Get Empowered to Get the Body You Want

“I’m doing everything right. Why isn’t my body responding?” “Being on a diet makes it really hard to enjoy life.” “I’ve tried everything and nothing works!” “Losing weight is a struggle every day.” “I’m so TIRED of being overweight.” “Why can’t I just have a normal body, and relax and enjoy myself like I see other people do?” “I’m already working so hard and I’m not seeing any results. I don’t know what else to do.” These are common statements that I hear women make. They feel frustrated, angry, and often think that their body is somehow faulty and that they are stuck with the body shape they have. And they desperately want something else. They yearn for a healthy, slim, and sexy body—sometimes more than anything else! What if it is these very thoughts that are holding you back? What if those feelings of desperation and yearning are like spraying yourself with healthy, slim, and sexy repellent? It’s possible that may actually make you feel worse. “How can I not feel desperate,” you might ask? “How can I not think dieting is hard when it bloody well is,” you might argue? This is not meant to make you self-critical, inspire you to explain to me why your situation is different (that just keeps you stuck), or to overwhelm you because you’re already working so hard to “fix it.” Honestly, I get it. I spent more than 35 years thinking some of those same thoughts and feeling that desperation. I couldn’t get a break. My body was somehow faulty, and actually felt like it was working against me. I tried everything and I couldn’t see any more solutions. But what I discovered is that I had the solution all along. What is actually going on here is that you have a […]

Add A Mental Workout to Your Weight-Loss Plan

  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 […]

How to Make Your Weight-Loss Easy

May I ask you some questions? I want you to really pay attention to your reaction to each one. Do you love and adore your body? Do you love the food that you eat, savoring every bite? Do you love the exercise that you’re doing and the feeling of moving your body? Do you love to sweat? Do you love and appreciate every part of your body—even the parts that most people think are gross? What emotions did you feel when you read those questions? Did they bring up strong positive or negative reactions? This is more important than you may realize. Your body is a reflection of your predominate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Think about your responses to the questions above. Did your positive or negative emotional reaction match the experience that you’re having with your body right now? Most of my clients hate their body. Most of the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs they have about their body are negative. For instance: You may hate how you look in or out of your clothes. You may judge specific body parts. You may hate—or at the best—tolerate exercise. You may be a picky eater. You think you just don’t like healthy food. You may eat on the run, or read while you eat, or otherwise distract yourself so you don’t truly appreciate what you are eating in the moment. When you accept that you are what you think, feel, and believe, is it any wonder that you struggle with your weight? Changing your thoughts about your body makes it easier to release the weight, helps create a more fulfilling weight-loss experience—and makes it easier to keep the weight off! But you may have had these […]

Where Are You Headed?

  One of the challenges with creating the body that you want is that you are always carrying the body that you have around with you. It’s a constant reminder that you are where you don’t want to be. When you think about the Foundation Principle that “Energy Attracts Like Energy,” also known as the Law of Attraction, it makes sense. Our thoughts are energy. If you are focused on the fat you don’t want, or your lack of fitness or beauty, you will not only attract more thoughts like that, but more circumstances that support those beliefs. Getting the body you want requires continually tearing your attention away from where you are and focusing more on where you want to be. Only, this backfires if you don’t believe you can get where you want to be. So how do you mentally walk this fine line of being in the body you don’t want—and having to look at and experience it all day every day—but not quite believing you can achieve the body you really want? Particularly when you are so used to thinking negative thoughts about your body, you don’t even know you’re doing it? This is why a coach is so helpful. But ultimately, whether you have a coach or not, you are the one who has to navigate this mental path forward. So here are some tips: Pay attention to your emotions. How many thoughts do you think a day? A lot! It will just make you crazy trying to monitor what you’re thinking. Instead, pay attention to how you are feeling. If you’re having negative, catabolic emotions, such as frustration, overwhelment, hopelessness, blame, etc., these should be like signal flares letting […]

By |September 5th, 2012|Mind, MindBodySpirt|11 Comments

Guaranteed to Change Your Life

What if you knew your success was guaranteed? What if the entire Universe was on your side? What if your value to the world was assured? What if all that entailed was spending more time focused on what you want, who you want to be, what you want to do, and how you want to feel? That when you looked at a problem, you quickly shifted your thoughts to what you would like the outcome to be? That when you saw someone behaving badly, you focused on how you wanted people to behave? That you appreciated more things than you complained about? It seems like such a simple shift to make. Love more. Appreciate more. Laugh more. Relax more. But simple—and even preferable—doesn’t necessarily mean easy. People often fear that if they take their eyes off the problem for a moment, it will grow and get worse. So they stay ever vigilant and keep their attention fixed on the worst-case scenario. Or they may be weak in guiding their attention, and therefore believe they have no option but to look directly at what is right in front of them. Or they may be so bought into reacting to “reality” that they don’t even know there is anything else to look at. What if it was your attention and focus that was actually making the problem worse? What if by not choosing what you want to think about you are guaranteed to see more of all the things you don’t want? That all “reality” means is that you are seeing a reflection of what you are focused on? We are each responsible for the “reality” of our lives. If you expect—and choose—to see good things, you […]

