Weight loss is a skill, and like any skill, it can be learned. But often, that learning process comes through trial in error. Often, the ability to stay positive or not through the trial in error period separates the people who are successful with weight loss from those who are not.

How To Cultivate Positive Thinking for Weight Loss

1. Realize That with Every Mistake There is a Lesson to be Learned

Every time you make a mistake, such as eating something you weren’t supposed to, there is a lesson to be learned. Realize that every lesson learned puts you one step closer to reaching your weight loss dreams, and if you stick with weight loss long enough, those lessons are going to mean something.

Now sometimes, it can take some digging to find the lesson learned.

See the good even in the bad when you have a bad experience. For example, let’s say you cheated on your diet. Try to figure out why you cheated on your diet and what you will do in the future to prevent that from happening.

Then instead of focusing on the fact that you cheated on your diet and gained a couple of pounds, focus on what lessons you learned. Doing this puts a positive spin on a negative situation, as weight gain is temporary but learning a new lesson.

 

2. Set Bench March Goals

Set smaller shorter-term goals that highlight your weight loss success. That is why it’s good to set short-term, more immediate goals. So, for example, instead of losing 40 pounds over the next couple of months, you can change your goal to losing 1 or 2 pounds every two weeks.

 

3. Avoid Negativity

Try to avoid, mitigate, or better manage any source of negative emotions. You want to prevent yourself from being in a negative headspace because when a person is in a negative headspace, they’re more emotional and impulsive and less objective & disciplined, which can cause them to cheat on their diet.

Another reason why being in a negative headspace can cause someone to cheat on their diet is that they may eat foods outside their diet for comfort when they are in a negative headspace.

 

4. Visualize The Benefits of Achieving Your Goals

Remind yourself why and the benefits of your why in a positive way. For example, let’s say you want to lose weight to have more energy when you spend time with your children. Maybe whenever you play games or sports with your kids, you always find yourself getting tired, and you want to have more energy.

Visualize yourself more in shape and playing tag, basketball, or soccer, and being full of energy. Visualizing the rewards and benefits of achieving your weight loss goals can keep you in a positive mind frame and keep you eager to achieve your weight loss goals.

 

5. Learn To Become More Centered

Learn to become more present. When you’re present, you’re more engaged in what you’re doing, and you have a more positive take on what you’re doing as well, which can be very beneficial if you’re trying to lose weight.

 

6. Fill Your Day With Things That You Love & Are Passionate About

Fill your day with activities you are passionate about and love doing. Doing things you love will keep you in a positive mood and give you a dopamine boost, so you don’t have to turn to food, and they will keep you from getting bored, which is another reason people turn to food.

 

7. Give Yourself Things To Do In The Evening

Many weight-loss diets have certain cut-off times, and it’s easy to start craving foods and to start getting down on your diet because all you think about is how hungry you are.

That’s why it’s very important that you are doing something engaging and fulfilling if you’re on a diet that requires you to stop eating at a certain time, so you have something to occupy doing times when you get food cravings. These food cravings should occur less over time.

 

8. Do Things To Take The Negative Emotions Out Of Working Out

One of the ways that you increase positive emotions is to do things that put you in a negative emotional state, such as dreading working out. You can try to make working out a more pleasurable experience. For example, you can hold off listening to music and only allow yourself to listen to music when you work out

 

9. Learn How To Become a Happier Person In General

Don’t just learn how to stay positive when it comes to weight loss. Learn to stay positive and happy in general.

When one makes the decision to lose weight, it can be a very exciting time, and in the first couple of days, they are able to follow their new weight loss diet. However, what tends to happen is the realization that weight loss does not happen overnight.

The ability to stay patient after the honeymoon excitement wears off will often separate the successful people from the unsuccessful people.

When losing weight, your level of patience may be the deciding factor in your weight loss success.

It’s important to be patient with both the weight loss process itself, as weight loss is a slow process, and it’s also important to be patient with yourself when you have setbacks. This article will discuss how to become more patient with the process and how to become more patient when you make mistakes.

How To Become More Patient

1. Create A Diet You Can Live With

Take your time to create a diet that satisfies you. If you find foods, you crave but aren’t a good fit for your everyday diet, find compatible, healthy, weight loss-friendly options.

2. Handle Mistakes Correctly/ Master Handling Setback

Mistakes will happen, and it’s important that you handle them correctly. Here is how you handle mistakes:

•Don’t Get Frustrated

When you cheat, don’t get frustrated; understand that weight loss is about carving out a system that works for you and comes through trial and error.

•Look On The Bright Side

When you make a mistake, you are always learning more about yourself, even if it’s a mistake you made before it’s being reaffirmed.

