How To Think Yourself Lean, Fit and Trim
Why your perfect weight begins in your mind . . and what to do from there to achieve your goal!
You want to lose weight, feel leaner, more fit and trim. For millions of people, dieting itself is a chronic problem.
Most folks are habitual dieters, all too often without lasting effects. After decades of diet fads, obesity remains perhaps one of the most serious health problems. Obviously, few people know the true secrets of weight control.
Overweight, we feel bad about ourselves – we have a problem we cannot hide. Everyone notices the overweight person. We fear that being overweight makes us less popular, limits our love life, even threatens career advancement. We might fear that others avoid us, talk about us behind our backs.
What can we do?
Overweight people have generally tried diet after diet, often with the same result – temporary weight loss perhaps, but rarely is permanent change effected. The diet ends, and you find yourself returning to your old weight, perhaps even gaining weight. The cycle seems uncontrollable. You feel overweight, you diet and fail, you fall back into old habit and eat to feel better. What is the result? You end up heavier than ever and feel even worse about yourself. The dieting cycle ends in feeling even more depressed and helpless. You begin to imagine that you will never be lean, fit or trim, no matter what you do. Don’t give up. You too can master the secrets of being lean, fit and trim.
Weight Loss Begins in the Mind...
The mind, not the stomach, is the part of the body that most
controls our weight. To become lean, fit and trim, you must learn how to think lean fit and trim.
What you cannot imagine, you cannot become.
First, you must focus your mind on an image of yourself as lean, fit and trim. What would your body type look like? How do you see yourself feeling? What type of life style do you imagine for yourself?
In answering these questions, it is important that you create a realistic and achievable image of yourself. If you have never been an athlete, don’t imagine that you are going to qualify for the Olympic Team in the next trials, or win an international contest in bodysculpting. If you view absolute beauty as being 6 feet tall and, as an adult, you have grown to 5 feet, 8 inches, your mental image of perfection needs adjustment! Go for a more realistic image.
See yourself in the next stage of advancement, aiming for something you believe you can accomplish.
Improvement is an incremental process. Who knows? You might qualify for the Olympic team, but right now you must begin by visualizing yourself walking a mile every day if you do not now walk every day. If a mile is too much, imagine yourself starting by walking a block or a few blocks. The important point is to imagine yourself improving. You can become the self you want to be, but results will be achieved in steps, incrementally, not in one instant, overnight.To set the mental image of your goal more firmly in your mind, you might find a photograph of a person whose body shape you admire – a body shape your realistically believe you could achieve. Put the picture where you can see it every day. Remind yourself that you, too, can experience the physical results you are now only magining. The subconscious mind is extremely powerful, receptive to suggestion. The more clearly you can visualize the lean, fit and trim self you want to be, the more easily the subconscious mind will guide you along the path to that achievement. The process of becoming lean, fit and trim begins with thinking – you must learn how to think of yourself as lean, fit and trim.
Start With Realistic Goals
Perhaps you cannot do 10 push-ups …maybe you can’t even do one. It doesn’t matter. The key is to begin. If you can start with one push-up, do one push-up. Tomorrow, see if you can do two. Increase the number of push-ups you do incrementally, adding repetitions as you gain strength and tone muscles. Setting out for your first walk with a 10-mile goal may be unrealistic if you are not in the habit of walking. See how far you can reasonably get without over-exerting yourself, then set a goal to increase that distance a little bit every day. If you can only walk for 10 minutes comfortably, fine. See if tomorrow you can walk for 11 minutes or make it another two blocks before turning around. With persistence and determination, your strength will grow and you will surprise yourself at how you improve.
To begin any conditioning program, you must begin exercising. Your first goal is to set a benchmark. “How much can I do today?” is the first question. With that benchmark firmly established, now set a goal to increase the goal reasonably, step by step. Then DO IT!
The same technique applies to setting your weight reduction goals. Perhaps you need to lose 50 pounds. Don’t start by making your initial goal to lose 50 pounds in two weeks. If you do so, you may come to the end of two weeks and will likely find that you only lost 5 or 7 pounds at most. This is a safe zone for your body and is acceptable – anything beyond that is a medical hazard to your body.
If you only lose 5 pounds, you’ll feel inclined to declare If you only lose 5 pounds, you’ll feel inclined to declare your effort a failure (when, instead, you’ve done exceedingly well!). But, you didn’t meet your unrealistic goal, and that’s when most people throw in the towel. If you set the initial goal, however, at losing 5 pounds then, after the same two-week effort, you would be able to declare a victory. At that point, set a goal to lose another 4 pounds in two weeks. Set achievable goals with the intent to declare multiple repeat victories. Meeting goals will make you feel good about yourself and about the effort you have undertaken. Building a positive attitude through the achievement of reasonable goals is a sure path to success.
Our Mind is the Body’s Weight Thermometer
The body maintains a relatively stable weight dayto-day. The typical person will find their weight fluctuating within a 5-8 pound range, always centering back to a standard you come to think of as your “current weight.”
The mind functions as a “weight meter,” adjusting out appetite to take in more food when we drop below a ‘set level,” reducing our appetite when we exceed that “set level.” The entire process operates subconsciously,regulating our weight within a fairly narrow range.
We consciously
regulate the ‘set point” by our pattern of eating. By eating excessively every day, either in quantity or type of food we eat, we are taking the necessary steps to adjust our “set point” higher. As a result, the body begins a “catch up” process, maintaining excess fat at a particular level consistent with the way our body is processing and storing the food we consume.So, too, if we eat minimally every day, we are taking the necessary steps to adjust our “set point” low. As a result, the body will eliminate excess fat, possibly too much so, with the result that we could generate what are commonly considered eating disorders such as bulimia or anorexia.
