Last week I alluded to how your thought habits heavily influence your weight. If you didn’t catch it – check it out here.
The more often you have the same thought, the easier it is to keep having that same thought. It becomes a familiar and well-trodden path.
The thought becomes your default setting, it becomes your automatic thinking, e.g. “I’m fat”, “I miserable”, “I’ll never lose weight”.
These are all focusing your energy towards what you don’t want. But equally, saying something like “I want to be slim”, while at the same time feeling frustrated about where you are now, gets the same result – more of the same.
Repetitive thoughts, i.e. thought habits, show up in your life.
Changing Your Thought Habits to Get Slim
You’ve got to decide what you want to be able to change your current thought habits. Because then you can focus on that, instead of where you are right now with your weight. It’s a bit like knowing you’re going on holiday, and looking forward to that, even though you might be sat at work right now.
A client of mine decided she wanted to lose enough weight to enable her to get back to skiing, and really enjoy a skiing holiday again. She hadn’t done this for years, having lost her fitness and put on tons of weight.
She’d been overweight for years, with thought habits like “I’ll never be slim, I’m fat, I feel awful…”, and so it went on. Practically all of her thoughts about herself made her feel sad and negative.
So her first job, BEFORE trying to change her eating and activity habits, was to change her thought habits.
The new thoughts need to focus on where she wants to go – thoughts about enjoying skiing again for example.
Having new and positive thought habits when you’ve had years of thinking really bad stuff about yourself can feel strange, weird and downright wrong to begin with. You try to have them, and the old and familiar ‘fat’ thoughts come in again.
You need to steer your thoughts back on track again. This can feel tough at first, like trying to steer a shopping trolley that has wonky wheels.
With the wonky shopping trolley, you know you want to get around the supermarket to the checkout, and get your stuff in the car. Because you know what you want, you keep it on track and do it.
It’s the same principle when you’re cultivating new thoughts (and you’re doing this because you want new results). However, unlike the wonky shopping trolley, having new thoughts gets easier the more you do it.
After a short while of keeping the ‘shopping trolley’ (your thoughts) in line, you make a new path in your mind.
Meanwhile the old path (the ‘I’m fat thoughts’), gets overgrown through lack of use.
Different thoughts create different feelings.
Different feelings about yourself create different results.
This week’s take home message is to decide what you want and think that about that instead.
Have a wonderful week.
Dr Julie
