What does it take to lose weight and finally be happy? To finally be able to enjoy life to the fullest? To wear whatever I want and do whatever I want and go wherever I want, and feel good about it. I want to meet the guy/woman/person of my dreams and have a beautiful life together. I want to feel good in my skin and confident in who I am. Because I can’t possibly do or feel any of those things until I’ve lost the weight. Right? 

Have you ever thought any of those things before? Cause I sure fuckin have. I used to always think that my life couldn’t really begin until I had achieved my goal of weight loss. Because only then would I be happy. Only then would I be deserving of the life that I wanted. Only then would someone love me, and I would be worthy of their love. What I am here to teach you, so that you can learn this and be on your merry way much faster than I was, is that none of those things that you *wish* you could have, have anything to do with your weight. Or with where you’re at in life, physically or circumstantially. 

Your thoughts about why you can’t have or don’t deserve what you want in life, are completely within your control. You create all of your thoughts. They aren’t placed there by little leprechauns and your thoughts are not a reaction to your emotions. In fact, your emotions are a reaction to your thoughts. So now that we have established that, we can work on managing your thoughts. No matter what your external circumstances are, you have the complete power to manage and control your thoughts, and therefore your feelings about those thoughts. So if you are having thoughts like the ones above, it’s time to do a little exploring about why those thoughts are occurring. 

One of the first things to work on is being able to recognize when you are having a thought that you don’t want to have. I know that sounds super easy, but because these thoughts have become such a regular pattern that has gone unmanaged, they can become almost unconscious. It can often be easier to reverse engineer where this thought is coming from, by paying attention to how you are feeling. When you are thinking about a goal you want to achieve, for example weight loss, and you feel anxious or hopeless about achieving that goal, why? Start there. Start with the feeling and trace it back to the thought that you are having that is causing that feeling. 

When you feel anxious or hopeless about losing weight, what’s the thought that’s right behind that? Let’s say you are able to recognize the thought of, “I’ll never be able to lose weight because I can’t break my bad habits and stay consistent”. Boom, you’ve identified the thought. Now its time to practice identifying that thought, every time it comes up. Once you have been able to consistently recognize the thought when you are having it, you can start working on a replacement thought for it. Something that is neutral. I always say start off with something neutral, because the replacement thought has to be something that you can believe. Jumping from negative all the way to positive is really hard for most people, so if you can’t get to positive right off the bat, that’s totally ok. Start with a neutral thought you can believe. 

Now you’re showing me something. This is the building block to changing the thoughts you are having, surrounding your belief about why you can’t achieve a goal that you have in mind (specifically for this example, weight loss). 

1. Identify the thought(s)
2. Practice recognizing the thought(s) every time you’re having them
3. Find a neutral thought that you can believe, to replace the negative thought that you are having. 

This is a great starting place, and if you can get this building block down, you are well on your way to changing your thoughts about food and your body.