To change our weight level, we must make conscious efforts to change where our ‘set point” is. A carefully designed regimen of eating less, or eating foods that are less likely to produce excess fat, we are communicating to our bodies to lower the “set point” to adjust our average weight downward.
A key breakthrough is to realize that controlling our weight is within our conscious decision-making ability.
Looked at simply, we cannot consistently maintain that we want to weigh less while we are eating chocolate candies, ice cream treats and other desserts in large quantities. “Give me a second helping” is a communication heard not only by your dinner companions but by your subconscious mind as well. Knowing that eating more is how you want to proceed, your subconscious mind will adjust upward to your ‘set point” and, as a consequence, your weight will follow.
One caution is important here. You should not assume that your “ideal weight” is to be as thin as a fashion model or as trim as an athlete. Medical research has shown that body types are genetically determined. Event the “average weights” specified in medical weight charts reflect broad statistical models of the population as a whole. Your particular ideal weight is something you need to determine with regard to your body type and family history. Consultation with your doctor to determine the proper mental image for your particular body is well advised before you determine to set out on a regimen to alter your weight and muscular tone.
Starvation Diets Don’t Work
You can’t lose weight by starving yourself. “Weight gain requires eating, so why not just eat less?” you may argue. This, of course, makes perfect sense on paper, but people tend to mess with the same concept in reality. The problem is that drastic reductions in eating throw the body into crisis. Trying to “reset” the body’s current weight equilibrium level by dramatic reduction in eating merely suggests to the body that it is being starved. Subconsciously, the body goes into panic.
As soon as we allow ourselves to eat again, the likelihood is that we will enter an eating binge. Even if the dieting
does produce a weight loss, the eating binge may end up in a net weight gain. Dieting all too often is produced by overeating, which produces an even more intense need to diet; all of which invites a self-defeating dynamic. A downward spiral sets in. The habitual dieter rarely breaks the downward cycle. Rapid crash diets are not diets that anyone can follow consistently.Exercise Alone Doesn’t Work
Exercise is the other pole of the intuitive solution. An overweight person probably correctly perceives the need for greater physical activity. The problem occurs when the person enters into an intensive physical conditioning program determined that exercise alone will solve the problem. Trying to “reset” the body’s current weight equilibrium by strenuous exercise just suggests to the body that it is going to be worked to death. It again enters a panic. The exercise makes us feel even hungrier and the body hastily stores up on energy just in case we decide to continue exercising intensively.
If you suddenly begin exercising strenuously, you can easily find yourself returning to the previous pattern of eating, inviting a weight gain. If the exercise does make you hungrier and your eating actually increases, you may find yourself actually gaining weight.
“Eat less and exercise more” is a facile formula that we have all heard since childhood. Yet, when it comes to becoming lean, fit and trim, few of us employ BOTH tactics simultaneously. Most of us will gravitate to one solution or the other, hoping for a panacea. Most will fail. In the millions of pages that have been written about weight control and conditioning in the last few years, no one has improved on this “tried and true” formula.
Gradual changes to a more healthy diet accompanied by gradual increase in a sane program of exercise offer the best prospect of becoming lean, fit and trim – and remaining so over the long term.
Choose a Diet and Exercise Program That Appeals to You
Truly becoming leaner, more fit and trim will most likely require you to examine both what you want and how much you exercise. Only dieting or only exercising are a lot less effective approaches than a combination of eating control and proper exercise. A reasonable program of exercise and diet control entered consciously by setting achievable goals has a chance of long-term success. The mind can set the weight “set point” at a new level without subconscious panic and you will begin to see gradual progress that you can mark by setting yet new goals to achieve.
Which
particular diet and exercise program you choose is less important than that you choose a program that is comfortable to you. The program should make sense to you, presenting itself as a set of activities you believe you can undertake and even enjoy undertaking. Since you are resolving to follow the diet and exercise program today and every day for the foreseeable future, be sure the program is one you like. If it requires an eating program you find distasteful or too controlling, your chances of success are dramatically reduced. If the exercises required by the program are exercises you have never successfully done, don’t believe you will enjoy trying them once again! Every gym has its clientele who show up, newly equipped for exercise and dressed in the latest gear, yet clearly out of place. Those who look like they haven’t seen the inside of a gym since grade school are unlikely in middle age to make the gym their new home. If walking is the only exercise you are comfortable doing, pursue walking.The same goes for dieting. If you have never lived on a carbohydrates-only diet, a carbo-intensive diet is not likely to succeed. If you have always eaten a protein-heavy diet rich in meat, a vegetarian approach is not likely to hold your interest for long. The diet has to look intuitively to you as one you can eat and MAINTAIN. Both exercise and dieting begin in the mind, remember. If your first reaction is skepticism or repulsion, keep looking for a different program.
Resources on dieting and exercise are abundant. Every bookstore of any size in America will most likely have sections full of books on both topics. Each topic frequents bestsellers on a regular basis. Libraries are well stocked with ample books on diet and exercise, and physicians are especially well prepared to give expert advice after a physical examination.
Before you decide on the approach you want to take, give yourself time to survey the many available options. Trust your instincts. If a particular program makes sense to you, look further into it. The program that feels right for you – is!
Hypnosis Can Help
Hypnosis can assist you in creating and maintiaining these changes effectively. Hypnosis will help you to change that internal diaglogue, the past programming that you may be fighting with to achieve your goals, your desires. Give yourself the gift of change, call Academy of NLP & Hypnosis and create the Lean, Fit, & Healthy you. You deserve it! Invest in yourself today and live your dreams...
Your dreams will be your Reality!