There are a lot of people in the world like I was. Overweight. Unhappy. Doing all the right things and frustrated because it’s not working. Some are even morbidly obese like I was. Engaged in a never-ending cycle of diets, pills, shakes and potions.
Secretly ashamed because they know that all they have to do is eat less and exercise more and they just can’t do it for some reason. That’s what they’ve been told by so many people, so it must be right…….right?!
I definitely thought it was for many years. I was morbidly obese for most of my adult life up until around the age of 34 and I had been told my whole life all of those things and every time the shame grew a little bit more. One day I found myself at over 180kgs wondering how I was ever going to turn my life around.
About 11 years ago I found what I call my “WHY Power!” and used it to make lifestyle changes, one at a time to release 100kg naturally. I learned so much over that journey and one of the most important things I learned is that while food and exercise are important, it’s not where it all starts. There are other more important factors that we need to work on in order to be able to make the changes to our food and exercise long term, which is what needs to happen to not only lose the weight but to keep it off.
I quite often get asked for my biggest tips for weight loss success and that’s what I want to impart to you now because if you have these 3 things as your foundation, you will absolutely achieve whatever goal you set out to achieve!
The first thing is “WHY Power!” and I explain it using a quote from “The Secret Code Of Success” by Noah St John. Noah says, “You can’t fix a WHY TO problem with a HOW TO answer”. What this means, is that for everything we are trying to achieve, we have reasons why we want to and also reasons why we don’t want to do what we need to do to achieve that goal. If the reasons why we DON’T want to outweigh the reasons we DO want to, then we won’t succeed. This is one of the biggest lessons I learned from my own journey and it’s the thing that started the whole domino effect for me. When you have massive WHY Power! you don’t NEED willpower!
The second thing is belief and there are 4 parts to this. Firstly, we need to believe that what we are trying to achieve is possible in the first place and secondly, we need to believe that we ourselves can achieve it. Otherwise, why would we even try? Thirdly, we need to remove any limiting beliefs that are stopping us from achieving our goals and causing us to self-sabotage and lastly, we need to be open to our beliefs changing. So many of my beliefs surrounding food, exercise and our body have changed over the last 11 years and they continue to evolve and change!
The third thing is to focus on only making ONE change at a time. This is so important! How many times have we all gone on a strict diet and started a ridiculous exercise regime that we hate? How long does it last? It’s unsustainable, it becomes too hard and we give up. I had a lot of changes to make to my lifestyle and if I had tried to make them all at once, I would still be trying to lose the weight! I only ever focused on making one change at a time and by doing that, the changes turned into lifelong habits and now I don’t even have to think about them. I’m still in the process of making changes 11 years later and I use the same process. I choose a change to make, work on it until it becomes a habit, then and only then, do I pick the next one to work on.
So if you’re like I was, please know that for all these years it wasn’t you that has been the problem. There is way more to it than just eating less and moving more. You’re not lazy. You’re not lacking willpower.
If you’re ready, you can start by doing something different!:
1) Find your “WHY Power!”- Identify your WHYs AND your WHY NOTS.
2) Find your belief and identify your limiting beliefs.
3) Do some journaling around these things. It’s amazing the change that occurs just by creating awareness.
4) Identify changes you want to make, choose ONE to start working on, create a plan of how you’re going to do that and start working on it until your happy that it’s become a habit.
You CAN change your story, ONE change at a time!
Blog is written by guest blogger Shari Ware
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