Thin Blog

Archive for the ‘Motivation’ Category

Everybody wants to lose weight.  Most are looking for fast weight loss or quick weight loss and end up on a fad diet or some other lame brain idea to lose weight.  After many of us try to lose weight time after time and that time piles up as year after year, the attempts start to be put off more and more by excuses.  We are too busy, we have to take the children to soccer or the husband needs me to make sure the house is clean, I had to go to work early….bla, bla, bla.  Whatever your excuse for not being able to lose weight you need to realize just that.  It is nothing more than an excuse.

I have always been a very cut and dry type of person and I too could go work out more often or eat better foods.  I am no weight loss wonder or Hollywood diet guru, I am just me and I realize that if you are over weight it is your fault.  PERIOD!!!  Strip away all of the excuses and what you have in your life  is commonly referred to as reality.  If your life is too busy then you have chosen to be busy.  If your job is too demanding then that is your choice and that is what you are willing to accept.  If you are always staying late at work, you chose to stay there.  If you decide to make scenery for the school play, that was your choice.  If you have children that need to be driven all over town everyday that too is your choice.  You would not be a horrible parent to tell them to walk every now and then.  If you choose to prepare full course, time consuming meals, then that is another choice

The sum total of your day is decided by the choices you make.  Whatever you fill the time with is the things you allow to happen.  If you can not find enough time a few hours a week, you have made a choice.  If you choose to watch TV, that is alright, but do not think that you do not have time to exercise or prepare healthy meals.  Choices are choices and you are where you are today because of the choices you made yesterday. 

Excuses Begone!: How to Change Lifelong, Self-Defeating Thinking Habits

We all have the same amount of time in day and what you choose to do in that time is…..your choice.  The entire point here is that if you are not the shape you desire, then you need to change the choices you make on a daily basis.  If you want to run a marathon but can’t, you have made the choice because you are not preparing.  We have become a nation that wants it now and gives up too fast.  If you want to lose weight, then make the choice and make it happen.

Weight loss is really kind of simple for the average person. It is merely a matter of eating less calories than you burn in a day.  There is not much more in the equation than that!  if it is such a simple equation why are there so many obese people today?  The answer is simple, it is the choice they make on a daily basis.

We are not here to fault you for being over weight.  We know that losing weight is much harder than it may appear on the outside, we just hope you will realize that if you are over weight, it is because of the choices you have made.  If you hope to lose weight in the future, it is merely a matter of how you handle the choices that are about to come your way

Would you rather spend one hour a day exercising, or 24 hours a day dead?

I have been trying to lose weight for years.  I read all of the facts about how being obese hurts my health and well being, yet I still cannot stick with a diet or a meal plan.  I get started and do great dieting, for awhile, and then one day I start to slip and falter and the downward slide towards diet failure begins once again.  I then wake up one day and the diet is essentially over and I have gained more weight, once again.

Does that sound familiar?  Is this the story of your life?  If so, you are not alone.

When you are talking weight loss and you have an issue that you cannot stick with your weight loss goals, it is very similar to having two people living inside your body.  On one side there is the person that you feel is “you” and that person tries to get centered in the good things of life.  This “you” is what most believe is the real, physical being that lives and walks the Earth.  If that is the case and this “you” is who you believe you are….then who is the other person that eats the ice cream and fails at the weight loss attempt?  Is there an evil twin living inside that drags you down the wrong path? 

Throughout history there have been many people that had identity issues and committed heinous crimes when they were not able to control their actions.  Those very same people did things that they were not able to control and they lost their identity and their conscious reality that propelled them to do things they would have never done otherwise.  Are you the same?  Are you a person that has a silent war going on inside that is silently screaming for attention?  If you are always failing to lose weight there needs to be a reason, is that reason the fact that there are two people living inside one head?  Is this the cause for depression in some people? 

For the average person reading this the answer is a simple and curt…”No!”  For the average person looking to lose weight it is all a matter of not only choices, but also motivation and the desire for change.  There may be a bit of a lack of willpower thrown into the mix, but the reality is the lack of sustained motivation,because of the repetitive history of failure after failure.  For those of you new to the Law of Attraction let me explain, very briefly.  For me to try to explain the Law of Attraction here and now would be equivalent to teaching you the Bible in five minutes.  It would not be possible, because even at it’s basic tenet the Law of Attraction is simplistically complex.

