ABC's of Weight Loss: Reward Yourself?

ABC’s of weight control: observing your own eating behaviors, identifying what feelings, people, and situations are “triggers” for you to overeat, and identifying new ways to deal with the triggers instead to avoid overeating should be your goals.

The last part, changing the consequences for self-reward can be a critical part for you. This seems very basic: we all learned as children that there are consequences to good and bad behavior, and when you complete a difficult task, you reward yourself for your efforts. Everyone knows that! But this is a very powerful tool when it comes to changing habits like overeating, smoking, and exercising: learning how and when to reward yourself is an important part of reaching and maintaining your goal. I strongly encourage everyone to set up a way to reward yourself that gives you the positive feedback you need to keep up your efforts. But first, there are some basic things to consider in setting up a successful reward system.

An Important Rule - Do Not Reward Yourself for Losing Weight!
If you want to really be successful in the long term and maintain the weight you’ve worked hard to lose, then you have to make your new eating habits a permanent part of your life. If you don’t, the old habits will return, and so will the weight. Almost anyone can lose a few pounds, even many pounds in the short term, without ever having made any significant or permanent changes in the way they think of and treat food in their lives. This is the problem with most “diets”: the focus is only on losing weight. Remember that weight loss claims are what these companies make their money on, not real long-term help. There’s a reason there aren’t many studies to show what happens to people on diets after the first year. So, instead of rewarding yourself for losing a few pounds, reward yourself for a new habit you’ve developed because that is what is most important. Here are some examples of habits that lead to permanent weight control:

Paying attention to true hunger
Eating within a hunger “comfort” zone. This means not waiting so long to eat that you starve, then stuff yourself. It also means putting off eating when you are not really hungry at all, and avoiding the habit of eating out of emotion, boredom or other non-hunger reasons. If this is a problem for you, develop a way to reward yourself for learning to eat within a real comfort zone for hunger.

Choosing low fat foods
This habit of eating more low fat foods (yes low fat foods), and saving high fat foods for occasional use has been shown in scientific studies to be a real key to maintaining weight loss. So, when you work on choosing these foods and successfully make good eating decisions (even though the high fat foods may be very appealing) this is a real milestone and is a great behavior to reward.

Exercising
The habit of increasing daily movement (by walking more, sitting less), and having a habit of regular physical activity is tied to losing weight, but more importantly, to helping you keep it off. If this is a new habit you are trying to develop, it’s a great one to reward yourself for.

Keeping track of your food or your “triggers”
This again, is a critical habit to develop if you are serious about losing weight and keeping it off. It takes some time, it’s not particularly fun, but you discover a lot when you keep track of what you eat as well as the situations that come up that cause you to overeat. Reward yourself for doing this task, it’s very important.

Because you’re rewarding yourself for building new habits, even if you don’t lose weight that week, but you still complete your goal for a habit change, you should give yourself a reward.

The Benefits of Weight Loss
Although you should not reward yourself for losing weight by itself, you should remind yourself of the benefits of weight loss, it has own rewards. You start to feel better, look better; your clothes start fitting better, your energy increases. And don’t forget the health benefits: with even a 10-15 pound weight loss, there is a decreased risk in heart disease, a lowering of blood sugar and insulin levels, lower blood pressure, less severe sleep apnea, and reduced symptoms of joint disease. These are all huge rewards for losing weight.

There are good reasons not to reward yourself for weight loss itself. For one thing, weight loss can be sporadic - one week you lose, the next you don’t, even though you were making good progress towards changing some habits. By focusing on the positive changes you’re making and rewarding those, you will be reinforcing the good habits you will need to keep losing weight and to keep it off once you’ve reached your goal. This is very basic behavior modification, but I’ll bet that very few of you have rewarded yourself lately for your hard work!

Setting yourself up for success
For a good reward system to work, it needs to be realistic. The goals you choose to reward should be reachable. What is reachable is very personal and varies from one person to another. It also depends how far along you are in changing a habit. For example, if your goal is to exercise 30 minutes every day next week, but you’ve never done this before, it may be too much. Maybe setting a goal of walking at least 4 times next week for 10-15 minutes might be more realistic.

Rewards can be short-term and long-term: You might have a reward for the end of the day for reaching a short term goal like choosing fruits and vegetables for snacks instead of chips and crackers for that day. You could also have a longer-term reward set up for the end of the week or month for reaching a longer-term goal.

What are good rewards?

First, food is not a good reward!!!!
Money works for most people. A small allowance for reaching a goal can be very reinforcing.
Small gifts, setting aside time for yourself to do something fun, reading a favorite book, calling a friend who lives overseas, or going to a movie are examples of rewards.
Make the size of your reward match the task. Buying yourself a new car because you followed your plan for a week may be a little extravagant, but it may not be for doing this for six months or a year!
For rewards to be reinforcing, you should get them just as soon after you complete your goal as possible. Do not put off rewarding yourself or it loses value.
Choose a reasonable goal you can achieve this week, one that will get you closer to your weight loss goal, and make a plan for rewarding yourself. You deserve it!

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