3. Recognize If You Need to Put Weight Loss On The Backburner

For some, seeing your weight and getting constant feedback may be motivational. For others, it may be good to put weight loss on the back burner and take the emotion out of weight loss. Analyze the impact focusing on weight loss is having on you. If you find that it makes you impatient and antsy, then put it on the back burner. 

4. Give Yourself Smaller Short-term Goals

Waiting to achieve a weight loss goal for a substantial amount of weight loss in the far-off future can be quite a weight. It could be beneficial to make smaller, shorter-term weight loss goals.

If you’re on a slow and steady diet, it can be a little frustrating. Because sometimes, you feel like you are moving at a snail’s pace and want to lose weight tomorrow.

However, the fact that your diet is so slow in steady may be the very reason why it is more likely to work long-term.

There are studies that show many people regain weight after losing it (1). A lot of it has to do with the fact people aren’t able to sustain their weight efforts.

So don’t gripe about the fact that losing weight is taking you a long time. Reframe it to where you are proud of yourself for maintaining a downward weight loss trend for so long because that means you found a system that works for you that you can maintain.

5. Work To Improve Yourself In Other Areas

Often, if you’re improving yourself in other areas alongside weight loss, it can take the pressure and the focus off weight loss.

 

 

It’s important to understand that being able to lose weight and being able to lose weight and keep it off is not the same thing.  There is a study that shows that 80 percent of people who lose weight gain it back.  In this article we teach you to create long-term weight loss success.

Your whole or entire approach has to be different when you are trying to lose weight and keep it off.

Anybody can lose weight, but it takes a certain understanding to lose it off and keep it off completely. In this article, we will talk about what you need to learn or know to lose weight and keep it off completely.

 

How To Create a Sustainable Weight Loss Lifestyle

 

1. Change Your Mindset About Weight Loss

Focus on your consistency, not your weight. Don’t get caught in the day to day up & down roller coaster about your weight. Look at things big picture how well are you at maintaining your day to day weight loss habits, and what could you do to improve your consistency.

A lot of people are very short-sighted or have a very narrow vision when it comes to weight loss. For example, let’s say hop on the scale and see a number there so focused on how do I lose this extra weight and get it down to my normal number instead of asking why did I gain this weight in the first place and is this the first time this has happened or is this a trend.

It’s important to understand that weight loss success is not about achieving a specific number. It’s about achieving a certain lifestyle.

If you ask a person what their weight loss goals are, they will often give you a number. The number is the ideal weight they hope to achieve.

However as we already indicated, studies have shown that around 80 percent of people who lose weight gain it back.

So that person who is saying that their goal is to lose a certain amount of weight, odds are if you were to wave a magic wand and make them their ideal weight, odds are they would gain it back.

What that indicates is that with weight loss, the focus should not be a specific number. The focus should be on creating a sustainable lifestyle.

 

2. Create A Diet That You Live With

Focus on creating a diet that you can live with long-term, not a diet that is going to get your results tomorrow. Because again, let’s say you go on a strict diet that gets you to your ideal weight; if it’s a diet that you can’t maintain, then it’s just a matter of time before you start to regain the weight that you’ve lost. So again, when it comes to diet, we don’t want to focus on the speed of diet of how fast we’re losing weight. We want to focus on consistency in our ability to maintain the diet.

 

3. Learn How To Deal With Negative Emotion

Learn how to deal with negative emotions in a way where you don’t have to resort to eating food.

 

4. Don’t Allow Lifestyle Changes Throw You

Often something will happen in our professional or personal life, where we start to give that more focus, and weight loss takes a back seat. For example, you may have added pressure to reach a certain goal at work. Often when lifestyle changes or events like this occur, we put weight loss on a backseat and focus on the event, and so you no longer care about losing weight or your diet. All your focus is on the goal. You need to realize that you want to maintain weight loss even when unplanned life events happen. Because if every time a major change happens, you stop weight loss, you’re going to be in a perpetual state of weight loss increase and decline. Also, this is why it’s important not to create a diet that is not too strict so when a lifestyle change happens and you’re no longer as enthusiastic about weight loss, you can still maintain it.

 

5. Ask Why

Think about why you have cheated on your diet in the past. Then set up a game plan for dealing with this in the future. Also, every time you cheat on your diet, always ask why.

 

6. Create Structure

Weight Loss is all about creating a structure and routine be mindful of when things throw you off your routine so they don’t throw you off your routine in the future.

Weight loss is not just about changing physically; it’s about improving mentally as well. A person will not go from a newbie dieter who struggles to maintain a diet & exercise regime for more than a couple of weeks to an experienced dieter who can lose weight and keep it off without some lessons learned and mental growth.

