This one will hit home HARD with some of you…. Lets jump in!
Consciously you’re aware of the obviously cycle of self sabotage: break your diet > feel guilty > resolve to do better > make short term progress > repeat.
BUT are you aware of the finer details of HOW you sabotage yourself?
Do you find you make ‘excuses’ that in the moment seem completely logical and rational?
“Oh come on, live a little”
“Oh come on, have some balance”
“There’s always tomorrow to restart or reset”
At every other time of the day you know you’re lying to yourself. But in THAT specific moment it is totally believable.
You also know that successful weight loss that is sustainable for a lifetime is all about healthy, sensible nutrition with room for wine and chocolate in moderation.
BUT you also have this deep fear: “What if I spend the next 6 weeks being smart, healthy, and sensible with my diet, and I get to the end and I didn’t lose any weight?…..Then I would have wasted my time.”
If you’re honest with yourself you also think “if that happened that would mean that I’M the failure, and this is yet MORE proof that I can’t do it, that I’m just not good enough.”
“I AM NOT GOOD ENOUGH” – Likely your GREATEST fear.
So, because progress has been so slow recently, AND because you’re terrified of proving that fear to be true, you take a more extreme – short sighted approach, in the hopes that rapid results will magically translate into greater belief in yourself (the “outside in” approach to feeling good enough).
You believe that you need to have a few weeks of strict regime to drop kilos BECAUSE you’ve been so out of control recently. You believe that’s going to reset everything, get you back on track, and kick start things off. THEN you can resume a healthy, smart, sustainable approach.
But you’ve been repeating this pattern for YEARS now!!! IS THIS NOT A WAKE UP CALL?!
Clearly your beliefs around what you need to do to lose weight are NOT WORKING! So perhaps it’s time to examine those beliefs in more detail, and get HONEST about what is really going on.
Because the stakes are much higher than perhaps you realise, or have been willing to admit to yourself…
The more ineffective, cheap band-aid solutions you try, or the more times you try the SAME approach over and over again (but pretend to yourself that you’ve tried “everything”) the more you lose faith in yourself and your future.
The more times you break your own promises to yourself the more you chip away at your sense of personal integrity. It’s impossible for that not to bleed into the other areas of your life in some way, and perhaps you’ve already started to get the feeling that you’re missing out on life, or that it’s passing you by because you know you’re not being all you can be.
So, let’s discover the REAL issues so that you can FINALLY build a body you love and develop the body confidence, self confidence, and self belief that benefits not just your health, but your entire life.
Let’s start with the simple stuff first of all – nutrition – because that’s what everybody loves to obsess over (even though it’s not the real issue).
The “kickstart” approach to weight loss reinforces the very behaviours that cause you to rebound. You create the perfect psychological environment to have one of your “fuck it!” moments…
“I’ve been so good”
“I deserve it”
“You need balance”
So you give yourself “just a taste”, but now your brain is conditioned into a scarcity and restricted mindset. It tries to compensate not just for this craving, but for all future anticipated cravings.
So inevitably you lose control. Through repetition this becomes a habit that functions on auto-pilot:
Regret > repent > resolve > repeat.
So the belief that you need to kick start things off? Nonsense!
Ok next, the belief that if you follow a sustainable approach for 6 weeks and don’t see any results (or results that are as fast as all those extreme approaches you used to do) then that means you’ll have wasted time, or that you can’t do it, or that you’re a failure, or that you’re just destined to be overweight!
Ok take an honest step back. What would that REALLY mean?
Does it really mean that you are physiologically incapable of losing weight? That you are the first glitch in the universe that the law of thermodynamics doesn’t apply to?!
Or does it mean there’s still something to learn, and those 6 weeks were an investment in learning, self discovery, and your future success?
Or that you’re healing years of damage on the inside – at the cellular level – that needs to be fixed before the outside will be fixed?
Or that you didn’t actually follow it for 6 weeks at all, and lied to yourself instead?
Or that you have made progress, it’s just slower than your unrealistic and unreasonable expectations?
So, the belief that it would be a wasted 6 weeks? Nonsense!
Let’s address the REAL issue. Success isn’t an overnight event, and neither is failure. It is the sum total of lots and lots of decision points.
Let’s revisit some of those excuses from the start:
“Oh come on, live a little”
“Oh come on, have some balance”
“There’s always tomorrow to restart or reset”
In simplified terms, through years of practice you’ve conditioned your brain to rely on food to meet your psychological and emotional needs. As far as your subconscious mind is concerned, when you’re feeling tired, stressed, bored, or overwhelmed, food is the most RAPID, RELIABLE and EFFECTIVE way for you to escape emotional pain and move towards pleasure.
Learning to address THIS issue requires stepping out of your comfort zone, and making a GENUINE commitment to work on yourself at a much deeper level. This is VERY different to the hobby / interest mentality to personal development that most people have, where they listen to a podcast, get excited, but then it makes no difference to their life.
It’s hard work, it can be daunting and confronting, and it’s uncomfortable. It’s also unknown and unfamiliar.
It’s also NEVER going to get resolved with most of the approaches you’ve heard of or tried. You will NEVER change your conditioning with logic, rationalising, analysing, or intellectual thought. The deeper, emotional parts of the brain don’t function that way.
But instead of making the necessary level of commitment and investment to work on yourself at this deeper level, you can just pretend that what you really need is to “kick start things off with a strict diet!” and so we’re full circle back to square one again.
So ultimately the REAL issue is this…
Making a LASTING transformation externally, requires absolute commitment to transforming INTERNALLY, which in turns takes hard work, courage, and commitment.
(Interestingly, whereas all the other approaches to weight loss start off easy, and get harder and harder the more progress you make, transforming internally starts of hard, and gets easier and easier the more progress you make.)
Most people are not prepared to invest in themselves at that level. They are not prepared to do the work to transform internally. Every other limiting belief they invent from that point simply serves as a protection mechanism against having to step up to this level of personal growth.
For example…
“Now that I don’t believe I’m capable, I don’t have to face my fears and grow”
So the question is, are you willing to do whatever it takes to transform INTERNALLY? Are you willing to make a proper commitment, to face your fears, to get uncomfortable in order to grow?
Need help? Book a call with us www.chaselifeintensive.com/call
xxx
