Change your thinking

I don't know about anyone else but alot of losing weight for me has been about changing my thought patterns.  I have to be able to believe that I can do this and not let my mind rule my body.  I have to let go of the past and all my failures with weight loss, otherwise I just set myself up for another failure.  I have to stop the negative thinking and replace those with positive thoughts.  This isn't something that has occurred overnight and its still an ongoing process. 

Just this morning I blogged about how discouraging weight loss can be because its seems to take forever.  Of course its easier to just sit and stuff my face and gain weight but is that the life I want to live....definitely not.  Noone ever said weight loss was going to be easy and yes I whine and complain about not being able to eat whatever I want and about having to exercise everyday but in the long run I know this is whats best for me.

I have had to overcome emotionally eating, from eating when I'm happy to celebrate to eating when I'm sad to make the pain go away.  I use to run to food when someone made me mad, thinking in my twisted mind that I was somehow punishing them for hurting me when the only person I was really punishing was myself.  Now when someone hurts me I use that hurt as my strength, I refuse to let that person win twice.  I turn to exercise to get out my frustrations.  I use to think of exercise as torture but now I see it as my time, time to meditate, calm down and think things out. 

I use to think of food as a reward.  If I had a hard day then I believed going out to dinner was a way of rewarding myself but not anymore.  My reward now for a hard day is to get me time to exercise.  I use to think of food as the center of my life, always thinking what my next meal was going to be.  Now food is secondary in my life, its what I need to keep my body energized and healthy.  I can do without the chocolate cake, cookies and ice cream, I don't need those things to survive and if I have a craving I can satisfy it with one bite not the whole cake, box of cookies or container of ice cream.

This time of the year is the worst for most people because of so many celebrations which usually include food.  Yes I worry that I'm not going to have the willpower to resist all the goodies but so far I have been very successfully at events like this.  The trick is to plan ahead and know that you don't have to eat to have fun.  I went to my nephews birthday party last weekend and I knew what I was going to eat ahead of time and thats what I had.  I also spent my time taking pictures, riding horses and other fun stuff going on at the party.  Enjoy the people you are spending time with instead of focusing on the food.  Tell yourself you can do it. 

I don't have very much support from anyone around me so I'm pretty much in this weight loss journey by myself.  Normally this would mean failure for me because I'm very codependent but not this time.  Noone can lose this weight for me and I don't need anyone elses approval, I'm doing this for me.  The people that are negative about my weight loss have no idea that their negativity is my greatest strength.  I have found a way to turn their negativity around and use it as one of my greatest motivations.

If you tell yourself your going to fail then thats exactly what you are going to do.  Change your negatives into positives and even if it doesn't seem to make any difference at first just keep telling yourself the same thing over and over again eventually you will change your thinking to.  Everything we have learned is about habit.  If you can learn the bad habit of overeating then you can relearn the good habit of healthy eating, it just takes time.