Today, we’ll continue our discussion of how your thoughts can lead to permanent weight loss. We’ll break it down into 3 separate areas, but you’ll need to pull them together to work as a team.
If you recall from our previous session: The only way to achieve lasting and permanent weight loss is to change your thinking.
This is what I call Mental Fitness.
However, thinking is NOT THE ONLY factor towards weight loss.
But you will NEVER achieve weight loss without changing your thinking.
In other words, thinking is the first step, but it is not the only step that you need to take.
If you skip this step, and move on to the other steps, then you will eventually fail, and gain your weight back.
Some people who succeed permanently, actually don’t realize that they have changed their thinking.
However, it may have taken them far longer, and have had a bigger struggle to lose weight, since they had not addressed their thinking first and foremost.
Here’s how this works.
Only Your Subconscious Mind Will Drive You To Success or Failure, Nothing Else Will
Your thoughts control your actions. You are an independent person and for the most part, you decide exactly what you’re going to do from 1 minute to the next. From one day to the other, year after year, after year.
Ultimately, it is your physical action that will affect your physical body.
No action means, nothing happens, no change, no weight loss.
Bad action means, bad consequences, bad weight gain.
Good action means, good consequences, healthy weight loss.
As simple as this may seem, virtually everyone I talk to, misses the point:
There is nothing that controls your actions, but your thoughts. (I’m assuming you don’t have a gun to your head, nor are you caged in a prison cell deprived of food and activity.)
This is not about “will power”, or lack of self-discipline. I will discuss that later.
But I hope you’re with me on the idea that your “mental self” drives and controls your “physical self”. Your mental self includes both your conscious and subconscious mind.
It is your subconscious mind that will actually determine your final destination within your lifetime.
The Three Members Of Your Mental Fitness Team
If you’re with me, then let’s break down the mental self into 3 distinct levels:
- Logical
- Emotional
- Spiritual
Let’s discuss each in more detail:
Logical – This is the seat of your knowledge, and you feed this with education and experience. This can be anything from the books you read, the advice you’ve been given by a friend, the formal education you’ve received (or lack thereof), or the humiliating embarrassment of being teased when you were an overweight teenager.
Emotional – There are 4 basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear and anger. The root of every decision is based on emotion. More often that not, you will justify your emotional decision using your logical thinking.
Because you are a human being, you are driven by emotion, no matter how logical you think you are.
For example, you made a decision to lose weight, but it really is driven by fear (of the health consequences), or love (you want to be desired by your spouse), or a range of countless other emotions that you are feeling in your heart.
As I have mentioned, I’m an engineer by education, and for the most part of my professional career, I worked developing and managing computer applications and technologies.
When I make business management decisions today, I continue to use numbers to make decisions.
So how am I an emotionally-driven person?
At the back of my mind, I justify my “logical conclusions” by saying to myself: “It makes me feel good, it makes me feel smart.”
I say to myself: “My family and my business associates will respect me if I make smart decisions.”
Do you see my emotions driving my actions? If my business partners respect me, then they will LIKE me (a form of love).
Unless I am a complete robot, no matter how engineer-like my thinking is, I will always be driven by some basic emotion.
That goes the same for you too, with your weight loss thinking.
Spiritual – I don’t have a better word for this, but I am NOT referring to religion. Maybe I used this word because this has a certain element of personal faith.
Spiritual refers to your desire for something that is bigger than yourself or outside of your own personal needs (which is all based on one of the 4 basic emotions).
For example, you may want to lose weight so that you can be a good example to your children.
You don’t want anything in return, but you just wish for them to live a lifetime of health and wellness. You’re not even craving for them to respect you.
Or perhaps you volunteer at your local hospital, without seeking any monetary compensation or personal recognition.
You’ve decided to live a healthier lifestyle, so that you can relate better to the people that you meet at the hospital.
Note: In a real spiritual sense, where you want to be a self-less volunteer, you don’t even want people to know you, since it will give them the opportunity to thank you – and you’re not looking for that.
You are doing this because you simply have faith in the idea of goodness.
