How Habits Help Us Lose Weight

Following healthy weight loss tips is all about forming new eating habits - healthy ones that will help you to lose weight. Learning how to lose weight is partly about eating the right foods, and partly about forming new eating habits.

Habits are learned behaviors that we develop to fulfill our basic human needs. Rather like instincts, they are essentially a survival mechanism that enables us to respond automatically, without conscious thought, to protect ourselves in familiar situations. For example, you enter a house through a low doorway and bump your head. The next time you come in, you pause just before you hit your head, and then you duck. By the third or fourth entry, you duck your head automatically, without even realizing you have done so.

A habit has been formed to help you avoid pain. Our survival as a species has depended on this 'pass or fail' system. In the wild, if you develop a behavior that fails, you die. If it's successful, you will live and pass it on so that your offspring have a better chance of survival.

Habitual behaviors form pathways in your nervous system like pathways through a forest. The more ingrained the habit, the clearer the path. In order to change an unwanted habit (such as overeating), you have two options. You can either leave the existing path to grow over by not walking down it (for example, by going on a strict diet) or, better still, you can choose to blaze a new trail through the forest (for example, by choosing a new, healthy and social lifestyle that will fulfill your emotional and physical needs).

If overeating has been a habit, there will be specific things that compel you to eat when you're not hungry. A habit is like a chain of events that your subconscious mind has learnt to put together in a specific order. For example, you read a letter about an overdue bill and instantly it makes you feel uncertain about how you will pay it. Perhaps you have a thought such as 'How will I cope with this?' This thought could be the first link in the chain. Your brain interprets this as if one of its basic needs is being threatened. If you feel uncertain, you will be driven to find certainty. The brain refers to previous experiences that were associated with dealing with this type of uncertainty in the past. Having found a like experience, it goes to the next link in the chain.

The response from one person might be, 'Ignore it' or 'Put the television on'; another might suggest, 'Phone them and deal with it' or 'Just pay it'. For many others, the link in the chain might be 'Eat something'. The more times you have followed the links in the chain to the same point, the more you will reinforce the behavior and the stronger the links will be. Once it becomes ingrained, the behavior becomes a habit.

Our habits are designed to help us feel safe and to ensure we do what we need to compulsively to meet our human needs. Habits are useful because they mean we don't have to think about everything consciously and they speed up our response time. Once things become a habit, you can relax and do other things at the same time.

You can see why many people have a habit of fulfilling their need for certainty (control) with food. We have complete control over food, so it makes us feel safe. We can be certain about what we want to eat, where to get it, how to cook it, how much and when to eat it, and we know for sure how it will make us feel. When situations in your life seem stressful and difficult to deal with, this is one area where we can feel in charge.

However, habits can be changed, and you will find that these new habits ensure you keep control over food, but in a much more positive and healthy way. We can feel completely certain about the taste of food, its texture, how we cook it, how much of it we want and how it will make us feel. We can also make choices about when, where, how to eat it and who with.