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Alternative Health & Healing: Heal Your Heart, Heal Your Life.
The Perfectionist’s Plight
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by Rena Greenberg |
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You are feeling great! You rode your bike for one hour, lifted weights for twenty minutes, and did stretching exercises, too. For breakfast you ate an egg with one piece of toast and half an orange. With a smile, you recall how last night, you rummaged through the cabinets and threw away every last piece of junk food. You’re feeling on top of the world because you just know that this time is going to be different. This time you are going to lose that weight once and for all and get on with your life.
At work, you breeze through the morning feeling very positive. You decide that since you are on such a roll with your weight loss plan, you might as well expedite things and just skip lunch altogether. After all you’re not really feeling hungry and a cup of coffee will give you all the energy you need right now. You decide to do your errands on foot so that you can log in some more miles for today.
When you return from lunch, you’re feeling slightly tired, so you decide to drink a couple of glasses of water and just tackle your work. Now you are at your desk, a project sprawled out before you and you notice that your eyes are glazing over and you are feeling light headed. “Hmmm,” you think to yourself, “I must be hungry.” But unfortunately, not anticipating physical hunger, you have nothing to eat. With a slight hint of desperation, you visit the coffee station and fill up your mug. On the way back to your desk, your co-worker, Sue, informs you that her daughter baked some cookies today. “Would you like one?” she inquires with a smile, as she thrusts a plate of hot, fresh cookies towards you, a strong whiff of the irresistible aroma of baked treats filling your senses.
There you stand, with a fixed smile frozen on your face as you struggle to cope with the onslaught of inner voices vying for your attention. “Don’t even think about it! After all the hard work, the sweat, the exercise, getting up early, don’t you dare even consider eating one of those fattening cookies!” “For Goodness Sake, Lauren, you are starving. Look at you! You are practically shaking from the caffeine. You NEED a cookie.” “One won’t hurt you.” “You’ll just exercise more later or tomorrow.” “You already lost five pounds, so in the worst case, you’ll gain back one. Big deal!” “You only live once.” Then the offense pipes in again, full force: “That’s a bunch of crap. You are so weak. There you go again doing the same thing you always do – caving in. I give up. I’m not even going to exercise anymore. Just stay fat. I don’t care.”
Exhausted, you look up to see Sue still smiling at you, her plate of hot cookies extended towards you. She looks at you eagerly, as she patiently waits for you to receive her friendship offering. With a forced smile and a thank you, you see yourself lifting the cookie off the plate. You quickly turn and head back to your office. Ravenously you devour the cookie. One hour later you find yourself at the candy machine, feeding it quarters and in exchange retrieving your favorite chocolate bar, which you rationalize is the only way that you can console yourself for “blowing” your diet again. With shame and disgust, you wonder, “Where did I go wrong? Am I just destined to be fat?”
The answer is an absolute NO. What could you have done differently to increase your chance of success? First of all realize, that you did not gain the weight overnight. Therefore, it is completely unrealistic to think that you can lose the weight, and keep it off, in just a matter of days. There is no single action you could possibly take that will make a substantial difference in the status of your long-term weight. Your expectation of perfection is just a ploy by your critical mind designed to perpetuate a sense of failure. Once you understand this important fact, it’s easier to recognize that it’s the actions you take on a consistent basis—the habits that you create for yourself—that will determine your weight and health, long-term.
Knowing that perfectionism is impossible, you can make a decision to increase the likelihood that your commitment to lose weight and keep it off will soon become your new reality. Begin to notice the habits of your thin friends. As you take on the exploration of how to navigate in the world while maintaining your ideal weight, you may notice the following behaviors as absolute pre-requisites for success.
