How to Lose Weight in the Modern World

Many of us try to lose weight in the modern world but fail because we are surrounded by things that make us overeat. These things include social media, electronic devices etc. which can be useful as well as disastrous to eating habits. Junk food has also become a lot easier to access. Combine this with a hectic lifestyle and you have the perfect recipe for weight gain.

You can lose weight only when you put yourself on a calorie deficit, a topic which I have covered in our complete guide to weight loss. In this post, I am going to talk about 4 ways to lose weight in the modern world.

 

Make Junk Food Difficult to Access

Just like bad company, if you surround yourself with junk, you start making bad decisions eventually. You tell yourself, “I’ll have just 1 cookie” and a few minutes later you are drowning in cookies, guilt and calories.

If you want to lose weight, here’s a simple rule to remember – The easier it is for you to grab junk food the greater the chance of you eating it. For example – you may find it easy to ignore a pack of chips on the dining table at first but eventually, you will give in to the dark side.

Solution – Reduce their accessibility. Here are a couple of ways you can do this –

1. Store foods in opaque containers – Storing junk food in transparent containers makes you crave them, instead keep them in opaque containers. This creates a visual barrier to food.
2. Increase the amount of effort needed to acquire food – Humans are extremely lazy; we want to do everything with the least amount of effort. Good news is you can use this nature to our advantage by increasing the amount of effort needed to access junk food.

For example, you could keep the cookie jar on a higher shelf which requires you to stand on a chair to reach it. This would require you to first fetch a chair and then make the effort to stand on it. Adding these 2 extra steps will make it less likely that you reach for the cookie jar.

 

Mute Notifications from Food Delivery Apps

Technology and applications are focused on making life as effortless as possible i.e. make the consumer as lazy as possible. But we pay the price with our expanding waistlines. Food delivery applications are a prime example of technology infecting us like the plague.

There’s been an avalanche of food delivery apps recently in India with a 380% increase in downloads of apps like Uber Eats. They have made food ordering easy and cheap, making people lazier and fatter. The constant discounts encourage us to eat like gluttons.

Food delivery apps make you order more by bombarding you with discount notifications throughout the day. Plus, you will be notified with offers around the time you generally feel hungry which makes it even more difficult for you to resist the temptation of ordering. This ensures that you are constantly thinking about ordering food.

Solution – Mute notifications from all food delivery apps so that you open them only when necessary. You can easily do this by going to the settings of the app and switching off notifications. If the app is present on your home screen as a shortcut then you should get rid of that as well.

 

Plan your Meals to Lose Weight

Eating home-cooked meals is associated with better adherence to the diet and better dietary quality. In our modern lifestyles, life can get so busy that decisions about food are often left to the last moment. This means that you are already hungry when it’s time to decide if you are cooking or ordering the meal. I think we can all agree that most of us would choose to order.

Solution – Planning your meals in advance. Asking yourself the following questions can help you begin planning –

1. What am I going to eat?
2. When am I going to eat it?
3. Am I going to cook or order from a healthy place?
4. If cooking, then what ingredients do I require to cook?

I often ask clients with haphazard eating habits to write down what they are going to eat during the week for all their meals. If that seems too daunting, then you can start off with just planning your meals for the next day and gradually increase.

 

Don’t Eat While Watching TV

I am sure must have received this advice (retort) plenty of times from your mother. Turns out we feel less full while watching TV and therefore overeat. Our moms were right after all!

However, modern TV shows are nothing like the ones we watched in our childhood. They are a lot more addicting and with the advent of live streaming services, television viewing has skyrocketed. The temptation makes us watch them even while we are eating. It is ok if you are doing this just once in a while, but if it has become a habit then this solution is for you.

Solution – Try to avoid watching television shows while eating and focus only on the food. One of the ways to do this is by choosing a series which releases episodes only once a week. This will ensure that you have no option other than waiting until the next episode releases the following week.

I have described just 4 of the most common habits which lead to overeating in the modern world. If you are doing most of the above and still aren’t losing weight then you simply aren’t in a calorie deficit. If you need help figuring it out feel free to give us a call or drop us a message in the blue chatbox and we’ll get back to you ASAP!