“In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.”
-John Muir.
When it comes to strategies to lose weight the healthy way, your mindset can play a big part in whether you will be successful. Approaching weight loss from the wrong perspective is one of the biggest reasons many fail with diets and eating plans. And on the flip side, getting your mindset right can be a game-changer for successfully losing weight.
Here are some mindset shifts that could help you to supercharge your weight loss and keep the pounds off!
Think About Why You’re Doing It
Why you want to lose weight can make a lot of difference. However, basing your reasons on being happier or looking good is a lot more likely to fail as there’s no saying that losing weight will make you feel good about yourself or bring you happiness.
Instead of choosing these reasons as your basis for weight loss, look at things differently. Think of your weight loss as part of a journey to becoming healthier and not just a means to reach an end target. It’s an excellent opportunity to introduce healthy habits into your life that set the scene for both improving your health and losing weight in the bargain. Then, when your ultimate goal is to live a longer and healthier life, weight loss will probably happen as a bonus due to these new habits.
Don’t Go For Broke
Trying too much too soon with your weight loss can work against you, which is one of the reasons why fad diets and drastically reducing your calorie intake aren’t successful in the long term. You might lose some weight, to begin with, but chances are, this will quickly tail off, and depending on your mindset and eating habits, you might even start gaining more weight.
When it comes to weight loss, slow and steady tends to do a lot better than trying to lose weight as quickly as possible.
You’re more likely to succeed if you go for more minor shifts that add to more significant lifestyle changes. If you do them every day, they’ll soon become habits. Of course, this is more of a long game, and you probably won’t see results straight away, but there’s a better chance of achieving your weight loss goals than focusing on one big goal that could fail.
You want your healthy choices to feel natural and not like a chore or as though you’re depriving yourself; this is where healthy habits can come into their own.
Breaking the Food-Emotions Cycle
One of the factors that can make it hard to lose weight involves emotional eating. We often eat when we’re not hungry and because we feel certain emotions. Breaking the link between your food and feelings is a crucial mindset shift to master if you want to lose weight and keep it off.
Moving away from emotional eating helps you react to genuine hunger cues, so you’ll eat to fuel your body and not align with your feelings. Mindful eating is a great way to get back in touch with your body’s hunger signals but it can be a big challenge to master, especially if you’re used to emotional eating. Finding ways to address your emotions that don’t involve food can make a huge difference in being able to lose weight naturally.
Visualizing Weight Loss Success
Visualization can be a powerful weight loss technique, especially if combined with positive self-talk. How does visualization work? The theory is that it helps rewire brain pathways, which can be great for breaking habits and learning new ones.
To get the most from it, visualize yourself at your ideal weight, with your body fat transforming into a much more positive form of energy. Keep this mental image in mind as much as possible.
You can use positive affirmations and self-talk to highlight how you’ll feel when you get to this point. Don’t forget to focus on how you’ll think about your health, fitness, and wellbeing and not just how much better you’ll feel about being thinner.
Even though this will happen in the future, keep your self-talk in the present tense and not the end to make visualization a more practical mindset shift. Tell yourself that you have the power to change your body through the power of your mind as the finishing touch.
Doing this daily can be much more effective than you might think.
Start planning your lifelong goals for your health, not just the short-term ones.