How to achieve and maintain your IDEAL BODY WEIGHT!

To achieve the ideal body shape and be able to maintain it in the long run, was one of the longest and hardest journeys I had to endure in my life! I would like someone would have told me back then, when I started, the things that I will share with you today!

I will start this post being very honest and direct, your physical body is just a reflection of your lifestyle! Pills, diets and even surgery might even work for a short period of time, but as soon as you get back to your old habits, your body will get back to what it was!

So if you are on a constant battle with the mirror, ask yourself if you want to live like this for the rest of your life, or if you want to sort this problem once for all. Use your frustration as a fuel, and I know there’s a lot because I’ve been through that , and work at the root of the problem! That’s the only way to sort this out!

Focus on 3 aspects, your relationship with food, your body awareness and physical exercises, and now I will talk in details about them.

Relationship with Food

Our relationship with food is terrible, most of us never learnt anything about nutrition and the food industry uses a lot of marketing strategy to make you believe that whatever they are selling is good and healthy for you, when they are not!

To top it up, there is a general association that a lot of food means abundance, and a lot of people are attached to the kind of food they eat.

The most efficient way that I know to change your relationship with food, is to change your knowledge about it! When you become aware of the nutritional value in foods, what they have inside and how they affect your body, your perspective and the way you look at them change!

There is a free app called MyFitnessPal that helped me a lot to understand what my body needs and the nutritional value found in foods. You can also learn a lot with documentaries because usually they show a lot of evidences about what happens to the body when the diet changes.

When I watched “Forks over Knives”, I was shocked when I saw a man that had a lot of health issues, was taking many pills a day, and after 6 months eating only healthy food, many of his diseases disappeared.

When you do shopping, develop the habit of looking at the back part of the package because the front is pure marketing! Verify the nutritional value and also the list of ingredients, if there are names that you don’t know what they are, you shouldn’t be eating that!

When you work on your relationship with food, the goal is to change your perspective and look at it as if it was a fuel, not only a source of pleasure!

When you manage this, your body will change the way it reacts to food, it will reject when it sees processed foods and will vibrate when it sees more natural and healthier foods! This kind of “diet”is sustainable for a whole life!

Body Awareness

We were all born with a “factory system” that should warn when we are hungry and how much we should eat, but we unlearn to listen to this system in our childhood when they make us eat when we are not hungry, and they force us to eat more than what we need. And to relearn how to listen to this system again after you are an adult full of bad habits, might be a challenge!

If you are overweight, it’s possible that your digestive system is overloaded, and probably you forgot how it is to feel light inside because if you are used to eat too much, you don’t have basis for comparison. It would be like and alcoholic trying to remember how it’s to be sober for a month!

To gain this awareness back, you can write down everything that you eat in a day, very often we don’t realize how much we eat, but when you make a list and imagine all that food inside your body, might help you to become more aware!

Another thing that you can do is to focus on your digestive system every single day to relearn how to listen to your body. Try to feel if you are hungry or thirsty, and if you ate too much or too less. In the beginning you will have to force yourself to pay attention, but with time you will get used and it will become more automatic.

To make radical changes to your diet for a determined period of time, as a detox for example, might teach you a lot as well about your body because you will be able to observe how it reacts to it.

Emotions also impact a lot your eating habits, so the more you know yourself, easier will be to realize when it happens. And when you catch yourself eating because of emotional needs, you might deal with the emotions, look for healthy options or even replace food for drinks, like tea or water!

Your goal is to tune into your physical system, and when you manage that, eat when you are not hungry or eat to much, will be very hard to happen!

Physical Exercises

The majority of your weight is about what you eat and how much, exercises might help you with your body shape, your well-being and your health. And compared to the other topics I covered today, this is the easiest to work on because is much simpler to implement a new habit than to change the old ones!

Don’t exercise because you hate your body, do it because you love it! Choose an activity that you really enjoy doing because it will be much easier to implement it as being part of your life!

Think about your body as if it was a machine, if you don’t move, the gears get rusty! Exercises will make your whole system function better, they will strengthen you inside out!

It’s not just about your appearance, is about your articulations, bones, organs, happy hormones and even the oxygen levels in your system, so you can absorb the nutrients from your food and feel energized!

The goal is to build a sustainable exercise routine and do it consistently for months, to the point where you miss it if you don’t exercise for a while.

Took me over 5 years to master everything that I wrote on today’s post, and I can tell
that the journey was long but it was worthy it! It’s very good to finally live in peace with my body and I hope you can achieve the same as well with the tips that I gave you today!