Do you think watching how someone else goes about losing her unwanted weight would help you? What about visualizing yourself doing what it takes to lose unwanted weight? Would that help you?

Both observational learning and visual imaging can help you anticipate what you have to do in your weight-loss regimen. Most importantly, they can give you the feel for the types of “moves” and effort you will have to make. The help comes from the fact that observation and imagery use similar brain networks to those you would use to do the weight-loss activity yourself.

Watching others and “watching” yourself through visualization are good ways to keep the rhythms of the weight-loss process right at your fingertips. The more automatic your weight-loss process, the less slogging your way through it you’ll have to do.