Change your mindset, and you will change who you are…
This is arguably one of the hardest things you will have to do… to make up your mind to change for good. It will take more than willpower, commitment, and desire. It wont be easy.
But it can be done, and these tips, ideas, and methods can help. If you truly want to change your body, health, and life you need to change your mindset.
So WHY Should I Change? Give Me A Good Reason…
Obesity may soon be the number one preventable killer of us, overtaking smoking. Imagine that! We have no biological need for cigarettes, but we need food to live. Smoking rates have been steadily declining while obesity and overweight individuals are increasing.
Obese and Overweight Adults are over 70% of the adult population in the U.S.
If you have poor health habits as an adult chances are you are teaching, by example, these poor health habits to your children. Along with societal pressure, food marketing bombardment, and easy access to unhealthy foods it adds up so children don’t have much of a chance.
Changing your habits may encourage others as well.
We know that drugs, tobacco, alcohol, and pollution are bad for us. So why do we struggle with food? Don’t stress about it, we have been programmed from birth to connect emotions with food.
Remember breast feeding (probably not)? Reward of Candy for doing something good? Special birthday dinner?
Our brain is constantly being programmed to perceive unhealthy food as a pleasure. It is our thalamus that detects levels of hormones and sends messages to the other parts of the brain to interpret them as emotions and thoughts. And to often it is on autopilot saying “feed me pleasurable food”!
Here is a list of foods that are harmful and can cause preventable disease. But not all food will eventually kill us. If we change our attachment to these foods we can overcome our biological training and need for food as a coping mechanism. Then we can eat to live, rather than live to eat.
We can nourish our body and fulfill the requirement of “WHY WE SHOULD CHANGE“.
We are all struck by something that propels us to change. A photo of yourself looking obese, an unhealthy checkup, a disastrous disease, or a mental breakdown. Whatever the reason it still is not enough to propel you to change IF YOU WANT A SHORTCUT. Change needs to stem from a deep desire from within. It is this deep desire that will sustain the longevity of change.
Reducing weight to a healthy BMI, eating healthy nutritious whole foods, and avoiding harmful substances and risky behaviors will help us achieve a healthy lifestyle.
So WHO Should Be The One To Change?
You constantly fight with your inner dialogue or thoughts, and your actions follow. Your thoughts are always shifting, changing, coming and going. But they are just thoughts, random words without any substance.
Your actions give them life!
The one to change IS YOU, more specifically your inner being. Change the way you think and watch your life catch up. Our biggest obstacle is being hypocritical with ourselves. A good example of this is if you want to lose weight but you constantly are eating unhealthy foods.
Quit Lying to Yourself!
Remember our emotional attachments above? Well we need to change those attachments so they are in line with what is best for our life. Instead of constantly berating ourselves each time we fail at weight loss we need to ask ourselves;
“WHAT DO WE TRULY WANT”? and “IS WHAT I AM DOING HELPING ME TO GET WHAT I TRULY WANT”?
So who should change, the answer is YOU SHOULD CHANGE. I cannot change you, and you shouldn’t change for some external reason (reunion, wedding, or bathing suit season), nor for someone. You should change for you and because you feel compassion and love for yourself and have a desire for true change.
What Can I Change To Make A Lasting Difference?
Change your movement habits. We are not talking about just exercise here but movement in addition to that. We should all get at least 30-60 minutes a day of moderate exercise. But you may still be at risk even if you exercise that much and are sedentary the rest of the time.
The key is to get up and move as often as you can.
Change your eating habits. Eat better foods and fuel your body and brain with nutritious whole foods and clean water. Stay away from processed foods. A properly fueled body can do magnificent things. More importantly learn the things that are causing you to overeat and overcome them.
Learn how to eat better, your body will thank you, and naturally stay leaner.
Say goodbye to tension in your life. Rid yourself of that unnecessary stress. Learn to be mindful, live in the present, and to relax away stress. Use techniques like meditation, prayer, and reflection. Get out in nature, make sure you get enough time for yourself to decompress and relax those tense muscles.
Get adequate Sleep. This is very important! Why? Because this is when the body does all of its restorative and repair work. You need about 6-9 hours of quality sleep each night. Don’t skimp on this, or oversleep, studies have shown adverse effects from both.
And finally change your mindset to allow the body to follow a purposeful path to wellness. Get rid of doubt and fear, and replace it with action and optimism. Remember what goes on in your brain comes out in life. So make it so good that your life will be amazing.
How Can I Change and Make it Lifelong?
By changing your belief structure. These are the principles that guide us through life. They give our life direction and meaning. A bunch of thoughts bundled together make up a belief. What happens if those thoughts are negative, or better yet positive?
Get a clear and concise purpose to guide your transformation. Why are you doing this? Is it to become healthier, to lose weight, to look better in clothes, to impress someone. Make sure that your purpose is sustainable and real. Sometimes losing weight is just a stop on the journey and the real purpose of life is much deeper.
Change your level of desire and commitment. Do this by setting goals for yourself. Make them achievable goals with a time frame. Drill down on each goal until you have one thing you can do each day to accomplish that goal. Those one days will turn into one week, then one month, then one year.
Execute the daily task perfectly each time and you will achieve your goal.
By decreasing fear and increasing faith, decreasing negative self-talk and improving positive self-talk. The opposite of fear is faith. Increase your faith in yourself and rid yourself of fear. Jettison negative talk from your mind, and replace it with positive affirmations. Believe in yourself, that you can change, will change, and watch yourself CHANGE!
When Should I Change?
When you have identified the underlying issues of why you have not changed up to this point. And when you have the desire to act on fixing that issue.
Until then, you may be able to use pure willpower to move through some positive change, but willpower will eventually decrease. And if the issues of why you live an unhealthy lifestyle are not addressed you will be right back where you started.
You should change when you have identified you are ready. and here are some tips;
You must do all you can to prepare for change. Here is where you need to be brutally honest with yourself.
Find the things that you need to change. This is where you need to identify those areas in your life that are holding you back and work on changing them.
Make small changes at first so you don’t overwhelm yourself. Set yourself up for success and then build upon it.
Let the new changes move in! Clear out some space in that brain of yours and let the changes you want to make move in. Move out the old, crappy stuff, and focus on setting up your new life of change.
Learn how to cope with change. In the beginning of your changes you may feel like slipping back into old habits. Here is where you need to learn new ways to deal with past issues to help prevent this.
And finally make the new positive changes a part of your life. Your bad habits may have gotten you to this point, but they did it over many repetitions, sometimes we have years and years of bad behavior. Don’t expect to fix it quickly it will take hundreds of times to make your new habits stick.
So when should you change? The question is easily answered as you start to change, execute the things you want to change perfectly, they will add up quickly and voila then when you should change, will be then NOW!
So you have started to change your mindset, now you need to work on Step 2, getting your support network ready.
So lets see what that is all about…