HealthEvolution

#6) “Develop a Healthy Selfishness”.

Now, here’s a point in the article where I really agree with and support the author who says, “As Fletcher counseled overweight clients, she noticed that many women, in particular, had a difficult time putting themselves first.  All day long, they’d help their spouse, family, friends, and co-workers.  At the end of the day, these women were exhausted.  And they often turned to food.  The only nice thing they did for themselves was eat.”

This was something that I definitely experienced while I was overweight.  I felt obligated to my work, my friends, my boyfriend, and certainly put the needs of almost everyone before my own.  I thought that I needed to help them – that was my purpose and I took pride in doing such a good job.  The problem, though, was that I soon became a martyr in my own life.  Soon, I was drained and resented the people that I was supporting – my boss, my parents, my friends.  I was sick and tired of supporting them and I felt exhausted from absorbing all of their stresses and making them my problems, too.  The only way that I relaxed was by eating.  The only time I had to myself was time to eat.  The only way I would relieve all this stress was by overloading my sensory input and getting totally high off food.  It made me feel good, relaxed, calm, comfortable, distracted, at ease, and peaceful. 

The problem with this, though, is that those good feelings I felt in the moment were soon quickly replaced with feelings of guilt, stress, gluttony, shame, agony, embarrassment, and anger.  I knew that my behavior was only making my problem worse, but I didn’t know how to stop.  I didn’t want to stop because eating was my only source of calm in the turbulent storm of my life. 

So, instead of adjusting your expectations and expecting a slow, torturous, punishment for old behavior and hard core test of your self-control, adjust your expectations to believe how easily and quickly things can change for you.  Start to notice the little things that are changing first like how, after I worked out today, I notice an overall feeling of improved health, increased stamina, increased energy, a positive perspective, a feeling that I am invincible and strong.  These feelings, if you can experience them in a genuine way every day, will start to penetrate every day of your life.  They will guide your thoughts and actions because you will behave in a way that will allow you to maintain this good and wonderful feeling.  That’s where you can look for the immediate result – it’s in your head and it’s very powerful.  The results in your body will take longer to show, there’s a
LOT of change that’s happening at a cellular and microscopic level, it takes time to manifest on the outside for you to see.  So, enjoy the immediate gratification of observing the changes in your attitude and energy.  You will feel lighter than ever and soon your body will change to match that!

Time is an interesting component, of weight loss and will probably be the subject of a few blogs in the future.  Most people believe that time is the enemy of weight loss because it happens slowly and because it takes time to show results.  The trick, though, is that time really is on your side.  Just like anything, the more time you choose to spend focusing on something and creating something, the faster the results will turn around for you.  When you choose to spend your time working out, the results of that effort will be shown to you over time.  Also, it’s important to realize that time creates a barrier for us to adjust to change.  If those kinds of consequences and results happened immediately, we’d be overwhelmed by trying to deal with so much change.  Time allows us to adjust to change and make sense of it, because even if it’s change toward something you want (like a thinner body), it does take some adjustment and it can be very uncomfortable.  Time is your friend because it is reliable.  It continues to pass and pass no matter what, you can’t control it and you can’t manipulate it.  But you CAN manipulate how you perceive it.  See, the time will pass fast enough.  Soon a week will go by, soon a month, soon 6 months.  Each individual day goes by so quickly and it seems like when we look back to 6 months or even a year ago, that it seems like time has really gone by in a flash.  Here’s the good news:  if you follow your plan every day and do something small to contribute to your own success, time will pass and results will show.  Period.  Don’t sit around anticipating results, looking for them and feeling stressed out about why you can’t see anything different.  Instead, let go of the need for control and just trust that if you do what you’re supposed to today, the results of your effort will show tomorrow.  And they will. 

#5) “Adjust Your Expectations”

In this segment, the article’s author feeds us the old cliché, “That extra 100 pounds didn’t appear overnight and it’s not going to come off overnight, either.”  I don’t know about you, but as a person who’s looking at myself and knowing I have to lose 100 pounds, this is the opposite of motivation.  It’s irritating.  I know that 100 pounds doesn’t disappear overnight and I know it’s going to take, “a long time, a lot of hard work, and a lot of patience, blah blah blah.”  Yeah, I think we’ve all been lied to about this.  Just like every thing else related to weight loss, it’s all about HOW YOU THINK.  This kind of attitude will definitely hinder your progress because why would anyone want to be involved in any long, torturous, painful process?  They wouldn’t, and that’s what we’ve made weight loss out to be.  No wonder so many people are failing, they don’t want to spend their time being miserable.  My take on this old adage is this:  that extra 100 pounds didn’t appear overnight, but you’ll be shocked how quickly it will disappear when you eat more veggies and exercise every day.  Seriously, I felt like the weight was just dropping off me so fast, and so it did. 