Plan Ahead
You must assume that you are likely to get physically hungry several times throughout every single day. Plan your day so that you have healthy, balanced food choices available to you at those times. You may want to bring along a tuna fish sandwich on whole grain bread with romaine lettuce and fresh sprouts and tomato, in a cooler bag, as you head out to face your day. Be creative and open to new ideas. When traveling to your destination by car, it’s easy to take along a larger cooler bag. I love to pack a big plastic container filled with Spring Mix Salad lightly tossed with a home-made olive oil dressing. Broiled chicken, crumpled goat cheese and roasted pecans bring a perfect balance of protein and good taste to the salad, turning it into a scrumptious meal. Even a slice of wrapped cheddar cheese and some sticks of lettuce and carrots is a wonderful snack to bring along for those moments when you feel overcome by physical hunger. It would have been a lot easier to forego Sue’s chocolate chip cookie and the candy bar one hour later, if you knew you had some form of nourishment to sustain you during those challenging hours. Remember that much of what you consider to be mental weakness, is simply a physical need to eat and not being prepared to fill that physical need, which causes an internal panic.
Start your exercise plan gradually and build up from there.
Be realistic. If you are like most people who have struggled with weight, you know how tempting it is to push yourself physically every time you make up your mind that you want to lose weight. The downside of this over exertion is the predictable outcome that you will give up entirely – deciding that it’s just too hard. Exercise shouldn’t be work. It should be fun. Most people who live their lives at their ideal weight are in touch with the natural joy of moving their body. Observe a child. See how it loves to run and play, kick a ball, race across a field or jump to catch a Frisbee. There is an innate sense of happiness which comes from movement—especially when the only motivation to move is to express yourself and engage your life force. As soon as you put a goal on that—I have to lose 20 lbs. by next Tuesday—the feeling of freedom your soul longs for, is deadened. Now it becomes a dreaded chore. Just one more thing you have to do, and worse, one more thing you may fail at.
If you are just moving your body for the sake of it, there can be no failure. What a relief! Now you may be thinking, “If I don’t set the bar high and make my goal a difficult one, I’ll never move enough to make a difference in my weight.” It’s true that motivation is everything. But why not motivate yourself by telling yourself the truth? The truth is that the ONLY way to have long term success is to begin to love exercise and look forward to it so that you don’t want to go to sleep at night unless you have done some kind of physical activity. You have to find something that you feel passionate about whether it’s competing in a sport, roller-blading, walking, jumping on a trampoline or swimming. It’s the inner image you have of yourself engaging in the activity of your choice, listening to the music of your choice, and LOVING it that will compel you to make exercise a daily part of your life. And this is the only way that physical exercise can have an impact on your weight. Create a positive habit.
Eat when you are hungry and eat enough food!
The single greatest mistake dieters make is that they diet at all! Most people who are thin don’t diet. Who wants to be deprived or denied of their favorite foods? No one! We all want to be happy and dieting doesn’t make us happy—rather it makes most people feel bad. “Wait a second,” You say to me, “If I don’t diet, I’ll just constantly pig out on bad foods that make me fat.” Well, you are right. You obviously can’t continue to eat an unlimited amount of fried, greasy, rich sugary food if you want to live life at your ideal weight. The solution is in your thinking. You can still select all the healthy, water rich, unprocessed food that your body craves, balanced with whole grains, healthy fat and enough protein. You can certainly avoid processed, empty-calorie, chemical filled foods. The difference is in your mind-set. Are you on a diet or are you simply making a shift in your life by making a decision to honor your body and care for it and fill it with those foods that will make it run and serve you at an optimal level? The truth is most people who are thin actually prefer to eat those foods that are going to nourish them. Sure they may enjoy an occasional treat, but it’s always balanced by healthier foods and a regular, sustained exercise regime.
By planning ahead, finding movement that you love and making it part of your life while eating enough healthy and tasty food to sustain you, you will find that your weight will naturally begin to come off. The greatest side benefit is inner peace . . . no more struggle and freedom from the perfectionist’s plight. |
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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. Master's Degree in Spiritual Ministry and Sufi Studies from the University of Spiritual Healing and Sufism.
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
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