Begin Your Weight Loss Journey With Logical Education
The root of all evil FAT is either:
- Logical – You have been misinformed, deliberately or not, by the food and drug industry, the medical profession, or your social community
- Emotional – You blame every other thing in your life, and you’ve come up with 101 reasons why you’re overweight
Here’s how I can help you.
Logical – During this series of communications with you, I will share with you all the readings, personal experiences and interviews that I have conducted over the past decades.
Hopefully, you will break away from conventional thinking, and look at things from a different perspective.
I encourage you not just to accept things as they seem to be, but to ask why or why not?
I encourage you to relentlessly pursue your own education about health. Not just about weight loss, but about total wellness.
(Of course, there are practical limitations, and I don’t expect you to go get a medical degree or something.)
Open your eyes and ears to more information, and even take the next step to confirm and validate, whatever you have just learned.
Does it have to be this complicated? You might be saying: “I don’t want to learn all of this…I just want to lose the weight!”
In plain and direct language – YES you might be able to lose weight just by following my coaching program, without understanding the principles behind it.
Your body might respond in the same way that my own body responded to my health decisions.
After all, you can drive a car, and it takes you where you need to be, without understanding how the car works.
However, if you ran into problems, such as a flat tire, you can guesstimate how much farther you can drive the car, without damaging your wheels, since you might be in the middle of an extremely busy freeway.
That is, if you knew just enough about the physical properties of the car’s wheels and tires.
By the same token, if you understood the principles of health, then you can adjust accordingly, and what may not work for me, will actually work the best for you.
Does that make logical sense? I hope so. If not, let me know and I’ll “take two”.
Then Establish An Emotional Foundation
Please assume personal responsibility for ALL your health decisions.
More likely than not, none of your medical professional advisers will LOVE you more than you love YOURSELF.
That being the case, you will want to assume an ACTIVE role in deciding what is best for YOU, because:
- you love yourself, and you want to be loved by your spouse
- you fear the idea of being banished to a wheelchair
- you want to experience the joy of being outdoors with a boundless source of energy
- you want to avoid the sadness of financial ruin due to catastrophic health bills
- etc., etc., etc.
In other words, when you decide that you want to lose weight, your decision has to be taken from your heart.
You need to identify a burning desire that will passionately drive you to change your thinking about health.
This emotional starting point is where it begins for most people.
Your Backup: Identify Your Spiritual Purpose
If your emotions are not sufficient to get you going, then you will have to summon your spiritual energy.
Sometimes, for whatever deep psychological reason, it is difficult to love one’s self enough to make the decision to lose weight.
Note: I am not making any judgments with the following statements, but I simply want to bring them up as examples so that you can understand what I’m sharing with you.
Usually, there is an overriding fear factor that looms bigger than self-love.
Perhaps deep-down, you are afraid of being slim and attractive.
Or perhaps you want to appear big, so that you will not be bullied or intimidated by other people.
Or maybe you grew up in poverty where food was scarce. You just don’t want to experience that feeling again.
I am not going into this into any more detail, but here is my point:
If you cannot use your emotions to jump start your weight loss journey, then look for something outside of yourself, such as your children, your spouse, your parents, etc.
Use these outside expressions of your love to get you to your ideal weight – for their own benefit.
Summary
So let’s summarize the hierarchical steps of your weight loss journey:
Step 1 is mental fitness, step 2 is physical fitness.
You cannot jump to step 2 and expect to stay there permanently. You must establish Step 1 as a solid foundation, because it will dictate your everyday actions consciously; but most importantly: your subconscious behavior.
Most people do indeed jump to step 2, and whether they realize it or not, they have had to go back to step 1, before achieving permanent weight loss.
Once you’ve pulled off your weight loss goals how do you plan to keep the weight off? Remaining involved in a regular fitness-training program is a great idea. The last thing you want to do is put all that weight back on now that you’ve reached your perfect weight! Adding some muscle is a great way to stay in shape too. Check Joe Rogan and see how he built up his magnificent physique. We found out everything we could about the (as we like to call them) Joe Rogan Supplements so we could share them with you.