On the fringes of the Law of Attraction the basic understanding is that you get returned to you (in life) what you dwell upon in your thoughts.  If you fear you will die of cancer, you have a greater chance of developing cancer.  If you your thoughts dwell on being poor, you remain poor.  If your thoughts dwell upon the fact that the Lord will always give you enough to “get by”, you will always…just “get by.”  If your thoughts spend too much time fearing weight loss failure, then you have increased your odds of the universe handing you, yet another failure.  A great contemporary thinker, Dr. Wayne Dyer, has a simple and yet awesome response to the fact that you are having trouble losing weight.  He has written a wonderful and easy to read book entitled Excuses Begone!
The pages in his book can lift your weight loss attempts out of the past and into the present moment.  Dr. Dyer has simply stated that the best way to combat your demons is to stop living in the past, and stop living in the future.  A person needs to start living, “in the now, in the moment, in the here and now.”  The past is over, the future is not here yet and the only thing you have going for your weight loss attempt is this moment and this moment is all you really need to lose weight.

If you live in the moment your past will not run you over as you try to make the changes in your daily life.  If you live for the moment you start to notice the wonders of the world.  You see the clouds and notice the wind, and in my case, see the feather tumbling down the aisle in retail store.  By living in the now you begin to understand that there is no evil twin, there is no such thing as an excuse, there are only the choices that we make.  Those choices are made moment by moment and they form the building block of what we are and what we can become.  If we dwell on our failures, failure is what we will receive. 

The Law of Attraction is about as simple as to explain as Christianity.  It is only when we dig deep and interject our thoughts and our questions does it start to become muddied up.  Only when we start throwing gunk into the formula do we start to slow down and stop manifesting the future we so much desire. 

As you try to live in the moment and create the life and the body you desire just try to make the best decision right now because that decision is the only one that really matters. 

Fat Day.  Have you ever had a fat day?  You know what I mean…it is when you wake up and just feel fat.  You look in the mirror and you see your body and are convinced you are fat.  In fact, you look at yourself and you just know you have gained a lot of weight from just yesterday.  You feel as if all of your dieting has been for nothing and you think about just giving up anymore attempts at losing weight.  Granted some people can have an actual fat day because they ate too much, but those are not the days I am writing about in this post.  What I am talking about are those days and weeks where you know you have done it all correctly, and yet the scale still reports back to you that you are having a fat day.  Let’s talk about what is really driving those emotions.  If you are doing the healthy choices throughout your days and your weeks, you will lose weight.  If you know all of your choices have been correct and still are having a fat day, let’s figure out why.

Psychology Behind a Fat Day
Let’s explore the last fat day that I had, which was the driving force behind this article.  I woke up one morning and was on Medifast for well over two weeks, and yet on this particular morning I woke up and just felt fat.  I mean I woke up and was not happy with the way I looked.  My clothing made me look fat.  I looked at my reflection and my mood just slumped.  Despite the fact that I did everything the right way, I still woke up that morning to another day of feeling fat.  I was all ready to just head off into the morning and stop at McDonald’s for a favorite meal of mine and just say “I give up!”  This was the path my day was heading because despite all of my efforts to lose weight…it was just not happening, and I knew that I was doomed to remain obese forever.

My fat day began when I stepped on the bathroom scale and I had not lost any weight from the day before.  I may have even gained a few ounces and that just set the fat day journey into motion even faster. I really do not know when I started to question the validity of my fat day, but I did manage to control my runaway emotions before I left the house.  I started to recap the day before.  I followed the Medifast plan to a “T” and having done so I knew I ate less than 1,000 calories the day before.  My mind was screaming the question “how” over and over.  I could not figure out how I gained weight and I was really ticked off at the whole situation.  Then it all dawned on me and I started to stop having a full blown fat day.

I knew that in order to gain a pound I would of had to eat AN EXTRA amount of calories which was more than I burned.  Since I knew I ate less than 1,000 calories, I knew there was no way I could have gained any weight.  ( A pound equals 3,500 calories)  Yet there it was…I GAINED WEIGHT!!!!  As I started to think more about my fat day I came to the simple conclusion that I was leading myself to the wrong conclusion.  There is no way a healthy person can gain weight if they are not eating the calories.  There is no way I could have gained weight!  I then looked back at my overall weight loss and started to realize that I was losing about one to two pounds a week.  That was great and if the bathroom scale was “off” one day, that was alright.  I realized at that moment what I have heard so often and ignored.  I realized that the bathroom scale is just one indicator of weight loss and not a definitive one either.

I realized on that fat day, which was my last fat day, that it was all in my head.  I now know that it is all too easy to slip into a state of mind and convince yourself that you are getting fatter, when it is impossible.  There is no way that you, or I, can gain weight while limiting calories.  I realized that the fat day I was having was all in my head.  I realized that a fat day would only be a reality if I allowed it to happen.

