Eight years ago during the 2010 Winter Olympics, I found out something about myself — I love watching the half pipe snowboarding competition (guys and girls). I could never do what they do … I’m too accident prone and a total chicken, but I get such a rush watching them swoosh back and fourth and doing flips and stunts.
The way many of them succeed is by winning the game inside their heads first. The same holds true for weight loss and fitness. I first wrote about it in 2014, and since this publication I have lost 70 pounds and gotten my health in check.
I began the journey of healthy living the Monday after Thanksgiving 2015 to restore my vision holistically. The vision is still a work in progress, but the weight loss and improved health are evident. Just two months in, two ladies I had class with the semester before in grad school came up to me after class one night and told me how great I looked and they could see how much weight I had lost. Then they asked me what I was eating … After giving them the short list of what I was (and currently am) eating and the long list of what I’m not, they decided they didn’t want to lose weight all that bad!
Change is not easy, but transformation is absolutely possible in any situation if you don’t give up! Let’s flashback and revisit this topic …
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(After) watching back stories on some of the American Olympic athletes the other night, the thing that struck me wasn’t all the hours they put into practicing their sport but that they all believed they were winners BEFORE they ever competed in an event — even the girl with no legs saw herself as a winner!
I’ve heard a lot about Sports Psychology and how successful athletes rehearse in their minds what they will do and how it will feel to win before ever competing.
Since the death of my birth father last month, I’ve started wondering if my battle with weight has anything to do with his rejection of me and how I’ve felt about myself as a result. (It’s important to note that I have never been athletic other than a stint at playing basketball in junior high and dancing throughout high school as a drill team officer.) The last time I talked with my birth father on the phone before inviting him to our wedding 7 years later, he said to me, “I saw photos of you at your sister’s wedding. I always knew you’d be the fat one!” At the time of my sister’s wedding, I was a size 14. At the time we spoke I was wearing sizes 4 and 2, but he wasn’t aware of this.
I carried around a wedding dress for 13 years hoping one day to meet the right man and wear it in our wedding. I did wear the dress, but it was quite snug. I must admit I had a total breakdown after getting the dress on standing there in that beautiful bridal room in front of the mirrors. I just couldn’t lose any weight before my wedding! Who does that?!? A woman’s wedding day is typically the number one motivator for losing weight, but I couldn’t do it. And there I was standing in front of those mirrors in front of my bridesmaids, the wedding coordinator, my future mother-in-law and my best friend’s mother crying as I said, “I’m the fat bride!” It was a real low moment …
Getting words stuck in your head that subconsciously work against your body isn’t abnormal. In his book I Can Make You Thin, Paul McKenna wrote, “I am continually surprised at the number of women (and occasionally men) I work with who realize that their initial weight gain coincided with a traumatic incident from the past, ranging from episodes of sexual abuse to seemingly innocuous teasing leading to embarrassment in front of their peers.”
My initial weight gain occurred about a year after that conversation with my birth father, and I’ve yet to fit into a size 4.
As you might expect, age and gender are determining factors in even getting started at being active. A 2002 study published in American Health Foundation and Elsevier Science found that competition was the most important perceived benefit for young men, while young women focused on health. The perceived barriers to participation in physical activity for older women and men were health concerns.
Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle author and fitness trainer Tom Venuto wrote about mindset on his Burn the Fat website. “The secret to change lies in your ability to intentionally program your unconscious mind, and when you understand this, change becomes as natural as driving a car or riding a bike,” he wrote. “Your life is the outward expression of the self-image that you hold of yourself, and you’ll always live up or down to it. If you’ve struggled to change in the past it is because you never really believed that you could be ‘that’ person. Permanent change happens from the inside out. Your beliefs, thoughts, and self-talk change and your body follows.”
So if “as a man thinks in his heart, so is he” as it says in the Bible, what can we do to change our thinking about weight and physical activity? Professional Weight Loss and Life Coach Irina Koles, MD offers the following advice on reprogramming your mind:
- Awareness/recognition — Before you even plan any actions, you need to be AWARE of your current situation, your extra weight, and health problems related to it.
- Admitting the situation — Admitting means that you are not only aware about your situation, but you’re taking responsibility for that; now you know where you are and are ready to take action.
- Focusing on values vs. results and the process — Focusing on dieting and avoiding fattening foods makes you think about the problem, not the solution. This is negative thinking because you are focusing on what you DON’T want – losing the food you have always liked. This will not take you far. Instead, focus on what you WANT, on your NEW desire, new behavior, and on your new CHOICE. Here you need a real REASON, a DESIRE which drives you to do that.
- Setting a clear goal — Setting goals correctly helps us to focus and to keep the commitment. They also keep us motivated and influence our success-oriented behavior. Your real goal should be: clear, specific and measurable, challenging but realistic and achievable, and stated in a present tense rather than in a future tense.
- Using imagination and feelings vs. willpower — Imagine yourself already DOING (your goal), and experiencing the feelings associated with it. Experience it completely, as if it has already happened. Live the life of your dreams NOW. Visualize yourself being a smaller size and feeling elegant and attractive. Imagine how you FEEL buying new clothes. FEEL how they touch your elegant body. Imagine choosing new styles and colors. Imagine how other people are looking at you, and enjoy it! Remember these feelings and let them inspire you.
Tom Venuto also recommends writing down your goals on a note card and carrying it around with you so you can look at it often. The Bible endorses this recommendation in Habakkuk 2:2 where it states, “And the LORD answered me: ‘Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.'”
Are you looking to approach weight loss and fitness differently? What’s your plan? Share your goals with us.
You can find these Flashback Friday blogs posted every Friday. If you want to know more about the healing and transformation process, you can get a free PDF sample chapter of “The Princess Guide to Healing a Broken Heart” by filling out the form in the sidebar on this page.