Do You Believe That? The Missing Link to Losing Weight

Do you spend more time focused on all the reasons you don’t want to eat healthy foods and move your body, or all the reasons you do? How do you think that impacts your actions? Your thoughts predict the success of your actions. Meaning that if you think about how much you hate working out, getting the motivation to move will be pretty darn hard. If you spend more time thinking about all the reasons you do want to work out, then getting up and doing your workout will be easier. Action alone is not enough. Not changing your thoughts and beliefs along with taking the action is the reason the majority of diet and exercise programs fail. Focusing your thoughts on what you do want is a simple but profound change that will significantly alter your weight-loss results—or the results of any goal you want to achieve. Simple, however, does not necessarily mean easy. Most people have never contemplated the idea that they have control over their thoughts. In fact, they may believe they are victim to their thoughts. Back to your thoughts predict the success of your actions. If you think you have no control over your thoughts, how likely are you to be able to take control? (Hint: not very!) You may also have practiced some thoughts for a very long time about eating healthy and exercise. These thoughts may have some momentum going. Momentum means they now include your belief that you are someone who doesn’t like eating healthy foods and moving your body. As Abraham-Hicks says, “A belief is just a thought you keep thinking.” To change a belief you have to use another belief. For instance, you probably can’t […]

That Wasn’t Necessary

I love discovering situations around which I have some practiced thoughts and beliefs that are not helping me be the person I want to be, or create the life I want to create. Because if you don’t know the negative catabolic thoughts, feelings, and beliefs are there, you can’t change them. Saturday morning provided me the opportunity to come face-to-face with negative expectations, fear, and prescribed beliefs—and to make different choices. For those of you who know me or read this blog regularly, you know that my husband and I have two dogs and two cats who truly are our children. Buffy, the oldest of our two Keeshonden, will be turning 10 on July 13. Buffy is a bit of a trash mouth, meaning if something hits the floor, she eats it. As we stroll through the park, she’s trying to grab bites of weeds along the path. She’s a dirt connoisseur. So it was a bit surprising, but not terribly unusual, to wake up Saturday morning and find some evidence that she had expelled something nasty in the night. We cleaned it up and didn’t think more of it. While I was writing my blog, she threw up breakfast. While I was upstairs working out, she threw up again. When my husband found that she had thrown up yet again, I discovered her having dry heaves and shivering. We knew something was seriously wrong and called the emergency vet who said to bring her right in. What’s the best mindset for heading to the emergency vet—or dealing with any difficult situation? While it’s probably the most common reaction, I would suggest that it’s not fear and jumping to the worst case scenario. You might […]

The Options are Overwhelming!

The feeling of being overwhelmed is negative, catabolic energy. For me, it’s victim energy. It’s the feeling that things are spinning out of control and I can’t do enough fast enough to meet all my goals or other people’s expectations. It is being at the effect of things instead of recognizing that I have complete control of my life and how I respond to each situation, and that I have the support of All-That-Is (God, the Universe, Source Energy, Higher Coach—whatever works for you) in everything I do. There can be a lot of self-judgment in it, and may include looking at myself through other people’s eyes and seeing all the things I “should” be doing from anyone’s perspective but my own. Feeling overwhelmed may be different for you—how we interpret emotions is as unique as we are—but my guess is that no matter how it feels to you, it’s not very pleasant. We can feel overwhelmed when we’re trying to process new information, make a decision, meet a deadline, etc., etc. Trying to force action while we’re feeling this catabolic emotion often doesn’t result in a satisfactory conclusion or outcome because you just can’t see where you’re going very clearly. One of the best things to do when you catch yourself feeling overwhelmed is often the last thing you feel like you can do—STOP what you are doing. Taking 15 minutes to breathe deeply, meditate, pray, go for a walk, think about the beach—whatever it is that brings you a sense of relief and helps you calm your mind—will more than pay for itself in productivity later. Another way to step off that crazy train is to let go of judging your feeling as […]

How Was Your Mental Workout?

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein Often my clients are surprised that creating optimal wellness requires working their mental muscles in the same way they exercise their bodies. It takes discipline, practice, and consistency. Just as you might plan to get up and do your physical workout, you also need to plan to work your mental muscles if you want to shift your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs to help support and change your actions to get different—and more desirable—results. How long do you think you will maintain a workout program if you force yourself to exercise through sheer willpower but spend the whole time thinking about how much you hate it? Let’s just say your chances of long-term success will be pretty slim. But how likely it is that you are going to go from hating to exercise to loving it in an instant? 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? The truth is that mentally, most people are the equivalent of coach potatoes. They just react unconsciously to the physical stimulus around them in the exact same way they’ve always reacted, or people around them react. They have no idea that they have just as much potential to control their 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. That is a practiced reaction that you actually do have the power to change—if you want […]

Do You Need That to Be Healthful?

nour•ish ˈnər-ish, ˈnə-rish verb nour•ish•es; nour•ished; nour•ish•ing [+ obj] 1 : to provide (someone or something) with food and other things that are needed to live, be healthy, etc. ▪ Plants are nourished [=fed] by rain and soil. ▪ Vitamins are added to the shampoo to nourish the hair. ▪ a well-nourished baby 2 : to cause (something) to develop or grow stronger ▪ a friendship nourished by trust ▪ Her parents nourished [=supported] her musical talent. Merriam-Webster Dictionary How well-nourished are you? I’m not just asking about your diet, but am including your mind, emotions, and soul. For many, nourishment may not be something they think about at all. For some, nutrition is what comes to mind. There are few of us who can claim to be well-nourished in all areas of our lives. But if you think about the difference nourishing food can make to your body, just imagine what would happen if you also consciously nourished your mind with information, ideas, and even entertainment that enhanced your knowledge, awareness, and clarity? Imagine nourishing relationships that are easy, loving, satisfying, and fun? Imagine nourishing spiritual practices that lead to richer, fuller, and more fulfilling life experiences? Imagine nourishing activities (such as work!) that are fun, interesting, and exciting? What did you do yesterday? How much of that nourished you—body, mind, and spirit? How much of it drained or depleted you? What are you doing today? How much of what you have on your to-do list is nourishing? What do your choices mean for the overall quality of your life? What choices would you need to make to be truly well-nourished? Together we can do it! Photo by Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net