first approach to beating obesity. When you have identified behaviours that are contributing to your obesity you can begin to change them using these strategies.

With more of an idea about your behaviours around food and an understanding of how your food choices affect your physical and mental state, you can learn how you can control your weight and how to beat obesity for good!