Maximizing Performance Through Applied Common Sense*

Do you notice how often you’re reluctant to lose weight because it’s hard to picture yourself slim and healthy?  Perhaps you’ve been overweight for so long that the idea of imagining yourself slim is just unthinkable.  Start rehearsing in your mind what you would look like and how you would feel if you were slim.  Imagine yourself slim and healthy and do it on a regular basis.  What are you wearing?  Who are you hanging around?  What are you doing?  The more you imagine and rehearse yourself being slim and healthy the more you are going to begin to believe that it’s actually possible.  So, rehearse and duplicate and you will begin to see results. 

When you eat you generally eat for one of three reasons: 

When you are medicating, you know you are upset because something happened.  Notice how often you eat when you are upset with the illusion that that’s going to help.  Instead, do something other than medicating through eating… write a letter, clean the garage, or go take a walk.  Simply do something other than medicating and you’ll begin to lose weight and have more control. 

How often do you eat when what you really want is connection?  How often is eating over a social event like lunch or time with the family?  Most of the time when people are eating for connection purposes, they are mindlessly eating because what they really want is to be connected with other people.  So start paying attention to how often you are using connection as an excuse to eat.  You will notice that you really do want to spend more time connecting with people and it is really unnecessary to overeat.  So spend more time on connection and less time on over-stuffing, you’ll start noticing more control.  

Most people who have trouble losing weight and more important, keeping it off, generally feel pessimistic.  So how do you overcome your pessimism?  You have to reprogram your state of mind to be one of more optimistic and powerful because most people when they feel pessimistic generally give up, feel defeated, and sabotage their diet.  You want to learn how to change your state of mind by changing your language from what it is not to what it is.  So instead of saying “diets never work,” you would say “sticking to a diet is a challenge.”  Instead of saying, “I can’t eat that,” say, “I can eat this.”  Concentrate on changing your language.  Talk about what it is instead of what it is not and then you will see by far better results.  

If you are like more than half the population out there, you are over-weight.  One in three is obese in this country; two out of three is seriously over-weight.  This means that if you are slim and in shape, then you are the exception!  Well, that has changed in the last 30 years.  Now, virtually everybody is over-weight.  What do you do about it?  The first thing you need to do is take responsibility for the way you are living your life.  Your health is at risk and you generally avoid doing the things you really like to do because you are over-weight.  So take more responsibility for now deciding to do something about it and start anew!