How Your Brain Might Be Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Efforts
Almost everyone who has started a weight loss or fitness program has, at some point, failed in their routine and had to pick it back up later down the line. It’s a fairly common occurrence.
You might start a weight loss routine for New Years and then stop for awhile, only to pick it back up the next year. These bumps in the road to weight loss aren’t all your fault, though.
New research suggests that our brains might be getting in our way.Studies have shown that it takes a lot more effort for our brains to work with physical activity than it does to get them to work with little activity.
There’s something so inherently appealing about lazy activities that we’re just naturally drawn to them over anything physically engaging, causing us to skip out on our workouts.
One of the primary theories surrounding why we’re so naturally sedentary traces back to our pre-civilization roots. Back when humans were primarily hunters and gatherers, energy conservation was a major concern.
Fatigue could be fatal in those days, especially as a member of a nomadic group, so we only really exerted ourselves when we needed to.The human body isn’t used to doing physical exercise just for fun or in a casual manner.
In fact, the entire notion of exercise is fairly new in human history. For most of our history, we only really pushed ourselves for work or for survival, so it’s only natural that our brains would have wired physical exercise as something negative.
If you want to successfully lose weight, you need to be able to rewire your brain in such a way that you can enjoy your workouts and look forward to exercising. There are a few different ways that you could do that, such as rewarding yourself for working out a certain number of days or finding creative workouts, but one of the most common ones is to work out with a partner.
By working out with another person, you’ll add this inherent obligation to actually go so that they’re not working out by themselves, especially if they’re your friend. This can make working out a lot more entertaining and you’ll start to see it as something enjoyable that you can do casually. This can also help boost your confidence if you feel a bit uncomfortable going to the gym by yourself.
