The Effect of Your Environment on Weight Management

Everyone knows that eating less and exercising more is the key to losing weight. After all, we’ve all been taught this since childhood. But with more and more people becoming obese in these west these days, finding ways to shed the excess pounds is crucial to avoid ongoing medical problems and other associated issues. 

A lot of people don’t realise that their environment can contribute to their weight gain, but in fact, it can have a more significant impact that anyone imagined. Here, we take a closer look at whether it’s possible to make environmental changes that will help you to drop a few sizes and live a healthier lifestyle overall.

What Does “Environment” Mean?

In this article, we’re looking specifically at your external environment which is everything from your bedroom to your home, to your street and town. Essentially, it’s everywhere that you go and spend time. 

Some of the questions you may want to ask about your own environment include: 

• How dark do you have your bedroom at night? 
• Does someone else share your room? 
• Do the other people in your house live a healthy lifestyle?
• Do you keep water by your bed? 
• How far do you have to go to reach the fridge?
• Do you do the cooking?
• Do you do the shopping?
• Do you have support from other people in the house?
• Can you eat anything you like?
• Do you have good ventilation and heating at home? 
• Have you got a dog?
• Are there lots of fast food places near your home? 
• Do you have a gym nearby?
• Where is your nearest park? 
• Is there somewhere safe to walk near your home?
• Are there cycle tracks in your town?
• Does your town have a swimming pool?

As you can see, there are a lot of wide-ranging questions that can have an effect on how easy it is for you to shed pounds. But there are two areas that you should focus on when it comes to weight loss: Your immediate surroundings and the people you live with.

The Influence Of Others

The people who surround us tend to dictate our behaviour. Typically, when couples start to live together they start gaining weight as one partner tends to adopt the same snacking and eating habits as their partner. 

Usually, people eat whatever is put on their plates. One person within the household typically choose the food that will be eaten and the size of each portion and the others just follow. Inadvertently, we tend to be influenced by the people who are around us. It can be all too easy to adopt the eating habits of those who share our homes, even if we’re trying hard to lose weight. The best way to deal with this is to make sure you tell your household that you want to live a healthier lifestyle and ask them all of their help so you can stop snacking between meals. Often, your housemates, friends, or family members will rise to the challenge and will put in the effort to help with your weight loss goals.

Do Your Surroundings Impact Your Weight Loss? 

The people who are around you are just half of the equation when it comes to weight loss, your surroundings also have a part to play in how slowly or quickly you lose weight or even whether your weight changes at all. 

It’s important to get rid of any triggers that are in your immediate environment that encourage you to eat. Following a fitness programme and diet regime is important, but there are many things that you can do in your home to help you achieve your weight loss goals too.

Here are just a few of the things you can try: 

• Changing how you arrange your furniture.
• Move your TV to a different spot.
• Change your fridge shelves regularly and label them.
• Change the cupboard where you store your treats to one that’s nowhere near your living room or bedroom. 
• Relocate items to different cabinets in the kitchen.

If you regularly move things around in your cabinets, you won’t have such easy and quick access to treats and snacks. You’ll have to remember where you’ve stored them, and that extra thinking time could be just enough to deter you from snacking on them.

Whenever you’re craving something to drink or eat, the emotional brain acts more quickly than the brain’s rational side. If you can slow down the time it takes to access the junk food, your rational thinking may have sufficient time to take over from your emotional thinking and help you to make a better decision.

What Can I Do To Lose Weight Successfully?

There is no trick to easy and quick weight loss. Although some people manage to shed a lot of weight by doing a crash diet, they usually put it all back on again in a short space of time once they quit their extreme diet, and often they gain even more than they lost. 

Losing weight successfully isn’t just about losing the weight in the first place but also about maintaining that weight loss, and the most effective way to achieve that is to adopt a long term healthy lifestyle. You can do this by eating more healthily and by increasing the amount of physical activity you do. 

Nevertheless, there are a few key changes that you can make to your environment that will support your weight loss goals and even help you to move closer towards achieving them. You should consider making the above changes in your home environment and also look at how you can change the way you interact with the people who live in your household. 

Although these changes are relatively small, they can make a significant difference to how quickly and how effectively you drop sizes, and you may find that it gives you the impetus you need to stick with your healthy lifestyle plan in the long term.