In reality you will never reach your goal in this way and if you will it is impossible for you to keep the results. Most probably you will gain all the weight back plus few extra pounds after you finish your diet.
If you are losing more that 0.5-1kg a week you are not loosing fat, you are eating up your own muscle mass which will decrease your metabolic rate and not only that you metabolic rate will also automatically decrease even more with your limited food intake. The more different diets you try the more difficult it will be for you to loose weight and the more easy it will be for you to put on more and more weight. In the end you are hardly eating but still putting on weight. The end result will be that when you stop dieting you will not only end up with a crashed down metabolism but also a feeling of failure and depression. This is why diets don’t work.
Successful weigh loss will start when you accept that it is not a matter of loosing as much weight as possible in the shortest time possible. Successful weigh loss starts when you accept and learn to change your lifestyle in small steps.
It will all start in your mind. As matter of fact the most important factor in successful weight loss are actually psychological not physical and the most obvious difference between someone who has lost weight and kept it off and someone hasn’t is their attitudes and their belief in their selves.
As a sports and rehabilitation counselor, I belong to the new school of therapists that focus on teaching people how to use the power of the mind. I believe that you have to look at weight loss as a challenge not as a problem.
Along with my associates Katarina and Ahmed, I am now offering a weight loss program called 8 weeks to a new you where mental training plays an important role.
The program combines mental training, behavior modification, nutrition and exercise all which are important in combination for successful weight loss.
What most people don’t know about is that our mind affects our bodies. Our mind affects our emotions, our hormons, the nervous system, the endocrine and muscular system and so on. Therefore we must see our bodies and mind as a whole unit unpossible to separate.
If you keep your focus on how fat and ugly you are, your goals to become slim and beautiful will be very difficult to reach. In contrast if you have confidence in your self and you really believe that you are going to succeed you probably will.
Now believing in success is not as easy and that is where mental training is especially helpful. Mental training is all about using the power of the mind. With mental training you can develop and learn how to use your potential fully, you can increase your well being, get healthier and in fact reach any goal you have in life.
By thinking about something you start a reaction process in your body. The body doesn’t really feel the difference between what is happening for real and what is happening in our mind. Therefore the body will start a chain of recation only by the thought itself.
This thought can both make us stronger and weaker. If you think positivily, you not only feel better mentally but also physically. The same thing happens if your thoughts are negative they will affect you both mentally and physically.
When you understand how your mind affects your feelings, you will realize how your mind also affects your cravings and longings. If you now sit down, close your eyes and imagine the biggest and nicest chocolate cake you ever tasted, what will happen. Do you feel a craving now that you didn’t feel before?? Do you understand now how much your mind affects your feelings??
As mental training is about using the power of the mind it is very helpful in getting control over your cravings as well.
I used mental training for the first time when faced a situation that I didn’t think I could handle. This happened during my studies in the university of sport in Stockholm. During the winter we took a course learning how to ice skate. To finish the course we not only had to leatn how to skate but we also had to learn to safe our selves in case we would fall through the ice into the water.
As I have all my life been terrified of cold water the thought of walking on a thin ice just to fall down and practice how get back up was more than I could bear. Keep in mind that outside was at least 10 degrees and we were supposed to change our wet clothes outside on the ice. I decited to try mental training. I practiced visualisation for 2 weeks and when the day came I was still nervous. I stood on the ice and waited for my turn. While I was waiting I tried not to look at the other kids who got up with difficulties screaming of being cold.
My turn came and like in a dream I was back on the ice without even feeling that I fell into the water. Still like hypnotised I changed my wet clothes without feeling anything, not cold not scared, nothing. I remember though thinking that this was too easy and that I wouldn’t mind doing it again.
Afterwards I was convinced that my training mentally had got me through this successfully. This made me believe in the importance of using the power of the mind. After this I have used mental training when ever I face a situtation that I find difficult to deal with and in every case has it helped me to get me where I wanted.
I have used mental training for the last 8 years and I find it very helpful
How can you use mental training to loose weight?
- One of the reason we get fat is stress and with mental training you learn how to relax.
- When we use mental training we are in better touch with our selves and our unconsciousness. When we understand how our thoughts affect our feelings we can learn to control our feelings by altering our thoughts.
- With mental training we will better understand how our current lifestyle has made us overweight, and a change always starts with recognizing the reasons behind our overweight.
- With mental training we build up our mental and physical strength and we learn to believe more in our selves. This makes it easier for us to loose weight. It is crucial to believe to succeed.
- We practice our concentration abilities and it is easier for us to concentrate on what we need to do to loose weight. If we keep forgetting that we are changing our lifestyle we wont get far.
- We can with mental training change the negative feelings and thoughts that have been preventing us from succeeding before. We will see clearer the benefits of loosing the extra pounds and we will see our new lifestyle as a poitive change to our life.
- Our lifestyle is inprinted into our unconsciousness and it is something that controls the way we live our life. Without mental training these informations or habits will make it more difficult for us to change. It is always easier to follow old habits than new ones. By using mental training you are able to change this old information faster and this will make it easier for you to change your lifestyle. You prepare yourself mentally and in that way the new good habits will sooner become automatic.
- Maybe the most important in mental trainng is to change the image you have on yourself. A positive selfimage will always make the trip to success easier. With a positive selfimage you will not doubt your abilities and therefore you will succeed.
The power of the mind is greater than many of you think, it can help you to build yourself up both mentally and physically but in the same manner it can break us down.
It is important that you use mental training to set up reasonable goal that are realistic. It is not enough to want, you need to believe and believing is the key to success.
If you don’t believe in yourself nobody will.