Want to Lose Weight? Change Your Brain.
- Kristin Stitz
- Aug 6
- 3 min read
No conversation about what influences weight loss would be complete without addressing mindset. When I work with clients, helping them figure out what to eat is often only a small part of the plan. Although what to eat is important, we spend most of our time together figuring out how to change your eating habits.
A positive mindset and healthy habit formation are a huge part of weight loss. Our brains default to familiar patterns as a survival strategy, and we revert to those defaults, which can derail our attempts to lose weight. Fortunately, your brain can be ‘rewired’ to create new thoughts and patterns, which is the secret to changing your mindset and behaviors about food. This is called neuroplasticity. Understanding how brain rewiring works and incorporating strategies to make it happen can make the difference between weight loss success and failure.
Check out my previous posts to learn about other reasons why losing weight can be hard, how insulin resistance affects weight loss, and the role hormones play in weight loss.
Why Your Brain Defaults to the Familiar
Most of us think about food and eating in familiar ways. We might think that certain foods are 'bad' or that it's a sin to leave food on our plates because there are starving kids in China.
We learn a lot of these thoughts in our childhood, and others come from the diet culture that pervades our society. Even when you're highly motivated to make changes, these thoughts are running in the background of your mind, blocking your efforts to do things differently.
It can take some effort to break bad eating habits or escape the food noise and find new ways of thinking about food and eating. That’s because our brains play it safe by defaulting to familiar patterns.
Your Brain is Also Flexible
Fortunately, given the right tools, repetition, and time, we can teach our brains to respond in new ways to old situations. The analogy I often use with my clients is driving home from work.
If you’ve lived and worked in the same places for a long time, you probably drive home from work without putting any thought into it. You automatically turn left out of the parking lot, go through 2 stoplights, get on the highway, and get off on the 3rd exit.
Now, imagine you moved to a new house. You’d have to think about where you were going. You might use a tool like a navigation system and actively note the landmarks where you turn. At first, you might even take the left turn you were used to taking, even though your new house is to the right, or take a longer route until you figure out the shortcut to your new neighborhood.
Eventually, getting to your new home will be just as automatic as getting to your old one. It just takes some tools, repetition, and time.
How Neuroplasticity Supports Weight Loss
Our brains work the same way when learning a new ‘route’ to a healthier way of eating or lifestyle.
As an example, I often suggest to my clients that they add protein to their breakfast to keep their blood sugar steady and feel satiated until lunch.
If you’ve always eaten cereal for breakfast, you will have to make an effort to stock your fridge with Greek yogurt or eggs. You'd have to allow an extra 5 minutes in the morning to slice fruit for the yogurt or scramble the eggs. You might automatically reach for the cereal box for a while, but eventually the new breakfast will feel like the only one you've ever eaten.
My nutrition coaching program includes strategies to help you rewire your brain. We create new thoughts about food and eating, practice them, and troubleshoot the challenges, until those new thoughts and habits are as automatic as driving to your new house.
In my free, 30-minute, no obligation strategy session, I invite potential clients to share one of their challenges with past diets or attempts to change their eating habits. We start the process of rewiring their brain right then and there.
I have a client who mentioned during her consultation that she often snacks while talking on the phone with her friends. We brainstormed what she could do during the call instead of eating, and she settled on having a cup of tea. (This called a replacement behavior.) Defaulting to the cup of tea instead of eating will take some time and repetition, but eventually her brain will learn that phone call = time for tea.
If you have a tricky situation that gets in the way of your attempts to change, schedule a call and let's talk about it.
