Wellness Tip of the Day: Stop waiting to fully live your life “when you lose weight.” Take the trip, go for the promotion, or sign up for that class right now.
Tag Archives: Lose Weight
Three Tips for Living Lean
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When a woman makes the decision to lose weight, often she wants the change effective immediately.
It’s the mindset of, “I want to be a size 4 and I want it today.”
This impatience is really being focused on the fact that you don’t have what you want, which means you are fighting the forces of the Universe and will struggle to lose weight.
What does it really matter if it takes a little time to achieve your goal? It’s the pain factor, right?
It’s looking in the mirror everyday and suffering from body shame. It’s feeling deprived as you turn down that piece of chocolate cake while everybody else digs in. It’s dreading the dressing room and trying on 50 swimsuits to find one that you might be willing to wear in public. It’s the risk of having your partner see you as unsex-worthy because of your sagging stomach.
You want to just wave a magic wand and make it all go away.
These thoughts are all symptoms of what has caused you to gain weight in the first place. At their heart is the fear of judgment and a lack of self-love. This is why so many diets and exercise programs fail. For lasting results, you have to change your core thoughts and beliefs along with eating healthy foods and moving your body.
Here are three tips to let go of the thoughts that keep you from living lean.
- Focus on a body part you can appreciate. How often do you look in the mirror and criticize your stomach, butt, or thighs? When you catch yourself doing this, shift your attention to something you can compliment. Maybe it’s your hair, your ankles, or your fingernails. Just find something you can consistently shift your focus to and praise.
- Make peace with the process. You didn’t gain the weight overnight, and you won’t lose it overnight. Recognize that life is meant to be lived and this includes living the experience of losing weight. Choose an eating and exercise program that you actually enjoy and that gives you some flexibility.
- Celebrate your daily progress. Did you eat on plan today? Woo hoo! Did you choose an apple over pie? Awesome! Did you walk five minutes longer than the day before? Fabulous! Focus on all the things you are doing right and ignore the rest.
What can you do today to begin shifting from wanting immediate results to thrilling in moving towards your dream?
Together we can do it!
You Hold the Key
I woke up this morning with a song in my heart. There is nothing special that I have planned for this day. There is no event or occasion. I feel happy for no reason at all, and it feels wonderful!
So often we feel like there has to be a reason to be happy. Often that reason is out ahead of us. We tell ourselves that we will be happy when we lose weight, get that job, have a certain amount of money, meet that deadline, recover from an illness, etc.
How would your life be different if you could let yourself just be happy anyway. How would it be different if you could be happy on your way to losing weight, getting that job, meeting that deadline, recovering from that illness?
Every moment that you deprive yourself of feeling good is like putting yourself in jail and refusing to set yourself free, even though you have the key in your pocket.
Wouldn’t it be better to be happy while you are losing weight, applying for that job, meeting that deadline, recovering from that illness?
And if you really need a reason to be happy, what can you use right now? Regardless of what else may be going on in your life, some ways to be happy anyway might be:
- The sun will rise.
- You are receiving these words.
- Someone somewhere loves you. (Probably a lot of someones.)
- You are alive this moment of this day.
- You have some form of nourishment available to you.
- You have clothes for your body.
- You have a body that is working well-enough for you to understand these words.
- There is an abundance of air to breathe.
- No matter what your state of wellness, your body is knocking itself out on your behalf.
- Another season is on its way that will bring new things to appreciate.
- You have at least one thing that you’re really good at and enjoy to do.
- You have a lifetime of experiences that are unique to you.
- You see the world as no one else does, and your perspective is valuable.
- Even if it seems the same, this day is different from all the others that have come before.
- Streams and rivers are flowing, and ocean tides are rising and falling.
- Chances are you have an abundance of clean water to drink.
- The Earth is spinning and producing resources to support life.
- There is an abundance of beauty in the world if you will just look for it.
- The sun will set and will rise again tomorrow.
How can you add to this list? What is in your life right now that you can use as a reason to be happy? Are there people, places, or animals that you appreciate? What about your body is working for you? What do you find beautiful? Where are you abundant?
How happy are you willing to let yourself feel right now? How can you let go of whatever reason is holding you back?
Together we can do it!
Photo by Evgeni Dinev / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
I Feel Skinny!
I have a friend who jokes that when she catches sight of her rear-end in the bathroom mirror that she reminds herself that she has great hair.
While this got a laugh during a recent group lunch, she’s actually onto something.
When you consider the foundation principle that “Energy Attracts Like Energy,” also known as the Law of Attraction, it becomes clear that focusing on the problem truly just creates more of the problem.
A subtle mental shift towards something you appreciate is a powerful way to shift the negative catabolic energy generated by looking in the mirror and feeling miserable about what you see.
You will know that you’ve successfully made the shift to a more positive anabolic place when you experience a feeling of genuine appreciation for another part of your body.
A woman I am working with used this technique during her journey to lose 40 pounds. Whenever she caught sight of her stomach, which she judged fat and unattractive, she would quickly shift her focus to appreciating her lean and muscular legs.
I used a similar technique on my own weight-loss journey. Whenever I was conscious of my body, I would turn the song “I Feel Pretty” from the Broadway play, West Side Story, into “I Feel Skinny,” and would play it loudly in my head, letting myself truly feel it.
When you look in the mirror, do you love or hate what you see? What can you do to focus more on what you love?
Imagine the impact that positive anabolic energy is having on your body and overall wellness.
Together we can do it!
Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Body
Most people know that eating healthy foods and moving our bodies is pretty darn important to achieving optimal wellness.
But how important is what you think about your body—and yourself?
This is the missing link at the heart of why so many people try to lose weight and fail.
Our thoughts are directly linked to our body processes. Negative thoughts create draining, destructive catabolic energy that releases stress chemicals and other harmful processes that literally eat way at your cells.
Positive thoughts release constructive, anabolic energy that generate physical processes that support—and rebuild—your body.
Often, changing your underlying thoughts, emotions, and beliefs is necessary to sustain lasting weight loss. And an added benefit is more positive thoughts also improve the quality—and enjoyment—of your life!
Your life won’t get better as a result of losing the weight. Your life will get better as a result of changing your thoughts about your weight. If you don’t change the underlying thoughts, your life will be the same whether you lose the weight or not.
Not only do I see this in my clients, but I know it from personal experience. My negative self-perception—and my resulting struggle with my weight—raged for more than 35 years. My negative thoughts bled over into all areas of my life. I was often depressed. I shied away from taking leadership roles at work, and I had a hard time making close friends.
So in addition to consistently moving my body and eating healthy foods, I began looking for inaccurate thinking and practicing new thoughts of appreciation, praise, and support for my body—and myself.
Successfully making these internal changes helped me reduce my weight by 35 pounds, and to keep it off now for more than a year.
But more importantly, those same internal changes have given me the confidence and self-empowerment to go after the life of my dreams.
What thoughts do you consistently think about your body—and about you? How can you ease up on the criticism and add more appreciation and praise? Notice the difference in how you feel mind, body, and spirit.
Together we can do it!
Photo by dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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