Below is a list of lessons and mental shifts that help speed up the learning curve when it comes to weight loss.

 

Important Mental Shifts For Weight Loss Success

 

1. Learn To Handle Set Backs Better

Learning to handle setbacks can be broken up into 3 parts that we will discuss bellow:

Stop Being Overly Critical:

Messing up when you are start weight loss is totally normal just as making mistakes when you learn anything is. What happens is as you go along you get better and better and start making mistakes less and less.

However, alot of times people want to prove to themselves that they know how to lose weight and that they have finally found a system that works for them.  You want to stop putting so much pressure on yourself to have everything figured out when you start your weight loss journey, because more than likely you will have an where you mess up and eat something you’re not supposed to.

What happens to people put a lot of pressure on themselves in the beginning is that when they experience a setback it becomes emotionally demoralizing and takes the wind out of there sales to the point where they may stop dieting because it’s too emotionally stressful. 

Then these people may reattempt dieting sometime in the future and the same process happens all over again, and they never get out of the beginner phase.

It’s understandable to be eager lose weight however, a lot of times important to realize that one is not doing themselves any favors by putting too much pressure on themselves in the beginning.

Come into a weight diet humble and realizing that you don’t be know everything and be ready to learn and grow. What happens when you come in with a more relaxed willing to learn mindset, is tha you can make those beginner mistakes without them causing you stop dieting.

 

Start Finding The Root Cause:

When every you make a mistake, you don’t want to beat yourself up over it, but you do want to learn from it.

Whenever you have occasions when you cheat on your diet, don’t just kick yourself for breaking your diet and tell yourself you won’t do it again.

Take the time to figure out what happened and why you cheated on your diet. Because if you don’t figure out what caused you to cheat on your diet, chances are you are going to cheat on your diet for the same reason in the future.

Sometimes you may have to think very analytically to find the root cause of why you cheated on your diet.

For example, if you cheated on your diet, maybe the reason is that something happened earlier in the day that put you in an emotional state and your cheating on your diet was a response to that.

Once you identify your triggers, come up with game plans so that these triggers don’t cause you to cheat on your diet in the future.

 

Keep A Record:

It may be a good idea to keep up record of your mistakes and ways to prevent them in the future because it may be more than one mistake that is causing you eat something against your diet.

You may want to go back to your journal occasionally so do you don’t forget.  Because if you forget something triggers you to eat something against your diet you could end up making that mistake again.

 

2. Create Weight Loss Friendly Ecosystem For Yourself

Create a weight loss friendly ecosystem for yourself this can be broken down in 5 parts.

Have A Engaging Schedule:

It’s important to understand how lifestyle can affect weight and eating habits. You want to have a schedule where you are doing things you enjoy and are passionate about, and that give you an endorphin boost. For example, if you are passionate about dancing and it always lifts you make sure you incorporate dance into your schedule.

The reason is that a lot of times, individuals look forward to eating is that they get an endorphin rush from it. However, if one has other things that they are doing that give them an endorphin boost, there is less emphasis and importance on food.

 

Have A Full Schedule:

It’s important not just have things that you are passionate about in your schedule but also you want to have a schedule that doesn’t have a lot of gaps where you have a lot of spare time where you have nothing to do.

The reason being is when you are on a diet especially at the beginning your body is used to its old eating habits even if the old eating habits were unhealthy, and it will send signals in the form of cravings when you start to eat less.  If you have a lot of free time where you’re not giving your mind anything to focus on. It can be very inclined to start focusing on these craving which can cause you to eat something that is not part of your weight loss diet.

Additionally, if you identify a particular time of day when you particularly struggle with food cravings, you want to definitely make sure you have something scheduled during that time so that you’re giving your mind something else to focus on. You want to develop a schedule that helps you achieve your weight loss goals.

 

Learn To Handle Negative Emotions:

If one learns to handle negative emotions, they can a lot of times prevent setbacks and occasions where they cheat on their diets. This is drawing off what was just talked about degerming root cause when you feel a negative emotion and also just working to create a better emotional ecosystem for one’s self.

Have A Good Support System:

It was just discussed how negative emotions and emotional volatility can hinder weight loss. Therefore, make sure you have people around you friend and family that promote good emotions in you. Also, it can be a great idea to join an exercise class for several reasons. Often times when you we choose to weight, we are really fired up, but that fire deflates over time. Going to an exercise class can keep that fire going and it also be an excellent support group of people who are working to achieve the same or similar goals.

