TheBrainChangingDiet

Yesterday we alluded to the fact that changing your clothes is a very important activity for weight loss and maintenance. In today’s article, we are going to explain exactly why it is critical to your success.

1. Complacency: One of the major mistakes that dieters make is that they tend to get complacent at exactly the wrong time. Once your clothes fit better, you feel great and everybody begins to comment on how great that you look. As a reward you decide to indulge in your favorite treat. No big deal, you have been so good up to now, right? Unfortunately, an indulgence like this leads to a second, and then to a third, until finally, in a few days, you have undone all the hard work that you have done over the past few weeks. When you have decided that you want to lose weight, it is imperative that you NEVER get complacent. Being thin is a lifestyle, and it is difficult to change your whole life in a few weeks. Change takes time, and just because you lose weight, does not mean that you lose vulnerability.

2. External Cues: Your clothes are one of the most powerful external cues when it comes to preventing weight gain. There is nothing that sounds the warning siren faster or motivates people to act more than when their clothing gets too tight. When you have loose fitting clothes however, you can gain inches without even knowing it! You can’t hide from your clothes like you can with a weighing scale. People tend to listen when there clothes get to tight, and you probably will too.

3. Convenience: If you do not get rid of your larger fitting clothes then you will always have a subconscious excuse for re-gaining weight. Saving these larger clothes makes it far to easy to switch back to them instead of acting to correct any errors. Knowing that you only have one size of clothing adds a powerful incentive to maintain your weight loss. Unless you can go out an buy an entire new wardrobe every time that you gain weight, keeping one size of clothing can be extremely effective for most people.

4. Reward: Buying new clothes can act as a very powerful reward for somebody losing weight. When you do something difficult, like losing weight, it is extremely important that you provide yourself with a reward. This makes it more likely that you will perform that activity again in the future. During weight loss this can be a problem because for a lot of people their reward is eating highly palatable food! To counter-act this you need to replace your food rewards with non-food related rewards. If you enjoy buying new clothes then this may be a very effective strategy for you. For one you are rewarding the act of losing weight with something that you enjoy – buying new clothes. Secondly you are eliminating loose-clothing complacency, implementing a new powerful external cue, and providing yourself with more motivation because you will want to continue to wear the new clothes…what a fantastic strategy!

I hope that by reading this you will realize the power that clothes has on your weight loss and maintenance. I am not saying to buy new clothes every time you lose a pound. Instead I am asking that you be aware of the potential this strategy has for your success. Try it out…you may be surprised with the results!

Living in the era of the world wide web, we now have access to hundreds, maybe even thousands of weight loss strategies, hints, and tips. Some are useful, but as you may have found, most are not. Today I am going to share with one one of the most powerful that I have discovered. From reading this blog, hopefully you will have realized that diet and exercise DO NOT WORK for weight loss(in the long run!). Instead you need to learn how your brain works, and in today’s strategy, I have a great example for you.

One of the most powerful and yet underused weight loss maintenance strategies is “clothes management”. Strange I know,  but if you learn how to use your clothes to your advantage, you can maintain your weight loss quite effectively.

To demonstrate the risk of wearing loosely fitting clothes let me refer you to an amusing and eye-opening example. During a survey of prison inmates, it was discovered that those with an average sentence of six months, mysteriously would end up gaining 20-25 “prison pounds” during the course of their stay. This is very surprising, as the food being served is not of very high quality, and the inmates have access to exercise facilities.

The true reason for the weight gain was unveiled when the prison mates were questioned. Not one of the inmates blamed the weight gain on food, exercise machines, or even emotional reason’s. Instead they explained how the baggy orange jumpsuit that they had to wear for six months was the result of their weight gain. Because the overalls were so loose-fitting, most of them failed to realize that they had progressively gained weight, which is quite easy to do if you are not paying attention. It was not until they were released and had to try and squeeze back into their old clothes that they all realized that they had gained so much weight!

To understand this better, lets take a look at what Brian Wansink call’s “Signal Clothes”. Wansink proposes that losing weight, for example 20 pounds, is an abstract concept. But being able to fit into your favorite jeans is not at all abstract. To dieters, such clothes are called “signal clothes”.

To illustrate this point Wansink conducted a survey of 322 people and he asked them what were the top 8 signals that they used to know when they had lost weight. Here are the results:

• “When my jeans feel comfortable again.”
• “When I have to start wearing a belt.”
• “When I suck in my stomach, and I can see some definition, like a four-pack.”
• “When my belt notch moves back to where it used to be.”
• “When I don’t get tired walking up two flights of stairs to my office.”
• “When I can see my cheeckbones.”
• “When I don’t have to inhale to button my pants.”
• “When my friends or colleagues ask me if I’ve lose weight.”

Fascinating. Out of the top 8 signals that people use to know when they have lose weight, 4 (yes half!!) are related to the clothes that they wear! Do you think that this has ramifications for weight loss? Or, more importantly weight maintenance, the most important stage for a weight loss campaign? The answer of course is a resounding, YES!! In tomorrow’s post I am going to explain exactly why and how using signal clothes is one of the most powerful weight loss and weight management strategies known to man…See you then!