Your weight is a reflection of your daily behavior. All of us at Cardiometabolic Medicine are focusing on your behavior change, and promoting habit(s) transformation.

Focusing on behavior change will likely be more successful in your attempts to lose weight. It’s mostly your behavior that really determines your weight. Tell me your behavior, and I will tell you if you are losing or maintaining your weight loss.

The National Weight Control Registry (NWCR) consists of thousands of individuals who have been successful in long-term weight loss maintenance. A high percentage of these individuals started losing weight with the assistance and guidance of a weight-loss program. Most of them report significant improvement in overall well-being, depression and anxiety, self-control and vitality.

Sustained behavioral changes were key in most of these successful dieters (e.g. Higher level of physical activity, Self monitoring, vegetable rich nutrition etc.). For many, changing “bad” habits with “good habits” were part of the success.

Behavioral techniques can be very effective in the short run, however, they are hard to maintain causing significant rebound weight gain.

The vast majority of dieters will regain weight. Those who maintain their weight loss more than 2 years have a significantly higher chance of long-term weight loss. Habit formation is the process of making a behavior automatic. When it becomes automatic, you will more likely sustain the behavior, and it will take less effort to initiate.

We make more than 200 food decisions per day, most are automatic, and many times are undermining our weight loss efforts. Breaking bad habits, and creating healthy habits are powerful tools in weight loss. It makes the weight-maintenance process not rely only on motivation and will power .

Habit(s) formation is not always easy, it’s a field of behavioral psychology which is constantly studied.

In order to achieve habit change, the provider (us) set a single, simple and important behavior as a goal. The context of the behavior, the exact time, location and cues should be discussed.

Cues should be triggers to beneficial behaviors. It is helpful to have a cue in order to make the behavior a habit.

For example, coffee in the morning could be a cue to start your morning exercise routine. ‏ To break a bad habit, one can use “Do something different” behavioral intervention. It encourages the individual to change their routine and have more behavioral flexibility. New, alternative behaviors which have beneficial effects on weight loss should be introduced. For example, breaking the routine of eating while working in front of a computer, or eating a late night snack, but rather introduce a different behavior such as: going for a walk, drinking tea only after dinner, and brushing your teeth.

I believe that guiding individuals through the habit(s) transformation is key to sustain and succeed in Weight loss.

Focusing on habit formation, behavioral and cognitive techniques, makes us more successful in promoting sustainable Weight loss.

At Cardiometabolic Medicine we provide intensive behavioral intervention for weight loss to assure successful outcomes.

I am working with our patients to locate core, undesirable habits, and help them break it. I am constantly working on healthy habits formation which is one of the essential key elements to weight loss success.