You’ve tried everything. Eating less. Exercising more. Replacing your favorite ice cream with frozen yogurt. Yet still those stubborn pounds just won’t go away.
It might surprise you to know that the root of your weight loss challenges isn’t all about calorie intake. In fact, it’s all in your mind. Your mind is a complex machine which orchestrates just about everything you do or don’t do. It has the power to make you lose weight, and it has the power to sabotage your weight loss goals. That’s why even the best weight-loss plans out there are worthless if you don’t have healthy habits of the mind as well as of the body.
Here are some techniques to get you started on harnessing the power of your mind for weight loss.
Mental Imagery
In 2018, a doctor named Linda Solberg conducted a study researching the effects on weight loss of a technique called Mental Imagery. The results of the study were telling, even somewhat shocking. It turned out that participants who utilized the Mental Imagery technique lost five times more weight than those who didn’t.
So how does it work?
Basically, you just have to create a vivid mental image in your mind of what your life will be like after you’ve lost the desired weight. How will you feel? What kinds of things will you be able to do that you can’t do now? Will you be able to wear that dress you haven’t worn in years?
One of the best things about this technique is that it doesn’t require any restrictive dieting. It’s simply a change in your mindset that leaves you free to make your own choices about what you eat and how much you exercise.
Tapping
Also known as the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), this allows you to absorb affirmations to counteract the patterns and beliefs contributing to your weight gain. Simply tap on specific acupressure points as you repeat a limiting belief about yourself (i.e., “I have no self-control”), and then following up with an affirmation about yourself (“I love and accept myself, no matter what my weight is.”). This action releases old emotional habits that are not serving you and also reduces the level of stress hormones in your body.
In this way, you can begin to heal from the trauma or negative emotions which led to the weight gain in the first place.
Change the Script
The process of losing weight begins with the way you talk to yourself. Spend time talking with others who have succeeded in attaining their weight loss goals. (Your Optavia Health Coach is a great resource for this.) Find out how they changed the script in their minds to boost self-care, and by extension, healthy weigh loss. Then pay attention to your own thoughts, attitudes and inner beliefs. How can you change these so that they help rather than hinder your weight loss goals?
These healthy habits of mind, along with the help of your Health Coach, will get you on the track to a healthy, happy weight loss program that makes you feel like a success, not a failure.
