Successfully losing weight is only ever about doing 2 things that everyone can easily achieve and I am about to reveal the great secret to weight loss in just one paragraph. I will then tell you why you never stick to it and then I will show you how you can.
Many years ago Paul Mckenna (You may have heard of him) wrote a book called “Change your life in 7 days”. Within the book, he told you how to change many areas of your life with one noticeable exception, weight loss!! He only wrote one line regarding how to lose weight and I have always remembered it. “If you want to lose weight eat less and move around more” Now he actually could have stopped there, but what he did was go on to write 3 more books on weight loss. The reason he could have stopped there is that is all you ever need to do if you want to lose weight. The secret is just eating less than you normally would and become more active than you usually are!! Now if you do this over a sustained period of time, I guarantee that the weight will fall off. In a nutshell, that is it that is all you need to do. It does not matter, what you eat or drink or what kind of exercise that you do if you are burning more calories up than you are putting in, you will lose weight. There you go the easiest no-fail weight loss method in the world, Ta Da simple yes?. Well no not really because there is a problem isn’t there?
The problems are we don’t stick to just eating less and moving around more until we have lost the weight we need to and that is because of just one thing. The thoughts and beliefs that you hold around eating less and being more active keep getting in the way, don’t they? If our thoughts and attached beliefs did not stop us, then everyone would just be really healthy and super fit.
Let me paint a picture for you. Everyone who has ever attempted to lose weight will be familiar with this story. You start off with good intentions to lose weight, you clear out the cupboards, fill it with low-calorie healthy food, join a gym or a weight loss club, start a new activity. You may then goal set and feel really great and what happens yes amazingly you lose weight. You are on a high and do so well for those first few days/ weeks and lose several pounds, but then something happens, doesn’t it?
It usually goes like this, you might have a bad day, or you get on the scales and you don’t get the results you want. Or the weekend arrives and you go out and eat and drink too much. You tell yourself “I have to treat myself because it’s the weekend”, Or maybe you have a bad day at work, or you have an argument with a partner. Then your children, pets, friends, the news makes you stressed and then you see an advert for your favourite food on special offer at the supermarket. Basically, any one of a million things can come knocking at your door. Then very soon you are back to where you started and you start to fall back onto one of your old thoughts such as “Well I just love food, I guess”, or “my parents were both big so it’s in my genes”, or “I am too old now to lose weight”. Or you may even fall back on my old personal favourite, “I have tried everything and nothing ever works for me”.
So here is the real problem, life and the way you choose to respond to it. Not food or drink or being active, but life. Life and events just happen and we respond with negative thoughts and then beliefs. But these thoughts are nothing but, lies lies and more damn lies. Now I am not saying that these experiences are not true for you, but the main thing that prevents you from losing weight is what you choose to tell yourself and the beliefs that you hold around yourself and weight loss.
But it is ok as I have developed a really simple and easy idea that will stop all of this. It takes quite a bit of practice, but it will definitely work. OK here goes; you just need to……Stop thinking! There, really simple, eat less, move around more and stop having all and every negative thought around food and drink and being more active. There is a slight problem though, have you ever tried to just not think at all? There are thousands of thoughts going around your brain each and every day. Now while some people can reach an incredible state of calm through meditation where they totally clear their mind, you cannot always hold onto that state all day. So maybe this idea is not that practical after all.
However, we are on the right lines here to achieving long-term weight loss. Because the real secret to long-term weight loss is actually about taking control of your thoughts and then challenging them and the beliefs attached to them. This may sound difficult, but it is so much easier than you “think!” You see we often spend so much of our time with our thoughts projected into the future or stuck in the past, that we fail to stay in the moment and connect with our current thinking. Within his book the “Power of now”, Eckhart Tolle writes about how we can all achieve much more happiness if we keep our thoughts focused on the moment. As when we keep our thoughts out of the past and future, we realise that we don’t actually have any problems in the present second. This is the same for weight loss unless we take full control of our thoughts we are very much at the mercy of our perceived past failures and our future anxieties of failing again. Now, this is actually what demotivates us and drives us back to our old beliefs and habits.
So how do we achieve this, well we are all hardwired from our early years with unconscious beliefs that we pick up from parents, teachers, television and these days social media. Now, these negative beliefs will come out through our thoughts and we respond to them with negative behaviour. So the first thing that we need to do is stop and listen to the thoughts that we are having. You see we never stop and think about our thoughts, but the minute we do this things start to change. As when we focus on a thought, we become aware of it and then it becomes a conscious thought. When the thought moves to our consciousness, we can then start to examine and challenge it and when we do this we actually start to destabilise the belief. For example, we might say to ourselves, “Walking for 30 minutes will not burn off enough calories to make a difference. You need to work out in a gym every day for an hour to see any difference and I am really tired after working all day”, but what if we flipped that belief? With “Well sitting down for an additional 30 minutes will certainly burn even less”. Or how about “A 30 minute walk will build up my energy levels so I will find it easier to walk 30 minutes tomorrow as well, then by the end of the week I will have done an extra 2 and a half hours exercise and that will make a difference” Notice the difference in the internal communication and how it starts to shake the belief system. Every time you get a negative thought around food or drink or being active you have to stop and notice the words, make them conscious and bring up the opposite thought to flip it.
For a long time now I have noticed that the work that I have been doing with people to help them lose weight or stop smoking always comes to rewiring the false beliefs that they are carrying around. I also then help people through hypnosis to become more consciously aware of the thoughts. These days I can always spot when someone who I have been working with has shaken off their old beliefs as they become so much happier and are managing to keep their thoughts in the present moment.
I know that some people will still turn to special diets, or become addicted to weight loss clubs and the low-calorie foods being pushed. The other day on Facebook someone was actually selling “Magic Beans”, that promised to do all sorts of incredible things including helping you lose weight!!
But always remember the simplest and easiest method of losing weight long term really is and always will be eating less and moving around more. If you do this, you cannot fail to lose weight. So the next time you are about to make a poor decision around food or drink and why or how it can’t be done, challenge your thoughts and ask whose beliefs or influences are you acting under.
If you would like to make any positive changes to your life, please click the link below to go to my website to find out more.