 

Work on Becoming More Positive Towards Weight Loss:

Weight loss can test one emotionally. For example, one can get discouraged when they make a mistake or become impatient with the pace at which they’re losing weight. It’s important not to give in to these negative emotions and to stay positive.

 

3. Start focusing on Longevity Instead of Short-Term Results

When people decide to start a weight loss diet, they’re often very excited about losing weight, so they choose a diet that will help them reach their weight loss goals the quickest.

Often, they may take on overly restrictive diets that they are not content with in the name of trying to lose weight as fast as possible. It’s important to resist this urge. Because if you are taking on a diet that doesn’t leave you feeling content, it’s very likely that you will quit the diet and regain a lot of weight you have worked so hard to lose.

Instead, create a diet that you can live with, and take your time cultivating this diet. Often it will come about through trial in error with figuring out what does work and what does not work for you.

 

4. Realize Diets Don’t Have To Be Horrible Thing

It’s important to realize that dieting does not have to be this horrible thing where you’re constantly eating foods and meals that you don’t like

Sometimes, when you start a diet, it is a good idea to cut out certain foods because they’re too unhealthy. However, in many instances, you can eat the same foods when you’re on a weight loss diet, just in smaller portions to lower the food’s calorie intake.

To fill the hunger void of eating less of the food you like, it’s good to make a fruit, vegetable, or both a part of every meal.

That way your meal can consist of the food you like, but in smaller portions and fruit, vegetables, or both.
Fruits and vegetables tend to be nutritious and low in calories.

Therefore, adding fruits and vegetables to your meals will not only make your meals more nutritious and complete, and they will also make the meal much more filling without adding a lot of additional calories to your meal, thereby filling hunger void left by eating less of the foods that you like.

Having a diet where your meals consist of food that you like and healthy sides is a diet that is tasting and filling, and this is a diet that you can sustain.
The point is you never have to go without a meal without at least not eating something you like.

Learning to create a diet that you enjoy and that serves the purpose of weight loss may take some time.

Every once you will find gold nuggets of food choices that you enjoy eating, are healthy, and weight loss friendly but that comes from experimenting with food.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When learning to lose weight, we are taught what to do physically. For example, we are taught how to diet and exercise.

However, we’re rarely taught what to do mentally; we are not how to manage our thoughts & emotions and the importance of managing thoughts & emotions.

This lack of focus on how the mind can impact weight loss success is unfortunate because often our lack of control over our thoughts is the very thing that can present one of the biggest challenges regarding weight loss.

A great way to gain more control over thoughts and feeling so that you can experience success with weight loss is through meditation.

 

How Meditation Can Help with Weight Loss

1. Can Keep You More Focused

When you meditate it keeps you present and more focused on achieving objectives and you are less likely to get distracted.  You are better focused and motivated to diet and exercise.

More goal oriented when your mind is focused.

Resist Cravings and Urges

Having lack of control of your thoughts and not having the willpower to resist your thoughts all have to do with your mind not being centered. When you have thoughts such as not wanting to work out or urges to create resist food.

More Inclined to Exercise

Exercise requires discipline when you practice meditation it makes you more centered so you can be objective and discipline in achieving weight loss goals and less likely to give in urges not to exercise.

Recapp: When your mind is centered and focused thoughts that are counterproductive (such as reasons of not wanting to exercise or reason to cheat on your diet) have less on impact and are less effective and should be less able to influence you when your mind is centered and focused compared to when your mind isn’t.

 

2. Increases Dopamine

Meditation can help keep you in a more positive and emotional state.

When you are in positive state you are less likely to get down and on yourself and discouraged and do things that are counterproductive to weight loss.

There are studies that show a correlation between being in negative state and unplanned eating or emotional eating (ib).

Meditation can boost dopamine (ib). When you are happier you tend to be more optimistic about being able to achieve goals and when you are down you don’t seem to be as optimistic and often your thoughts turn to reality which is why you want to control your thoughts.  Often our thoughts are a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Therefore, meditation is a great way to stop you from getting discouraged.

 

3. Better Handle Stress and Negative Emotions:

Although meditation does keep you in a more naturally happier upbeat state life will happen and there will be things that cause you get down. In these situations, you still want to meditate as it can help you manage better emotions better.

Therefore, meditation can prevent you from feeling down, but it allows you to deal with negative emotions better once you get down.

It’s very important to get control of your emotional state. Because often time the more emotional the less objective discipline and will power we have and more impulsive we are. Also, if we have negative emotions, we may use foods for an escape.

So, if you’re dealing with stress at work mediation can help so that you don’t turn to food for comfort and mess up your diet.

One of the major emotions or feeling that cause people to eat is stress. Meditation has been shown to reduce stress.

