Last week I delivered my first in-person seminar, The Weight Loss Mindset, locally in the Hudson Valley.
Yes, I was nervous in the weeks leading up to this, that is until I created the presentation tablet covering the bullet points for seminar/workshop. When I was all done preparing that, I stepped back and thought, “Wow – this is going to be fabulous!” From that point on my excited was mounting. The group was small, intimate, and the attendees were all bright and engaging women. Everyone was open to sharing their feelings and thoughts around weight, dieting, and food. I just loved getting to know each and every one. But it was not until the next day I began to get a glimmer from email responses and phone calls just how successful that evening had been in adding a new level of awareness.
In a nutshell, we explored our own thinking. It is funny that we think thoughts all day long without actually paying attention to what our brain is saying to us. I asked everyone to write down the thoughts they normally think when they eat something they consider to not be healthy or when they overeat. Some were able to start writing thoughts right away; others struggled to even remember what their brain says to them. We all have thoughts – over 60,000 thoughts a day; but we mostly are not conscious of them.
If you’ve struggled with weight, you probably have become stuck in a “diet mindset.” The odd thing about “diet mindset” is that we can walk around in a diet mindset, struggling against eating anything that is not an “acceptable” diet food; but it does not change one thing about our weight. Maybe we take off some pounds with willpower, but eventually regain that weight back. All the while we are still stuck in that diet mind. Even if we are not actively trying to “diet,” that diet mind is still in full force. There are few other things as painful to deal with as a diet mind that causes you to mentally beat yourself up whenever you deviate from it. Diet mind is NOT a weight loss mindset. If it were, you would be losing weight without struggle.
Whatever it is that we think when we’ve eaten something that we judge as not being healthy or “diet food,” those thoughts create a feeling in our body. If you think, “I hate myself for eating that second piece of cake,” that probably makes you feel beaten down. That is the exact vibration of the thought “I hate myself” that moves down through your body. When you feel beaten down, you have zero motivation to do anything good for yourself. So you give up. You stop caring about you. The result is that you don’t bother to take care of yourself. It shows to your brain that the thought “I hate myself” was right all along. Do you see the cycle there?
How can you stop that thought cycle? Just by becoming aware that it is something you think – acknowledge the sentence in your brain. Then KNOW your thoughts are something you chose. Thoughts are optional. So when your brain plays a negative sentence in your head that makes you feel down about yourself, you do not have to react to that down feeling. You can acknowledge the thought and just let it go. The thought is not something that happens to you. It is your creation – your choice. So you don’t have to embrace that thought if it does not serve you. If you trace that thought to how it makes you feel, and how that feeling makes you act, and to the result in your life because of how you act; you will clearly see if the thought is creating results that you want – or a result that you do not want. If you want a fit and healthy body, but the thought ends up making you want to overeat, then it is not working towards the result you want. Let it go.
Discover how you WANT to feel. Find the thought that supports that feeling.
It is your choice. It is your super power.
