Article written May 2005 by Helga Marin
As we all know and experienced it, this time of the year is definitely the most popular time to go on diets and start new exercise routines. How about doing it right this time? How about starting something today that will put you into better shape and make you feel better about yourself for a long time to come?
Starting one more new diet or trying one more new exercise routine hoping to get into your bikini shape in few weeks is just not going to happen. And, instead of feeling better about yourself, it is more likely that you will be left with a feeling of worthlessness after failing one more time to get into shape.
Quick fix is what everybody wants but nobody gets. You read success stories about people who lost 20 kg in 2 months and they feel great, what about today, where are they today and how are they doing? Do you know how many of those who loose weight quickly can actually keep it off?
Scientifically if you are loosing more that 0.5-1kg a week you are not loosing fat, you are eating up your own musclemass.
As muscles are metabolic active, reduced muscle mass will affect your metabolic rate in a negative way, and going on different diets is a sure way to put on more and more weight. In the end you will find that although you are hardly eating you are still putting on weight. To top it, dieting cannot only crash down your metabolism but can also leave you with a feeling of failure and depression. This is why diets don’t work.
Successful weighloss will start when you accept that it is not a matter of loosing as much weight as possible in the shortest time possible. A successful weighloss 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 weightloss 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 believe in their selves.
According to Helga if you 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 your 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. Threfore 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 posetivily 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.
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.
Written by Helga Marin