Stepping on the scale also took some of the subjectivity out of my situation.  For so long, I’d depended on how I felt or what size I was to determine how I looked.  But, I suddenly realized that was a complete disaster – look where I’d ended up, and I really had no idea that I was as large as 300 pounds.  I figured I was big, but I still looked good.  Yeah right.  No one who weighs 300 pounds looks good.  It was all in my head and I realized that by measuring my weight on the scale, I made this weight loss an objective, measurable thing instead of just basing my success on my feelings or my ideas about what was happening with my weight.  I started weighing myself every single day, enjoying the moment when the numbers popped up and they showed that I’d made progress.  This way, every time I’d lose a single pound (or even half a pound because my scale is digital) I would celebrate it as a tremendous success and prove to myself that I was definitely making progress and moving toward my goal. 

I could tell myself that today I weigh less than I ever have before, and I knew it to be true.  This kind of thinking completely snowballed into helping me transform my mind and start to believe things like, “I’m so thin today,” or, “I’m so proud that I weigh XXX amount,” or, “I’m so small!  I’m so close to being a size XXX.”  This kind of thinking, especially when I could experience it on a daily basis, really helped align my behavior toward my goal, too.  I was compelled to engage in activity that would support these thoughts.  Things like working out and eating healthy were things I wanted to do, it felt natural because it was part of moving me toward my goal. 

 I had to find accountability and motivation elsewhere – thinking outside the box and coming up with some creative solutions that worked for me and inspired me to be more successful.  For example, when I started noticing that I was losing weight, I bought myself a scale to use at home.  Now, I know that most people HATE this tool for measuring weight loss and there are plenty of reasons why, too.  “My weight fluctuates every day,” or, “I have a lot of muscle mass and muscle weighs more than fat so it’s not accurate,” or, “It makes me feel depressed to look at my weight because I’m too heavy,” or, “I hate the scale. Period.”  All common ways of thinking, and certainly things I used to believe.   Well, that changed when I changed my perspective.  I had lost a little weight, so I liked the idea of stepping on the scale and having it show less than it ever had before.  Even though the number was still huge, I saw it as a good thing and I liked the feeling of knowing that I really did weight less. 

#4) “Build in Accountability”.

Accountability is essential for progress, it helps you not only track your success, but also can be used as a motivational tool to help you spring forward.  The “10 Tips for Losing 100 Pounds” article states that including an accountability component in your weight loss plan.  Things like working with a partner or friend, showing up at a meeting every week, or scheduling a follow-up appointment with your doctor can be beneficial if you use them as progress marks.  The problem, though, is that most people see these kinds of goals as simply things that they “should” accomplish, not necessarily believing that they really “can” or “will” accomplish them.  And they’re usually not motivating, either.  What’s the reward when you reach one of these markers?  How do you build momentum to continue moving forward?  How do you celebrate your success so that it makes you want to continue working toward your goal?  Because things like weekly meetings made me feel uncomfortable, intimidated and miserable, they never worked for me.  Also, I found my friends and family to be highly unreliable.  Every time I’d tried working out with a buddy in the past, instead of motivating each other over the long term, we held our team enthusiasm for awhile, but quickly would become each other’s enablers as we slacked off and decided to have lunch together instead of work out.

I can’t stress this enough – if you’ve been using food as a source of comfort and satisfaction in the past (and we ALL do this to some degree), but if you’ve been doing it in an addictive way, then you will probably continue to do so on some level.  The key here is that you need to be able to control your decisions, increase your awareness of your behaviors, and also include some foods in your program that can be used to fulfill this need for comfort and satisfaction.  The secret is that you can actually meet these needs with foods that both taste good and are actually really good for you! I bet no diet program out there would encourage that kind of behavior, but that’s part of the problem with our diet plans.  Eating food can’t be only about nutritional value, it has to taste good, too!!  It’s so simple, but a brilliant revelation for me – I can have both.   Nutrition and taste – both important qualities, and, in fact, these are the main criteria I use to choose most of the food I eat to maintain my health. 

The specifics of what I’m going to eat and what kinds of activities I’m going to do will be revealed in time:  What enjoyable options do I have today to meet my basic criteria?  (As stated above: eat more good, eat less bad, exercise more, and be happy about it.)  I was more successful at planning my “program” on a day-to-day basis because I really felt like taking the time to cook and plan meals and go to the gym for workouts actually created more work and made the whole process a huge annoying chore…the opposite of productive.  The other problem with these diet plans is that they’re temporary.  They’re not the “lifestyle change” (yeah, I know that’s an annoying phrase) that’s going to be required if you’re going to lose 100 pounds, they’re just a temporary adjustment.  If you’re going to follow a diet plan, make sure it’s one you can live with for a long time – make sure you’re eating foods that are not only good for your body, but that are good for your soul, too. 

 If you’re the kind of person who likes a lot of structure your life and you enjoy planning out every detail of what you’re eating and where you’re going, then it might be beneficial for you to have a very specific program that tells you the kind of workouts and foods that you’re going to be using.  For me, however, I found that these heavily detail-oriented programs actually caused me to feel more stressed out and anxious instead of excited about the results I was achieving.  It was more work for me to complete, work I did not enjoy, and I didn’t get results by following that kind of program because it became boring and tedious very quickly.