How paying attention can help you reach your weight loss goals

By Christina Ross – Accredited Practising Dietitian

We’ve all experienced moments of mindlessness when it comes to our eating. When distracted, bored or feeling particular emotions, we can eat without paying attention. Later we realise we’ve overeaten or not made the healthiest food choice, and wonder what we can do differently next time.  

The answer – practice paying attention to your everyday eating behaviours. Extend this beyond just what you’ve eaten to include the emotions you may be experiencing, the associated behaviours and the thoughts running through your mind at the time. This practice of self-monitoring has been found to be an effective strategy as it allows you to identify the factors that are maintaining the eating behaviour you might be looking to change. 

Situation  → Feelings → Thoughts  → Behaviours 

So next time you find yourself behaving in a way that you’d like to change, aim to pay attention to the following:  

Situation: Flesh out the who, what, when, where, why. This makes it easier to tease out those “high risk” times when you want to turn to certain foods. 

Feelings: Feelings or emotions you felt at the time eg. sad, happy, anxious, bored, tired. Emotions operate along a continuum, so it’s important to consider the degree of the emotion in the situation.  

Thoughts: Initially these may be difficult to notice. We have thousands of thoughts running through our mind on any given day, so it can be difficult to grab hold of them. Over time and with practice, catching these thoughts as they arise will become automatic. 

Behaviour: This is what you did as a result of the thoughts and emotions. This can be food-related or otherwise.  

It can be helpful to keep a journal so you can identify patterns and trends, especially since several situations may arise over the course of the day making it difficult to remember the details of each afterwards. This practice of journaling your eating behaviours will increase your self-awareness and your ability to identify the links between thoughts, emotions, and eating behaviours. With this awareness of your eating behaviours, you’ll be able to see what you can do to change them.