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Alternative Health & Healing: Lose Weight Permanently: Stop the Endless Cycle of Dieting
Get Off The Roller Coaster
and Step Into Success!
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by Rena Greenberg |
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Do you find yourself sticking to your diet one day, “being good,” eating all the right foods, certain that slenderness is your destiny, only to find yourself ravenously devouring a box of cookies the next? Has the continuous roller coaster of weight loss, followed by gain, taken over your life? If the answer is yes, the great news is that there is an end to this madness in sight. The key is for you to know that the control switch for this crazy ride is in your hands. You only need to discover how to operate it.
Your desire to be thin, healthy and at your optimum weight is very positive. The reason why success has eluded you up until this point, however, is because of the distorted assumptions that are fueling your weight loss actions. Ask yourself the following questions?
1. Do I need to do things perfectly, or not at all?
2. Does my weight loss have to be quick?
3. Am I planning to go back to all my “favorite foods” after I get this bothersome weight off?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions, it’s important to understand that failure is inevitable as long as you hold on to these beliefs. Why? Because you are coming from a place of being disempowered. The great news is that you can absolutely update old, stale, unproductive belief systems and change them into thought patterns that will insure your success. To begin, it’s essential that you discover for yourself that the above mental decisions are not only counterproductive to your ultimate success, but are based on false information. What’s more is they keep you feeling bad about yourself. As long as you are feeling weak or desperate, it will be next to impossible for you to summon up the strength and follow-through necessary for your long-term success.
So how can you change those self-sabotaging beliefs? To begin with, you can take a look at them and ask yourself if they are true. Compare your decisions in the area of weight loss to your attitude about other areas of your life. For example, if you frequently act on the assumption that you must follow your diet perfectly or else throw it out the window, inquire to yourself whether you hold that same tenet to be true at work, for example, or with your children.
If you do allow yourself room for error in other aspects of your life, take a look at how having a more relaxed attitude actually increases your success and helps you to achieve what is most important to you. Now, open to the possibility that you can adopt this same attitude in the area of weight loss and feel the freedom this shift in expectation would offer you.
Perhaps upon reflection, you realize that you actually do expect perfection of yourself, across the board. This understanding can help you to gain valuable insight into a part of you that is unnecessarily hard on yourself. If you find that you do hold perfectionism to be a very strong value in all areas of your life, take a moment to reflect upon how your quality of life could be improved, if you released your demand that you and others be perfect. Without judgment, notice the impact this irrational demand has on you and possibly even your loved ones.
Dropping perfectionism means accepting that backslides are inevitable and knowing that the value of our mistakes comes to us based on what we decide to do when we discover that we “messed up.” It is our very human nature that causes us to make mistakes. The trick is that when you notice a “mistake,” you don’t have to stay in the mistake, beat yourself up for it or cover it up and pretend it didn’t happen. Instead, you can simply notice that you made a mistake, see what you can learn from it, and make a new choice in the next moment. This is true in all areas in your life, and especially with weight loss.
Learn to take your mistakes in stride. Do what you can to gain insight into what happened and why, and make every effort to avoid the same set of circumstances in the future. For example, if you went through your whole day eating like a bird, and then came home and ordered a pizza and devoured it, see what you can learn to prevent this from happening again. Rather than berate yourself for your lack of discipline, willpower or intelligence, take a look at what happened. Be compassionate with yourself as you recognize that, yes, you made a poor choice, and you are going to use this event to learn from. The lesson may or may not seem obvious. You may have a lot of excuses to explain what happened. Just keep asking yourself, “Is this stance useful in helping me to achieve my goal, or will it hold me back? Will it keep me on the roller-coaster of endless dieting, or does it give me an opportunity to get off?”
Avoid the temptation to swing between two ineffective ends of a pendulum. For example, on the one hand, you may want to convince yourself how hopeless you are and how you’ll never lose weight so you might as well not even try, and beat yourself up for engaging in the behavior that you did, or on the other hand you may find yourself inclined to minimize what happened. “Oh well,” you may tell yourself, “I really don’t want to lose weight anyway. It could have been worse.”
Either stance is unlikely to get you closer to your goal. Instead, ask yourself, “What can I learn from this? How can I avoid eating large amounts of food that isn’t best for me in the future? How did it happen that I let myself get so hungry that I snapped out of control?” Sit for a moment and take the time to gain valuable insight. You may see that it would be helpful for you to start bringing food to work with you, because your day often gets so hectic, you don’t have a chance to eat enough of the proper foods to sustain yourself. Or, it may become clear to you that you need to eat a small snack at 3pm, and that it would be preferable to have a small block of cheese with an apple or a cracker, for example, than to eat an entire pizza pie a few hours later because you were being “good” and decided to forego the “fattening” piece of cheese. Wisdom means gleaning valuable information from all our experiences. When we blow up the occurrences, or minimize them, we miss the golden opportunity to gain insight and make the necessary adjustments to our lifestyle.
How would it feel for you to approach your weight-loss goal as the most precious gift that you are giving yourself? Holding onto irrational beliefs that weight-loss has to be quick, or else it’s not worth the effort, or that when the horrible ordeal of “dieting” is over, you can go back to eating in your normal way, is completely counterproductive. Instead, realize that what may have seemed like a “normal” way of eating, in the past, may actually have been causing you a great deal of suffering—physically, mentally and emotionally—and improving your eating habits and changing your taste for food, is an exciting, positive step for you to take towards living a much more fulfilling life. Get excited about what you are doing for yourself. Begin to look forward to the reward of fitting into your clothes comfortably, being proud of and happy with your body, feeling confident, and looking and feeling your best. Imagine the freedom you will experience in your life when you gain mastery over the types of foods you will allow into your system. Feel how good that feels and make that your goal. Look forward to a new way of life that is in alignment with your highest aspirations for your life.
As long as you keep going in the right direction, self-correcting when you make a “mistake,” you are moving towards your goal. Be willing for it to take as long as it takes. How long would you give your baby to learn to walk? Or, to feed itself? The answer, undoubtedly, is as long as it takes. Give yourself the same gift of time. For permanent results, a pound a week is an excellent goal, understanding that your exact amount of weight loss will fluctuate. Some months you will lose more, and other times you will hit a plateau. The yo-yo dieting only keeps you further from achieving what you truly desire for yourself. You have the power within you to stop the scary ride—climb down off that roller-coaster to no-where—and begin heading towards your true destination: health, happiness and control over your life and your eating habits permanently.
Read an excerpt of Rena's new book:
The Right Weigh: Six Steps to Permanent Weight Loss
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Rena Greenberg,
Author, Practitioner of Neuro Linguistic Programming, & Hypnotherapist
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Rena Greenberg is the Founder and Director of Wellness Seminars, Inc, which provides weight loss programs for over100 major corporations and city governments, including over 75 Florida and Michigan hospitals.
She is a graduate of City University of New York at Brooklyn College. Rena Greenberg’s wellness programs have been featured in many television and radio news features.
Ms. Greenberg holds two certifications in hypnosis from The Eastern NLP Institute and the National Guild of Hypnotists, as well as national biofeedback certification from the Biofeedback Certification Institute of America. She is also a certified Practitioner of Neuro Linguistic Programming and an ordained Minister.
Rena Greenberg is the author of The Right Weigh: Six Steps to Permanent Weight Loss used by over 100,000 People (Hay House, January 2006).
Email:
wellnessseminars@aol.
com
Web:
www.easywillpower.com
Read an excerpt
of Rena's new book:
The Right Weigh: Six Steps to Permanent Weight Loss
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You'll find it in
The
Directory! |
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