The Power of The Mind on Your Weight Loss Journey
One of the most important lessons you can learn about losing weight is that treating your body right is only half the battle. If you want to make real progress towards your fitness goals, you have to address your mindset, as well as the many ways that the brain can affect your motivation, energy levels, and long-term commitment. Here, we’re going to look at some of the ways to use the power of the mind to improve your chances of successful, sustainable weight loss, as well as some of the ways you stop the mind from sabotaging you, as well.
Recognise the brain as the real starting point
Before you start committing to any food choices or workout regimes, you need to make sure that you’re in the right mindset. Our complex history with food and our bodies can affect how we eat, how we respond to hunger, and how we see ourselves. Emotional eating is one of the clearest examples of these. To begin with, make sure that you have clear goals, not an abstract desire of what you want to meet. By setting SMART fitness goals, such as reaching a certain weight or being able to do so much cardio a week, you give yourself a fixed point to aim at, which then makes it easier to apply practical knowledge to your interior aims.
Banish the fear of failure
One of the worst habits that can set people way back in their fitness and weight loss journeys is the all-or-nothing mindset. This is the mindset that sees every stumble along the way as an abject failure. Guilt is one of the worst motivators when it comes to long-term health changes to how you eat and live. Understand and acknowledge that sometimes, you’re not going to reach your goal. You’re going to indulge in a bad habit, or you’re even going to fall short, even when you’re trying your best. Being able to pick yourself back up, dust yourself off, and get back into it even when you fall is what makes habits consistent.
Understand the role of hunger noise
For how helpful discipline can be, we tend to put a little too much weight on it when talking about our relationship with food. When thoughts of food are becoming overwhelming, and you feel yourself weakening to cravings, this isn’t just a lack of discipline. These are called hunger noises, and they are very legitimate responses to biological functions in the body. Our hormones can cause us to begin developing food cravings, which can even lead us to feel low energy if we don’t indulge. Weight loss injectables focus on controlling these internal signals, enhancing our satiety signals so that we don’t have to eat as much to feel full or energetic throughout the day. They aren’t a weight loss fix, alone, but they can definitely wipe out one of the most consistent difficulties when trying to make dietary changes.
Stress is the enemy
Making changes to your lifestyle can be a stressful enough process; you don’t need anything else making it more difficult on you. However, issues like not getting enough time for self-care, nor not getting as much sleep as you need at night, can increase stress. This, in turn, can lead to habits like emotional eating. Even if it doesn’t, a bad mood over the long-term makes it much harder to stay disciplined and committed, making it easier for us to experience failures along the way, and for those failures to impact us more deeply. Addressing the issue with stress relief techniques, as well as healthy lifestyle changes like improving your sleep, can make healthy lifestyle changes much easier to implement and sustain.
Awareness improves control in the long-run
When we’re trying to change the habits that define our health, it’s important that we know and are honest about what those habits are. It’s easy for us to exaggerate or even mislead ourselves when it comes to diet and exercise, creating narratives in our heads that don’t often reflect the real truth. This is why journaling your health journey can be so effective. Not only do you record proof of the changes you’re making, but when you’re taking the time to write down everything you eat and every time you move, you begin to be much more mindful of those habits in the first place, which can make it easier to cut out the bad ones.
We are complex creatures, an alchemy of mind and body, and without addressing both halves of the whole, you make it much easier on yourself to fail. The tips above can help you prevent that.
Top photo by Clark Douglas on Unsplash
