You want to lose weight.

Your plan may look something like:

 Eat healthy foods.

 Workout your body.

 Workout your mind.

Wait? What was that last one?

Often my clients are surprised that creating optimal wellness requires working their mental muscles in the same way they exercise their bodies.

Consistently working your mental muscle is one of the key things missing from every diet and exercise programs you have ever tried.

Think about it this way. If you want to start an exercise program, but you hate exercise, you dread it all day long, you think about how much you hate it while you are working out—how long are you going to keep doing that program?

Answer: Not long!

Your thoughts precede your action. If you want to create a sustainable exercise program that will help you keep the weight off for good you have to shift your underlying thoughts.

To get different results, you have to shift your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs to help support your actions.

Just as with physical exercise, this takes persistence, practice, and patience.

The reason?

How likely it is that you are going to go from hating exercise to loving it? Just as you are not going to be able to go from lifting 25 pounds to 50 pounds in one day, you are not likely to shift your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs instantly.

You wouldn’t expect to get off the sofa and be able to go run 3 miles the first time out, so why would you expect to create new mental patterns that quickly?

This may be hard to hear, but the truth is that with your mental focus, most people are the equivalent of coach potatoes.

You may have no idea that you have just as much potential to control your thoughts and reactions as a body builder has to curl a 50-pound dumbbell.

Just because you have hated exercise in the past—or have always hated it—doesn’t mean that you have to hate it forever.

Believe it or not, that is a practiced reaction that you actually do have the power to change—if you want to.

I know because I was one of those people.

As a kid, I was not physically gifted. My lack of grace was a running joke in my family. Reading was my pleasure and the idea of working physically hard and, heaven forbid, actually sweating were abhorrent to me.

In other words, I hated exercise.

Oh, my parents poked, goaded, and prodded me to get off the sofa and move, but I resented the heck out of it.

As a teenager and young adult, I only worked out long enough to meet my weight-loss goal. As soon as the scale hit my target weight, I went right back to my more restful habits—only to regain the weight I had just lost—and usually then some.

It wasn’t until I started shifting my thoughts that I began to be able to exercise more consistently.

First, I made peace with the need to exercise to maintain my health and feel physically well-being. Slowly and surely—with mental practice—I began to look forward to it, and eventually to actually enjoy it.

Now, my day is off big time if I don’t get my workout in. All truly is not right with the world! I enjoy moving my body and working out—and I love how good it makes me feel.

And I love to sweat!

Building your mental muscles is a process, just as building your physical muscles is a process.

You first figure out your goal and create a plan to get there.

There are lots of mental exercises to choose from, such as

• Centering exercises
• Meditating
• Making lists of things you appreciate
• Visualizing
• Using affirmations
• Journaling
• Consciously shifting your thoughts on specific topics

Just as you decide if you want to run, life weights, or do yoga, you pick what feels right to you—and what you will actually do consistently. And then decide how often and for how long.

Just as with physical exercise, start off easy and build up.

For instance, want to meditate? Start with 1 to 5 minutes and work your way up. If you start with 30 minutes, chances are that will be too much and you won’t sustain it.

As you practice your mental workouts, you’ll notice a difference in your physical ones. You’ll begin to realize that you actually feel better after your workout. The more you focus on that, it becomes something you want to do. And even better, you’ll find yourself pushing yourself in your workout because it feels good.

What can you do today to exercise your mental muscles? How can you make that a consistent practice that you are just as committed to as your physical workout? What difference does that make to achieving your weight-loss goals?

Together we can do it!