Sticking to any structured way of eating is about as fun as having a centipede crawl across your face in the night. It’s an intrusion. A major source of concern. It’s also just plain terrifying. There are already enough stressors in your world. Job. Family. Exercise. All the things that make life worth living but can very easily overwhelm you. It can start off as a small and insignificant distress but can steadily grow into something that eats you up from the inside out. Then try to stick to a way of eating when everything around you is crumbling at a glacial pace. It feels impossible. Fortunately, there are some easy solutions, the first of which starts with understanding what success looks like.
The Success You Need
You may not be eating a ketogenic diet as a form of a diet to lose weight. There are plenty of other very valid reasons to eat this way. You may want to be better as sports. Improve your health. Fix an ailment. Whatever. That said, it’s worth understanding why a successful weight loss diet looks like because it offers a framework for realizing how people create long term success when following a complex and highly specific eating plan. Once such study comes from the aptly named journal, Appetite. They discovered the dietary success of people who followed an eating plan that was complex and required them to track what they ate, was based on their unique opinion of the diet. Their opinion of it is what influenced how well they stuck to it. Like any diet, the metric for success is always yoked to how long you can do it for. How was this opinion formed? The simple answer is through experience.
A New Understanding
People who were on the diet were more likely to think of a diet as hard, if they didn’t really understand how it worked. If they thought of it as difficult, then they were more likely to give up on it. If a diet was flexible and easy get their head around, then they were more likely to stick to it in the long term. It all came down to perception that was closely married to understanding. Ketogenic is not easy. It’s damn hard. Getting it right is almost a fine art. One little dietary misstep can force you out of ketosis and unravel months of work because you must put yourself back into this state and possibly suffer through keto-flu once again. Argh! The solution is hardwiring your brain towards success. You need to learn why it works and how to do this.
Learning The New Way
There are plenty of ways you can get this information you need for success. You’ve already done part of this task by reading this far. You can also follow your favorite ketogenic influencers on social media. You can allot time each day to read up on the subject. One of the easiest ways to do it is to listen to ketogenic podcasts while you do you bang out mundane things. It could be while driving, folding laundry, or running on a treadmill. Grab hold of these little moments and turn them into something useful that brainwashes you in a good way. To get started, some of the highest rated podcasts are the following.
- The Keto Diet Podcast with Leanne Vogel which has over 300 episodes.
- Fast Keto with Ketogenic Girl for anyone who has struggled with keto.
- The Natural State gives you a doctor’s perspective with Anthony Gustin.
Try loading these into your schedule and you’ll feel like you’ve got a partner with you along your journey. They’ll give your brain a source of constant reassurance that you’re on the right track. It’s never easy sticking to a particular way of eating but putting your ears to good use is the best way you can hardwire yourself for success thanks to learning.
[REFERENCES]
Photo by Anastase Maragos on Unsplash.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0195666309006205?via%3Dihub