Example of Fat Day Nonsense
There are days I have stepped on the scale and lost weight and then I thought my clothes were lose and I looked in the mirror and felt great. Feeling lighter on my feet and feeling great about weight loss I would set my course to manifest anything but a fat day..  On the very next day I would weight myself and see a number that was not what I liked and my mood would drastically change.  I would feel fat and I would think that I was a failure and it was all because of a silly number on the bathroom scale.  That number really does not hold the validity that I kept cornered in my thinking.  I have realized that the number on the scale is irrelevant, when I am doing the right things.  If I can lose weight week after week, or even month after month I know I am headed in the right direction.

I have learned that losing weight is not a destination, it is a journey and as long as I weigh less next month than I did last month, I am headed in the right direction.  I am not in competition to lose weight with anyone and that was a huge acknowledgement when I realized I do not have to be in competition with myself either.  Weight loss is all about the direction and perseverance to continue onward towards your health goals.  Stop pinning your hopes on the scale every morning and only weigh yourself weekly. Do not weigh yourself daily.  Be happy with the one and two pound weeks and rest easy knowing that weight loss is an ongoing journey.

I used Medifast to lose weight and it worked great for me.  If you can use it for yourself that is great.  Whatever method you choose to lose weight you need to understand that if you are following your weight loss plan, then a fat day may simply be in your head.  A fat day may be what your bathroom scale is telling you, but that does not always make the scale right.  Only you know what you are doing.  If you know you are not cheating, you will know whether a fat day is really on the scale, or really just in your head.

If you are having a fat day and are a Medifast user you can check out our other blog (Our Story) and if you want, you can even give me a call and I will see if I can help you to understand your fat day.

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For the first time in my life I have lost weight. I had been trying to lose weight for years and had tried every diet under the sun. I tried Atkins, which was great till I ate a bowl of cereal.  I tried so many different diets that I sort of went through a sort of numb period.  I sort of gave up and my weight hit a whopping 297 pounds and that is when something had to give.  I grew tired of hiding behind all of my clothes and despite the fact my husband said I looked fine, I did not feel fine.  When I almost hit 300 pounds I decided to throw away all of the weight loss nonsense and knew I had to lose weight naturally.

Most websites will tell you there is some magic pill or some simple 12 minute exercise that you could do just 3 times a week…but we know better and we know that none of that is true.  I received my inspiration for natural weight loss by watching The Biggest Loser.  It was on that show that I realized that it was all about calories in, and calories out.  I even received that thing they wear on their arm in The Biggest Loser, which is called The BodyBugg. I have written over 50 articles about The BodyBugg (Click here to see the articles) and it is the greatest thing ever invented for weight loss.  I am not going to write about why, because i am tired of writing about that thing the players wear on The Biggest Loser.  What I do want to discuss is how my weight loss is all attributed to natural weight loss techniques.  I have listed the three not so easy steps below.

• Get enough sleep- Most people do not realize how important getting a good night sleep is to a person trying to lose weight.  Without a decent night of sleep your body just does not perform as well as it should because it just isn’t.  When you are tired you have less “ooommmmfffff” to get out and exercise.  Let desire to spend the time preparing healthy foods and when you are tired you just have less will power to resist all of the goodies that end up in front of your mouth.  If sleeping isn’t a natural way to lose weight…..what is?
• Exercise- When I first started to lose weight going to the health club or taking a long walk was a horrible thing to do.  I hated going, I hated being there and I could not wait until it was time to leave.  Exercise and me was a four letter word.  Somewhere along the way I stopped exercising to lose eight and just started to do it because I realized that it was something that was just overall healthy for me. I no longer go to the health club to lose weight, I go to just help myself be healthy.  My stress is lower, my cholesterol levels plummeted and I am no longer in line to ever have Type – II diabetes.  Exercise is as natural as a person can get when looking for natural weight loss.
• Eat better- Notice I said eat better, I did not say eat like a rabbit.  When I first started my weigh loss journey in the world of dieting, I thought it was all about salad and other forms of rabbit food.  I tried to eat what I thought to be healthy but after just a few weeks I grew bored and gave up.  After each and every weight loss attempt I went right back to the behaviour that got me fat in the first place.  I have learned that the best way to lose weight naturally is well…..to eat.  I have since learned that to lose weight naturally I need to just make beater choices.  I committed myself to understanding why smaller meals every 4 hours was better.  I learned about the power of protein in defeating hunger.  I learned how bad even diet soda is for a person.  I have learned that I never drink my calories.  This subject is too broad so lets just say I educated myself and now I am in a lifetime course because the true weight loss never really ends, it becomes a way of life.

