Weight loss tips for women: Lasting success requires you to think yourself thin.
Believe it or not, a solid food or exercise plan is only a single piece of the puzzle when it comes to creating success with the scale, or increasing your fitness or your health. Where the rubber really meets the road, is whether or not that plan gets implemented; whether you continue to implement it; and whether it benefits your life or adds to your overall stress. Some of the best weight loss tips for women fail, because, as solid as they are, they don’t address a critical component for your success – your mental game.
Weight loss is an endurance event (unless you are looking for fast results that don’t last). And just like running a marathon, or training for the Olympics, setting yourself up for success with the scale has a huge psychological component.
Ignore the head game, and you can easily set yourself up for self-sabotage or continually find that you get in your own way despite all your hard work. Learn to leverage what I call healthy thinking, and you’ll quickly develop a powerful asset for weight loss success.
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Healthy thinking weight loss tip: Visualize success
Remember Olympic athlete Michael Phelps? He’s the most decorated Olympic athlete ever. He won those gold medals at the pool because he trained hard physically. But he also invested in training his brain. You may have heard that for years – every morning, every evening, and after every practice, Michael Phelps visualized himself succeeding. His coach had him play a mental video tape, multiple times a day, of every detail of his perfect race. His mental visualization included vivid details – the sights, sounds, and physical sensation of pulling himself through the water – the way he would think and feel and act as he succeeded.
Do you currently have a mental video tape (or DVD) of how your weight loss efforts will play out? What’s the story you currently review in your mind? It’s probably not nearly as deliberate an exercise as Michael Phelps engaged in, but I bet you have a story reel that plays in your head. Is it one of failure or success? Struggle or ease? Just notice the film that may have been playing for quite a while.
Does it have a somber tone to it, or is the theme from Rocky playing in your background?
Now, take a moment and close your eyes. Visualize yourself as you will be when you are successful with this goal – when you have arrived.
What do you see? How does it feel to be you – successful you? When you close your eyes and breathe it in, do you see a clear picture – one in technicolor, where you can feel the richness of it, the sensations, the emotions, the posture of success?
Do you have a movie of yourself where you feel the possibility deep down in your cells? Can you envision either what it will look like or (better yet) feel like to be the person who has achieved it – to be actually living the change?
Or do you simply see a clothing size, or a number on the scale? Do you know what success will look like for you, or do you feel a little confused, or draw a blank?
If you’ve been caught up in vicious cycles in this particular area of your life, you may find that you don’t really have a clear vision of you being successful.
Sometimes smart, busy women get so focused on stopping a habit they don’t like, that they don’t create a vision of how they want to think and be instead. Self-sabotage can happen when you are working hard to achieve a goal, but secretly, you can’t imagine it happening, or the vision you have in your mind is of you maintaining a routine or a set of habits that make you miserable (or exhausted, or hungry). That’s actually the vision that a lot of women have of “weight loss success.”
Here’s a smart weight loss tip: if you want to be successful, create a very clear picture of what you are aiming for. Practice mentally stepping into the shoes of you, being successful.
Healthy thinking action step:
If you haven’t already, spend the time to envision the look and the feel of your success. Create a vision – a screen by screen mental film – of what your success will look like and feel like. What will be different? How will your day unfold? Be sure to include the emotions and the physical feelings that come with success. Visualize eating as someone who has succeeded with your goal. What’s your vision of how you eat, how you feel when you eat, and how you take care of yourself when you used to overeat?
If you get stuck here, don’t get lost in the details you can’t see. Write down the things you do know about how you want success to be and then imagine how it will feel. Don’t worry if you don’t have the full, colorful picture yet – it will come.
Take time to visit this vision of success regularly. Spend a few moments feeling what it feels like to be successful, every single day. Don’t feel silly – Michael Phelps didn’t, and it sure worked for him. Let this kind of healthy thinking help you too.
Take good care,
