The promise of fast weight loss catches our attention every time. It’s not surprising though, as we all want a quick fix to our problems. In a world of instant dinners, instant coffee, delivery pizza, and fast food, why not be able to lose weight just as fast.

Hope as we might, we know that it takes time to lose weight, unless, of course, you’re willing to let a doctor suck it out. For the vast majority, that’s not an option or something we are inclined to try. What you need to do is remind yourself that you didn’t put on all those pounds overnight. Depending on how overweight you are, getting there may have taken you weeks, months or even years.

Instead of looking for a fast and easy way to lose weight, you need to look at how you got there in the first place. The easy answer is, of course, overeating, but it’s more complicated than that. According to researchers studying obesity, eating not only has to do with providing nourishment to your body, but also satisfying a psychological need.

For the most part, when you eat, you eat for pleasure. However, researchers used dopamine inhibitors, the hormones secreted when we feel pleasure, to block the pleasure participants felt while eating a meal. Surprisingly, after the dopamine inhibitors were administered, they continued to consume just as much food as before the inhibitors were administered. This suggest that there’s more to eating than just pleasure.

What the researchers concluded was that eating is also behavioral based. What can we garner from this? Well, regardless of whether pleasure is felt or not, we have become so accustomed to eating a certain way that it’s not just the pleasure of the food we’re missing, but the behavior that goes alone with it. What does this suggest?

Well for one thing, instead of just looking for a fast and easy weight loss method, you also need to become more aware of the need to change your behavior. If you’ve been on an unsuccessful diet before, the reason that you started back eating the stuff that got you fat in the first place may not be that you miss the taste of the food, but you miss the very act of eating it.

Think about it. Everything you do on a regular basis, you go about it practically in an unconscious manner. When you brush your teeth, you don’t have to think about how to get the cap off the toothpaste or which side of the brush to use. Because you’ve done it for such a long time, you could do it in your sleep. But if you would change from toothpaste to toothpowder, or from a toothbrush to a cloth, things would seem out of whack.

The same can be said of the foods you eat. Having a burger and fries have become second nature to you. Your mind expects it and views this as normal. However, order salad and soup and unconsciously your mind is saying: “Whoa! What’s going on here?” “Where are my burger and fries?” You may go ahead and eat the salad and soup and you may even feel nourished and full, but in the back of your mind you’re still thinking about that burger and those fries you didn’t get.

That lingering thought finally gets to you and you not only indulge yourself, you go on a binge.

So what is the solution to this? It has long been known that to get accustomed to a new behavior, therapist, coaches and anyone involved in personal development recommends role playing. For instance, you may have used role playing to perform a mock interview for your job; you may have used it by imagining yourself meeting and greeting people at a dinner party; or you may have used role playing before you had to give a speech. Examples of role playing are endless.

So, how can this help curve the foods you crave? The answer is it can’t. What it can do, however, is to help you establish a new way of thinking about your food. For instance, instead of eating burgers and fries, suppose you wanted to make eating salad and soup a part of your daily routine. Before you even attempt to order and eat the food for real, practice doing everying using role playing.

For instance, stand up and imagine yourself walking towards the restaurant counter and ordering soup and salad. For this to work you need to make it as real as possible. So, you need to get up out of your seat and imagine that you’re actually doing it. Yes, going over it in your imagination is helpful, but going through the physical process adds a dimension that imagination alone just can not do.

Next, act like you received your order and act as though you’re taking it to whereever you normally eat. Now sit down and go through the motions of actually eating. Yes, that means imagining a fork in your hand and raising it to your mouth. Do this for the entire meal. Once you’ve finished, repeat it at least 5 times. You may need to do it more. Remember to just have the attitude that whatever it takes, you’ll do it.

What this process does is create new memories in your mind of what is “normal.” If you do this enough, the new behavior will become second nature to you. In fact it’s kind of like preparing for a speech. If someone told you just five minutes beforehand, that you were going to have to give a thirty minute talk, you would probably freak. But if you were given a week’s notice, you would have time to prepare.

This is exactly what you need to do with weight loss. Once you get a diet plan, you normally would just jump into following it. Instead, if you gave yourself time to prepare before you actually start following it, you would have a better idea of what to expect. By applying this method, your weight loss process would be easier and as a bonus, you would probably lose weight faster as well. Now that would truly be a fast and easy weight loss program.

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