When learning how to lose weight, it’s important that you gather all the facts and start a successful game plan. To achieve your goal of nutrition natural weight loss, you’ll need to break your goal into a series of smaller, simpler steps, advises UK psychologist Richard Wiseman. For instance, you may intend to lose 1-2 pounds per week for three months until you shed the pounds. It’s also best if you tell friends about your goal, so you’re accountable to someone, and chronicle your progress in a diary. In addition to these motivational natural weight loss tips, consider what the experts have to say about the psychology of eating.

One of the first rules of healthy weight loss is to fight your own natural urges to snack senselessly. “Whether you need to lose 5 pounds, 10 pounds, 50 pounds, there are probably some little subtle habits you’re doing, you’re not even aware of it, and they’re totally undermining, sabotaging your best attempts to lose weight,” says health expert Elizabeth Somer. In her books — Food and Mood and The Eating Your Way To Happiness diet — Somer advises that you make a pact with yourself to avoid eating anything that isn’t on a plate. “Every mouthful averages about 25 calories, so four mindless bites in a day, and you’ll gain a pound in a month,” she explains. Portion control doesn’t come instinctively, but it’s an important part of how to lose weight naturally.

One of the first methods of how to lose weight is to recognize those things that sabotage your best efforts to lose weight naturally. For instance, Dr. Brian Wansink, Cornell food psychologist and author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, says that big packages and servings subconsciously tell the mind that bigger portions are normal. Similarly, the bigger the plate, glass or serving spoon, the more we eat. We drink more from short, wide tumblers than tall, slender glasses. TV encourages uncontrolled snacking and drinks before dinner to lower our inhibitions, allowing us to eat and eat and eat. “Buy two, get one free” supermarket offers encourage us to buy 30-100% more — and eat it too. Additionally, cooler temperatures, dimmed lighting and soft music encourage overeating too.

Learning how to lose weight isn’t just about eating a natural diet with portion control in mind, of course. Most experts will tell you that it’s also about incorporating exercise into our lives a minimum of 3-5 days per week for 30-60 minutes. To meet our goals, many of us are inclined to join a gym to jumpstart our regimen. However, researchers at the London Metropolitan University found that gym-goers who do not get a buzz or “feel good factor” from their workouts will give up within three months on average. Lead researcher Dr. Jeremy Adams explains, “Weight loss and improved appearance featured heavily in exercise motivation,” but “external motivations, such as the desire to lose weight, will motivate people for around three to six months. People will only tend to continue beyond that if they feel better having exercised, if they feel they have more energy or feel less stressed.”