Relapse Prevention

We begin the final week of our five week project based course with the topic of Relapse Prevention. The learning objective for this lesson is that learners will demonstrate an understanding of relapse prevention and strategies for dealing with relapses when they occur. Let’s start with some simple definitions. A lapse Is a temporary failure to follow your plans and stick to your goals, something that happens one time. Examples of common lapses are missing a day of exercise or eating a large portion of a high fat dessert. Relapse happens when the one time lapse is repeated. It’s falling back or slipping back into former habits. Examples would be missing three or four days of exercise or totally falling off your calorie and food group goals for a few days. A collapse is when someone falls completely away from their weight loss goals and plans for more than one week. Think about the cycle pictured here, starting with the lapse shown in red. A lapse, or temporary failure to stick with goals and plans, is actually normal and should be expected. You can recover from a lapse in several ways which we will discuss, but another lapse is most likely going to happen. If you are not able to recover form the lapse, you could fall into a relapse, several days of straying from your nutrition and exercise goals. Recovery is still possible at this point, but if you are not able to recover from a relapse You could easily wind up in a collapse. Recovery is really difficult at this point. People in weight loss collapse basically give up all their goals and plans and go back to the old habits of eating and not exercising. This is when any weight lost will be regained, and possibly gain even more weight than what was previous lost. The thing about lapses is that they are normal and to be expected, nobody is perfect. There will be a time when you will eat too many calories. A time will come when you will miss an exercise session. You’ll order something very high in calories at a restaurant, or you’ll find yourself without the groceries that you need to prepare the meals that you’ve planned. These are lapses, and if you expect them to happen, you will be more likely to recover. If you expect perfection, you’ll be devastated by these normal lapses and this will make recovery much more difficult for you. So, set yourself up to deal with lapses when they occur by expecting that they will happen to you. Habits are what you do 90% of the time Your usual mode of operation. In weight loss, this is following your plans for nutrition, exercise and self monitoring. Lapses or episodes isolated instances of moving away from your plans. Your habits will determine your weight loss success despite additional lapses. If you believe this and expect a few lapses along the way you’ll be much more likely to reach your weight-loss goal and to keep the weight off. Once you have a lapse your strategy should be to immediately return to your nutrition and exercise plans. If you allow yourself to feel sorry for yourself or to think about how horribly you’ve failed You could easily find yourself in a relapse. Remember, we’re defining a relapse as several days of not following your weight loss goals and plans. We want to prevent this, and the good news is that relapses can be prevented. Take some time now to review week 4, lesson 1 on triggers This will help you understand how a lapse can turn into a relapse. Negative emotions, stress, lack of sleep, and attending celebrations, can turn a lapse into a relapse. Here’s an example. Suppose you’re going along just fine, following your weight loss goals, When you have a lapse like missing a scheduled exercise session on let’s say a Friday. The next day, Saturday, you go to a birthday party and eat a really large piece of birthday cake with ice cream. You feel like a failure, you start to think negatively, you don’t exercise on Saturday as scheduled. And you go out for pizza and beer on Sunday, might as well, because you can start again on Monday. Your lapse of missing that one day of exercise has now become a relapse because of negative emotions and thought about the birthday party celebration. Once you find yourself in a relapse, your goal should be to recover quickly so that you can avoid a total collapse. Attitude is everything. You will probably have lots of negative thoughts like I messed up, I’m a failure. I’ll never be able to lose weight. Stopping those negative thoughts will be difficult but it absolutely can be done. Here are some suggestions for stopping or at least minimizing negative thoughts. Call a key support person, distract yourself by working on a puzzle or a video or computer game that requires a lot of concentration. Force yourself to think about the positive things that you’ve done. Whatever you focus on will grow, so work against the negative thoughts by focusing on the positive thoughts. Ask yourself what would you say to a friend who came to you with the exact same situation? Write down the advice you would give your friend and read it aloud to yourself. Try to follow your own advice. It’s probably very accurate and very good advice. Get yourself right back on the saddle right away and start to follow your weight loss goals and plans. Think positive thoughts about how well you have recovered from your relapse. Go back to using the hunger scale from week four, lesson one, before and after every meal and snack. So that you can know that you’re eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full. This is a really important piece of your weight loss plan. Hopefully this content will help you in your goal to lose weight and keep it off.