Everybody knows how to get weight off. Most of us have tried at least once and usually we have failed to keep the weight off. Most of the strategies we use to lose weight are not sustainable. Up to 50% of dieters who reduce their weight to a healthy level, put weight back on within five years; and the more we lose it the more likely we are to regain it.

We need to continually disrupt our bodies and minds from thinking and acting comfortably fat.

Most of our excuses are legitimate. Dieting is boring, so is doing the same exercises day after day and there is only so much mindfulness we can do in a very busy day. Besides some of us have bodies that are programmed to put on weight.

My book, Understanding Weight Control: Mind and Body Strategies for Lifelong Success will be out at the end of this month. It addresses these issues from a perspective that lifelong weight management, a process that requires continual disruption.

Disruptive weight management makes us disrupt our bodies and minds from thinking and acting comfortably fat. There are three key principles to weight disruption.

Disruption is a process. Rather than one particular strategy, disrupting our weight requires us to engage in a range of strategies and keep changing them until our minds and bodies no longer operate in fat mode. For example, we need to accept that once the diet we have chosen isn’t working anymore we need to change it immediately.  So, when we plateau on a low calorie diet, we need to change to a different diet such as a low fat diet and/or introduce another strategy such as short term laxative use.

As disrupters we are unique and almost every weight management activity begins as a personal experiment. We are own researchers and advisors. For example, some people lose initial weight quite quickly only on a diet, others require the combination of diet and exercise or behavioural therapy. We need to build own models to manage the business of losing weight permanently.

Disruption takes time. It takes time because we want it to work lifelong. Often, when we are ready for fat disruption, our bodies, minds, support systems are strongly in defence of our fat mode. Complete substitution of fat mode for a lean one takes decades. But just like we learned how to use the internet and now we don’t have to think about it, continually disrupting our weight management strategies should become part of our daily lives.