I have learned that losing weight is not rocket science and the best way to lose weight is the natural way.  I try not to lose no more than 1.5 to 2 pounds a week because I have learned that it is a much more natural amount to lose every week.  The small numbers still add up over time and by losing it slowly, it takes longer for me to put it back on if I have a bad day.  My only negative thing I have to say about my natural method of weight loss is that I never did anything to stop all of the skin from sagging.  I did not do anything about all of the nasty cellulite and now although I am thinner, I do not like what I see.  Although the view is not as bad as being obese. I just wish I prepared myself better for the physical aspect of losing weight.  But then I guess that is a matter for another article and it is tired and I think I am going to call it a night. 

In closing, weight loss is not impossible and it can happen.  Once you get your mind on track you will look back and wonder why you made such a big thing about it at all.  Weight loss is something you can do and if you pay attention you will be able to achieve natural weight loss also.  Weight loss is not only possible, it can start right here and right now. You just have to make the first step and our mind will allow your body to do the rest.  All ideas began in the imagination and if you can imagine yourself thin, you will soon learn that you can lose the weight and start your own weight loss journey. 

Good Luck and God Bless! 

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Long term weight loss is something that does not just happen by luck.  Long-term weight loss is the result of a decision to lose weight and then having the sustained motivation to stick with a diet for the duration of the plan.  The problem that most weight loss seeking people encounter is that they choose a diet plan only when considering how  to lose weight.  The person seeking weight loss all too often makes solid plans to lose weight and does not have a plan to actually enjoy life once the weight loss has been achieved.  To be able to lose weight for the long term a person needs to be able to plan on creating a method that will carry them through all of the weight loss stages and throughout the rest of their life. 

If you are planning to lose weight then you more than likely are trying to decide what “diet” plan to use.  That is and will always be a fundamental error in your planning and here is why.  If you choose a “diet” you will have two goals with one being a number of pounds to lose and the other will be in the time frame you desire to lose the weight.  Let us just say you want to lose 50 pounds using The South Beach Diet and you actually lose the weight.  Are you then ready to stay on that diet plan for the rest of your life?  This is where all “diets” fail which results in your lack of self confidence and thoughts that you are nothing but a diet failure.  What you need to do is stop looking for a diet and start thinking about changing the lifestyle habits that were the direct reason for you becoming obese.  You need to realize that losing weight on a diet is actually not typical.  That is why ALL diets have the disclaimer “Results Not Typical”

The interesting thing about weight loss is that so many people are clueless as to how to lose weight.  The one simple aspect of losing weight is that you need to “burn” more calories than you eat in your life.  If you were to be able to do this on a constant and daily basis you will lose weight.  What a person needs to concentrate on is being healthy and making healthy choices.  The culmination of a series of healthy choices will result in your body becoming healthier.  As you get healthier you will lose weight as a matter of fact.  All too often people who want to lose weight equate a diet with depriving themselves of what they enjoy.  This is backwards from what a person trying to achieve longterm weight loss should do.

I have been overweight for years, twenty years to be fairly exact.  I tried so many diets that I could write a book.  It was not until I learned that you need to stop dieting and start a “live-it” to be a success in losing weight.  Since I have started to exercise and choose healthier options like smaller portions, fruit and less fat that I really began to understand true weight loss.  Today my sixteen year old daughter did a High School fundraiser and sold cartons of cookie dough.  I did not deprive myself of a taste.  What I did not do is I did not have to eat a bowl of the stuff.  I took a couple a small teaspoons and was done.  I did not deprive myself and set myself up for failure.  I tasted the stuff and moved on.  I have learned that I do not need to live to eat; I only need to eat to live. 

What I have learned is that one of the most important things to choose in weight loss is the method you will be able to live with for the rest of your life.  Commit yourself to more exercise of at least four to five days a week.  Commit yourself to smaller portions of food.  Do not give up anything you love.  I love pizza and I eat some every now and then and do not fret over the extra weight I may or may not gain.  That is because I am not trying to lose weight, I am trying to be healthy.  I know that for me to obtain long term weight loss I need to be able to do it for the rest of my life.  In the grand scheme of losing 100 pounds having a cheeseburger is not a show stopper.  I have learned that I just need to make more good choices than bad choices because wherever I go I will sometimes make a “bad” food choice.  As long as I try to limit those bad choices and make more good choices, I know the end result will be a healthier and thinner me.

As of today, using the above concept, I have lost 46 pounds in about one year.  That may not seem fast enough for some and again there may be your problem.  There should be no rush in weight loss.  If you want to go on a cruise and that is your motivation, then you are dieting for the wrong reason.  If you want to lose weight then do it for the right reasons.  Lose the weight for yourself and your health.  Lose the weight for the long term because that is the only weight loss that really matters.  Only worry about today because that is all the time you really have.  Do not waste it, use it well. Skip the diet and start a “live-it”