Better Able to Bounce Back from Setbacks and Curve Balls of Life

You will unavoidably encounter setbacks and life will through you curve balls. So, if you’re dealing with a major challenge meditation can help you stick your weight loss process and whether the storm. Weight loss can keep you centered through the problem, so you don’t turn to food for comfort and your weight loss doesn’t suffer.

 

 

Different Ways To Meditation

There are number of different ways to meditate. Popular ways to meditate include:

Sitting In a Spot Meditation:
•Sit in a spot
•Fold Your Legs
•Focus On Image
•Blank Out All Thoughts
•Do this for a couple of minutes

Guided Breathing Meditation:
•Sit in Spot
•Close Your Eyes
•Focus on breathing
•Block out all thoughts
•Do this for a couple of minutes

 

Things To Be Mindful of When Meditating

There have been reports that people do experience certain things such as twitches and discomfort. It’s very important to keep an eye out for those things and be mindful of those things.

 

Additional Things You Can Do to Become More Centered

Meditation is not the only thing you can do to make sure yourself more centered. You can also make lifestyle changes.  Here are additional things you can do to make yourself more centered:

Try to Create a Stable Emotional Ecosystem:

Try to eliminate or mitigate negativity by Identifying sources of negative emotions and avoid or manage those things better. Have a schedule full of activities that keep you engaged.

Learn to Better Manage Emotions:

You may find yourself getting a lot of counterproductive thoughts and feelings then it’s time to exercise. Using music can be a great way to encourage you to exercise and can thwart off a lot of thoughts about not wanting to exercise. You can even use music as a reward system when you are only allowed listen to music when you exercise.

The ability to always look on the bright side is so important when it comes to weight loss.

 

 

It’s important to understand that getting physical exercise is a healthy way to combat stress.

When you’re stressed-out exercise may the last thing you want to because you have other things on your mind.

Maybe what’s on your mind is trouble at work, a relationship problem, or some other negative event, and they just quit exercising.  They quit exercising because they find the problem that they’re dealing with too upsetting, and they don’t feel like doing burdensome activities like exercising. 

However, what these people don’t realize is that exercising is one of the best activities that they can do when they’re going through a tough time.

In this article, you’re going to learn why it’s important to maintain your exercise regime when you’re going through hard times, and how maintaining your exercise regime will help you get through those hard times.

 

How Exercising Helps You Deal with Stress

1. Relieves Stress by Releasing Endorphins

Another reason why exercising is the perfect activity to do when you encounter a problem is exercising is a great stress reliever. 

Exercising triggers the release of endorphins.  Endorphins improve your mood and calm you down when you’re stressed out.  That’s why you want to continue to exercise consistently when you’re going through a tough time, and you’re stressed out because exercising will make you feel less stressed. 

Once you’re in a calm state, you will be much more effective at resolving a problem, then when you were in your stressed and emotional state.

 

2. Takes Your Mind Off the Problem / Great for Anxiety/Gives Outlet for Nervous Energy

The worst thing you can do when a problem occurs is dwell on it because dwelling on the problem will only make you more upset.  Instead of dwelling on the problem you, want to do a constructive activity that will take your mind off the problem.

Exercising is the perfect activity to do to take your mind off the negative situation.  Working out will keep you going so you’re not sitting around dwelling on the problem.

If have anxiety in general, having a regular exercise routine can help.  Sometimes we can make poor decisions because we are in an emotional less objective state.

 

3. Exercising Gives You a Sense of Improvement

When you’re exercising, you’re improving yourself; you’re becoming more fit and healthier, which is why it’s important to maintain your exercise regime when you’re going through hard times.  You see, when you’re going through hard times, you can sometimes feel like you’re in a rut. 

Exercising is a great reminder that even though you might be having a problem or minor setback in one area of your life, you are improving in other areas of your life.  This helps put things into context and into perspective.  Exercise keeps you moving and keeps you going.

 

4. It will Help You Deal with The Stressful Situation Better

When you look at all the benefits that exercising when you’re going through a stressful situation provides, it all adds up to you will be be able to handle the stressful situation better.

When it does come time to do something the problem you will usually be less stressed and will be able to handle the situation better.

 

Conclusion

Day to day challenges is an unavoidable part of life, and they’re not going to stop happening when you start trying to lose weight.  You need to understand and anticipate that you will run into random life challenges when you’re on your weight loss journey.  These challenges could be issues at work, relationship problems, or random life events. 

It’s important that you make a mental decision in advance that when these challenges do come up, you are going to stick to your exercise regime.  Sticking to your exercise regime during hard times will allow you to achieve weight loss and will help you get over the problem.