DIET | DETECTIVE^®

BREAKING THE FAT PATTERN uses the principle of "automaticity" -- a psychological term used to describe the unconscious way in which we make choices for our daily behaviors. Activities like setting an alarm clock at night, putting on shoes before you leave the house, buckling your seat belt when you get in a car, and remembering how to drive to the office -- these activities do not require much thought, we just do them. If we consciously thought about each decision that we make, we would be exhausted at the end of a day. Through automaticity, we unconsciously automate some of our routine processes. While automaticity has been working against an individual's weight loss goals for years, BREAKING THE FAT PATTERN will show readers how to redirect their knee-jerk impulses so they can work in their favor! So how do you actually discover and then break your fat pattern?

To discover your fat pattern you need to become a “diet detective” and honestly seek out the facts and rituals that have led to your weight problems. To start the process of identifying patterns that haven't worked for you and the Diet Traps that have tripped you up in the past, you have to delve into your history. This delving is not so you can find people, circumstances, or events to blame for your food patterns, but to help you see what does and doesn't work.

Discovering your fat patterns and identifying your Diet Traps are steps toward new ways of thinking. And if you don’t learn to think differently about what you've done in the past you may find your diet history repeating itself.

If you understand what you are doing (such as making excuses for why you should eat another half-box of cookies), and why you are doing it (you had a fight with your best friend), you have a better chance of being able to break the “cookies-as-comfort-food” pattern. A careful and honest examination of past successes and failures allows you to see the outline and substance of very distinct patterns. By recognizing these patterns, you can analyze them, see why and how they occurred, break them down, and focus on stopping the destructive behaviors – ending the vicious cycle of the “diet.” You also learn to turn things around and capitalize on your positive patterns. You can harness these positive patterns to make huge advances and lose weight for good simply by making a conscious effort.

The operative word here is conscious. Click into your consciousness and out of unconscious patterns, and then create a new, more positive pattern of eating and physical activity – one you can live with comfortably, and that fits you just right. Combining self-reflection and self-assessment leads to awareness. And awareness is one of the tools you will use to overcome the factors of genetics, hormones, and all the other influences that are making it difficult to reach your desired weight and body shape. Ironically, this conscious hyperawareness is the first step in creating a new automatic lifestyle. We all operate on autopilot some of the time – the key is to achieve a conscious understanding of what that means and how we want to change it. Once that’s accomplished, we can begin to consciously implement sustainable, practical changes that will become automatic.