In the ultimate battle of the bulge lies the ultimate roadblock your mind. How you think about weight loss is as important, if not more, than eating healthy, exercising and counting those calories. Unless there’s a medical reason for it, weight loss rarely happens by accident it’s a strategy, a deliberate set of actions designed to attain a particular goal. And every goal starts in your mind. Based on my work with thousands of clients, here are two of the biggest mind blocks that come between you and a thinner you.
THE THIN MINDSET
Don’t get me wrong: I am not talking about wanting to be thin; that’s a separate conversation entirely.When I refer to The Thin Mindset, I am simply talking of how people track their weight loss progress.I’ll tell you what I mean: Kartik was a 34-year-old banker, who had lost 16 kilos but had a goal of losing 20. Despite following my programme, he had reached -as weight loss sometimes does -a plateau; and the weighing scale was taking a bit of time to dip further. He came in one afternoon saying, “I am doing everything right but I’ve lost just a kilo this entire month. I still have three to go.“ Now, here’s someone who lost a whopping 16 kilos but because of his `Thin Mindset’, instead of focusing on how far he’d come, he was obsessed with how far he had to go. When you have a Thin Mindset, you tend to compare your progress against the end goal. So if you have 30 kilos to lose, and you lose 5, you don’t think `I am five kilos thinner’, you think, I have 25 kilos to go, and it’s a long way.
There’s a tendency to measure your progress against the end result (which is imaginary) instead of the current result (which is real). Celebrate every single bit of weight you lose. Instead of focusing on being thin, celebrate being thinner than you were a few weeks before. Replace the Thin Mindset with the Thinner Mindset and make that your focus when you are trying to shed those kilos. Because no matter how you look at it, losing is losing.
THE ALL OR NOTHING MINDSET
It usually starts with a muffin. Or a few peanuts. And suddenly, 30 minutes later, you have scarfed down a bar of chocolate, a bag of chips and a thick chocolate milk shake. And you don’t even know how it happened. The `All or Nothing’ mindset is the feeling that since the diet has been `broken’, you may as well give up for the day, start again tomorrow, and eat everything in your path right now because `it doesn’t count’. Well, it does. Every little thing you eat counts.
Let’s look at it this way. You have a set of six beautiful tea cups. You broke one by accident. What do you do?
Do you break the other five be cause you have broken one? No, right? The `All or Nothing’ mindset is like shattering all six cups because you broke one.
Instead, salvage the damage.
There’s no need to pile on 2,000 extra calories because you’ve slipped. Slipping is human and no one is perfect. Accept your little imperfections, and learn to move on from them.
It’s one of the best things you could do for yourself and your body.
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