Poor lifestyle habits complicate weight-loss efforts by leading you to choose a poor diet, miss out on necessary sleep or skip workouts. Years of making the same unhealthy choices often causes weight gain. Common pitfalls include skipping meals, mindlessly eating, rewarding yourself with food, overestimating portion size, lacking focus and not exercising. Identifying and correcting your specific bad habits takes time and commitment, but you benefit from fewer obstructions on your path to weight loss.
Step 1
Write a list of the habits that prevent you from reaching your weight-loss goals. Include habits related to eating, exercising, stress levels and your approach to weight loss. Prioritize the list of habits so you can tackle your biggest issue first rather than trying to change all of your habits at once.
Step 2
Visualize how your life and weight-loss efforts will change once you break the first habit on your prioritized list. If being sedentary is your habit, envision yourself engaging in daily exercise. Think about the energy, sense of well-being and greater weight loss the exercise will provide for you. This helps provide motivation to break the habit.
Step 3
Break down the habit into steps you can follow to change how you behave. In the sedentary example, include steps like walking around the neighborhood each night, signing up for an exercise class and increasing the length of time you exercise.
Step 4
Make a chart or other visual reminder of the steps you need to take to break the selected habit. For example, draw an exercise chart and mark each day when you exercise.
Step 5
Talk to someone else about the habit you are trying to break. Partner up with someone else who is working on the same habit so you can form a support system.
Step 6
Talk to yourself when you are in situations related to your negative habit to help make a conscious effort to avoid falling into your old routine. When you get home from work and are tempted to sit down on the couch for the night, remind yourself why you need to exercise and how it will feel to break the habit of being sedentary.
Step 7
Reward yourself after successfully making a change to your habit for certain periods of time. Choose rewards that don't involve food but instead encourage your weight loss, such as a new healthy cookbook or an exercise video.
Step 8
Work on the next habit on your list once your biggest priority becomes less of a problem. Avoid moving on too fast. If you haven't completely changed your behavior regarding the first habit, working on something new increases your chances of falling back to your old ways.
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