Weight Loss Mind Changing Techniques

.... “The only failure is the failure to participate”

Dieter L. Editor

Author of It happened in the seventies

Part 8 - Mind changing techniques

Mind changing techniques come in all forms and shapes. The best technique is always to gain awareness, and because of the new found awareness you will gain understanding. Once you truly understand something, you will act on your understanding, that by the way is called wisdom.

With other words we all have to wise up to our self :-)

Embarking on a new journey, like a weightless journey, efforts a lot of awareness.

Feeling that you may fail, is certainly not the right type of awareness nor understanding and certainly no wisdom.
Please be aware, that you can’t fail, because there is no failure!
Put this next statement on your fridge door:

“The only failure is the failure to participate”

Therefore as long as you will participate, you can’t fail!
This is an important piece of information; it brings awareness; and it may change your attitude to your weight loss journey.

This new found awareness should eliminate the fear for failure, and the fear, which may set in, if for whatever reason you have broken your diet for a few days. Whereas, in the past, you may have stopped altogether, now you just keep participating and learning from your mistakes. Yes, I just have included a new word, and concept, which is “mistake”.

Straying away from your diet or making a wrong judgement call, or anything else for this matter is just a mistake, nothing else.
We all make mistakes!

Without mistakes, there is no learning.

It is only when you have made a mistake, that you noticed, that’s not much good; it was a mistake; I better correct that.

If you make a mistake ONCE, it is just a learning mistake - learn and correct.
If you make the same mistake TWICE, it is a reminder for you to wake up! It is a pat on your shoulder, please take notice, there is something to fix, something to correct, don't make the same mistake again.
If you make the same mistake THREE TIMES (wow, you better wake up)
is called a default response. (You a stuck in a deep groove)
You are not learning, you are not listening, you refuse to feel the pats on your shoulder and you are waiting for the "Mack truck" to hit you.
The Mack truck, in this instance is diabetics, heart failure, high blood pressure or other health problems. Certainly nothing you would like to experience. We have talked about aversion therapy before; be adverse to that mistake sequence.
Solution: Correct before you have to correct.

Weight loss journal introduction

To keep track of your awareness, as well as your progress and possible mistakes and learning experiences, please start a Weight loss journal today!

Buy yourself a nice Journal type book, personalise it, add pictures, maybe a poem, and other inspiring words, thoughts or philosophies. On the first page, definitely write; “The only failure is the failure to participate”.

Write down your ultimate Goal, and I don’t mean just losing a few pounds or kilos.

Write down what you gain by losing weight first. The gain could be to run a marathon, or just getting up the stairs without catching your breath. With other words, write down what pulls you.

After that, fix a sensible weight loss goal. Right next to the amount of kilos you want to lose, write down your baby steps.

I suggest you go in steps of 6 kg to lose, and give yourself a reasonable time, say 2 month. This technique is sometimes be presented as; “How do you eat an elephant trunk, chunk by chunk”.

I am sure that is easy to remember, it is always wise to divide a goal in smaller achievable steps. Smaller steps are easier to walk, easier to monitor, and in case of something is not working out as anticipated, smaller steps are easier to correct.

With other words, you can’t go wrong with smaller steps.

With smaller steps you also can enjoy the journey, without getting overwhelmed.

After each smaller goal is achieved, reward yourself, no …. not with food, with something we talked about it before, something you would like for yourself, spoil yourself, you have earned it, and get your support team to spoil you too.

Who is your support team? Obviously I am not sure, but you do need one. A partner, children, relatives, friends, work mates, sport mates, recreational activity mates … anyone…
… and promise me, do stay away from people who try to pull you down.

Now to keep your goal in mind, I will explain visualisation techniques. I will explain more techniques as we go along, or when ever appropriate.
Our mind is a bit like a computer, it needs programming to work efficiently. Lets do some programming now.

First you need to know, that you have been programmed all your life, your hard drive if full of programmes, or as mentioned before, we all have been conditioned to put it politely, another way of putting it, we all have been sucked in. We seem to believe that we actually can’t do without sugar or pizza or soft drinks, etc; obviously, once you really think about it, this is not true, it’s all conditioning or programming.

