Weight Loss - It's a Mind Game!

When you consider losing your weight, you’ll be faced with so many challenges, especially negative self-talk. If care is not taken, those little negative self-talks will kill your drive and program gradually. Once your negative self-talks get to the point at which you say to yourself “why all these efforts? Am I the only overweight person around?” your drive to shed your weight will start to wither away like a dehydrated flower. The best way to tackle negative self-talks is to counter them immediately with positive and motivational ones. For example, if you find yourself saying something like “why do I have to give up most of my favorite snacks because I want to shed some pounds?” Is it really worth it?” Immediately you realize you have been doing some negative self-talks, you should just counter it with something like “nothing good comes easy, I have to sacrifice something to get what I want”. This would continue to maintain your will power against challenges and discouragements.

The truth is that you can’t change anything about yourself if your thoughts don’t change. If you really want to change your diet and your unhealthy lifestyle, you have to start with your thoughts. Negative self-talks are always preceded by negative thoughts and they work against your goal. That is why you need to change your negative thoughts to motivational and inspirational ones. Some of the negative thoughts that may reduce your success have been enumerated below. 

 “Will” Instead of “Should”

In your statements, learn to replace all the word “should” with the word “will”. Putting should in your statement make the statement sound like other people’s beliefs not what you believe. The word “will” makes the statement sound like the idea comes from you. For instance, compare the following two statements. “I should reduce my calorie intake” and “I will reduce my calorie intake”. Now consider the phrase “They said”. Which of the above two statements makes a better statement when joined to the phrase “They said”? Of course “They said I should reduce my calorie intake” sounds better and makes more sense. Isn’t it? That confirms that “should” signifies other people’s ideas. And other people’s beliefs can not be strong enough to pull you through. The whole thing has to come from you. That is why you have to remove all the word “should” from all your motivational quotes and replace it with “will”. 

All-or-Nothing

Do not apply an All-or-Nothing principle to your weight loss program. It will discourage you in no time because it is almost impossible to obey all the rules at once. You don’t seem to understand the point here, do you? If you apply such principles to your diet, you may be discouraged very soon. For example, if you are a pizza freak and you were told that pizza has a lot of calories. After giving up all other fatty and calorie-filled foods and snacks for a while, you now thought of giving up pizza. The fact that you can not live without it will make you start seeing the whole new diet as a failure because you have unconsciously applied the all-or-nothing principle. And since you see your diet as a failure, you are likely to discontinue that diet, putting your entire weight loss program in jeopardy all because you could not give up pizza completely. The point here is that instead of adopting such principles, you should opt for a diet that would allow you to eat whatever you want but in small quantities.

Your Body

Instead of filling your head with the shape of your body, you should think about how important and helpful your body has been and how you can make it even more helpful.

In summary, you have to do your best to change all your negative thoughts to positive ones. It may not come easy, but you have to keep doing it gradually. You also need to put a touch of reality in your thoughts. For instance, statements like “I’ll half my wait in the next two weeks” are unrealistic and they may not yield the result you expect. Most importantly, you have to back your thoughts and statements with serious actions too.