Waking up one morning and facing the harsh reality, that at some point in time you lost control of things and are now unhealthy and overweight, is tough to take! Immediately, feelings of frustration, sadness and insecurities can start rushing in. You are not the woman or man you wish to be and you stand there wondering, “how did I get here, OMG, I am fat!” Of course, both your decreased activity level and slowing metabolism contributed to your weight gain, but much of your problem is also behavioral.
Losing track of your health and weight; because you didn’t give it any thought, or it was not a priority, or you didn’t give it the time or attention it needed, and you got caught up in just living life day to day, is very common. It happens in other areas of our lives as well. Have you ever been driving somewhere, begin to daydream, and arrive at your destination not knowing how you got there. It is the same thing, it is just that weight gain takes a longer period of time, we don’t realize that it is happening until the dreaded day that we see the changes in the mirror or on the scale.
Here is how it works when it occurs while we are driving…..
……as your conscious mind is day dreaming or busy thinking about something else, your subconscious mind takes over and starts operating on auto-pilot. In essence, you might think of your sub-conscious mind as a vault filled with tape recordings. Those recordings are your past habits, and certain triggers will play certain recordings.
That is the way we are designed, our conscious mind is left free to imagine, create and problem solve, while the sub-conscious mind plays the appropriate recording for handling the simple tasks of daily living.
That’s why when you are driving and you start to daydream, your recording for driving will start to play. Have you ever arrived home, realized that you hadn’t given driving any thought and wondered how you didn’t crash? Thank your sub-conscious mind for that.
How does this apply to gaining weight? You might think that you are making choices about what you are going to eat every day but, in reality, you don’t. You have learned recordings or habits that actually are directing your choices. As you run through the process of your busy day and realize you need food, your sub-conscious recording for food will start to play. What ever is your learned habit will just be repeated. All of the choices that you make concerning food; from eating something out of convenience, to what you are going to eat, from what places you will entertain to get food from, to how much food you end up eating is all being influenced and directed by your sub-conscious recordings.
Your bad habits are the foundation for failed diets as well as yo-yo weight loss and rebound weight gain.
Your sub-conscious mind is like an auto-pilot. If a plane is headed to a destination and the captain puts the plane on auto-pilot, then we know that the plane will continue to head in that same direction. Even if someone was to turn the plane all the way around and head in the opposite direction, the auto-pilot would eventually get that plane back on the original course, wouldn’t it? If you want the plane to go in a different direction then the only successful way to do that is to turn off the auto-pilot, change the direction or heading, and turn the auto-pilot back on. Now the auto-pilot has a completely new heading and direction it is traveling.
If you are trying to lose weight and you only go on a diet or exercise program, then what you will find is that just like our plane with the auto-pilot engaged, you will always return to your negative habits or sub-conscious patterns. You might be able to circumvent your habits temporarily with your mind and will power but at some point in time you will relax, become distracted or day dream and your original auto-pilot or recording will start playing again. Returning you back to the same old bad eating habits That is why you continually hear about celebrities who lose weight and then gain it back. If you want freedom from the struggles associated with losing weight, then changing your auto-pilot for food, eating and exercise must be apart of your effort.
These tape recordings that make up your auto-pilot for food can include; emotional eating, binge eating, over-eating, unhealthy eating and food addictions. The Weight Loss Success formula involves changing the following; your poor eating habits or sub-conscious tape recordings, and diet and exercise.
About: Michael Mountain is a transformational author on health, weight loss & personal growth and is featured on Amazon.com. He is the author of the Ultimate Fat Loss Solution Diet which is available presently free of charge at http://www.michael-mountain.com/. He is also the author of Mindset for Weight Loss transformational program - a revolutionary step-by-step program designed to provide the “inner-strength strategies” to take any diet and make it effective for permanent weight loss. This program allowed him to end his own personal 20 year struggle with weight and poor health!
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