If in the past, you thought learning something new is hard, let me tell you, it’s not.

Learning is easy ..... is un-learning what is hard

To go past the knowledge you have already can be very unsettling, some people just can’t do it.

To un-learn means, some of your beliefs, something you trusted may have been out-dated by new knowledge. All of a sudden you don’t know anything anymore, actually to be up-to-date, you would need to re-evaluate everything you know all the times. This may seem over-kill, and it probably is, but it can be an interesting pursuit, the task of always questioning, how do I know that this or that is true, and true for whom?

You may ask yourself, why would food companies produce something if it is bad for us? Which is a good question, with a complex answer. If you ask a representative from a global food company, they would say; “their food items are complying with all food regulation and people should be responsible enough to know how much one could consume of a particular item”.

Now, ask yourself; are you responsible enough to know what, when and how much to eat?

Yes, we all should be, but we are not all acting according to our responsibility, we are acting according to what we like to taste, and to the way we feel, and it’s usually only after we have stuffed our self, that we say, I shouldn’t have eaten that last piece of cream cake.

With other words, our conditionings to food has taken over our responsibility. Addiction, allergies or other chemical brain chemistry, may have taken over as well, which makes it very hard to act responsible.

This is why re-programming, un-learning and learning is so important.

We have learnt already, and we probably know which food is good or bad for us, and the same with our level of physical activity.

Now we need to get rid of former conditioning by programming our mind to accept the new concept between food and life.

We do that with 2 simple visualisation exercises, and here they are:

Imagine food you crave and where you know you shouldn’t have those foods, or if that fails, simply visualize some processed food or drinks you consume.
This exercise can be repeated many times with different food items.
For the sake of keeping it simple, lets say the item you have chosen are those colourful sugary types of donuts.

OK, here we go, close your eyes and visualize a few donuts in front of you. Can you see them …. yes … good, now visualize them on a windscreen of a car, as if the windscreen is a movie screen.
Have you ever seen a windscreen shattering into thousands of pieces, I am sure you know what I mean, that’s what we want to happen in a moment.
Now, visualize you are taking a big hammer, and you smash the donuts which you see on the windscreen, and you see the windscreen with the donuts shatter into thousands of pieces, and whenever there are pieces still appearing showing the donuts, you keep smashing them apart, and you keep smashing till absolutely nothing is appearing anymore.
Great.... now, what just happened?
You just took the edge off your cravings; your subconscious mind will not present you with such strong desires if you see donuts anymore. This even can be intensified if you use all of your sensory channels. So far we have worked with visualizing, but it can be used with emotions, while you doing the smashing, and you can even include hearing the smashing noises while you going through the exercise.
You can use these techniques for most of the foods you like to give up, as long as it is for sake of better health.
The second technique is clear a message letting your subconscious know, that you will be a slimmer person very soon.
Stretch out your left hand, and see yourself as a smaller version, standing on your left palm of your hand the way you look now, but in black and white. Keep that picture in your mind.
Now, stretch out your right hand, and see yourself the way you will look in 1year time, much slimmer of course, but in full colour, and you are looking good, really see this new you, and feel yourself how you would feel in the future,
... and once you feel really good about the new you, bring both hands together, clasp them together and hold for a while, enjoying that new feeling that new you.

Now your subconscious mind will work with you, not trying to sabotage you anymore.

By the way, talking visualisation, if you have a picture hanging on your fridge of a super fat person, take it down, as I mentioned, this kind of aversion is not working, it has the opposite effect, by looking at a fat person you give your subconscious mind the image of what you want to become.

What I want you to do instead is to cut out a picture of a nice person with just the right weight, and cut off the head, and stick yours on instead.

Now you will see what you meant to see, the new you and your subconscious mind will transform to that.

Part 9. Weight loss journal - why writing a journal is therapeutic

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Article by:

Dieter L. Editor of useNature Gold Coast - Brisbane

Disclaimer:
The information provided in this article is intended for general use and for personal interest only. It should not be used or understood as suggestion or medical advice.