How To Win The Mental Game Of Losing Weight

Sticking to a diet is a mental battlefield. In today's post we're going to talk about how NOT to screw up your diet or your training or any other aspect of the weight loss journey. I will take you through one simple mindset strategy for weight loss success so you can overcome the mental obstacles and consistently make the right decisions to give you the weight loss results you are looking for.

Our Psychotherapist, Weight Loss Coach and Personal Trainer Jeff Laurence shares insights on the TRAPS our mind creates to throw us off our diet with solutions and tips on what to watch out for so we can overcome these diet obstacles, stick to the diet and finally talk ourselves into successfully losing weight.

We'll cover:
- Common distortions of the mind that derail our diet efforts and screw up your diet success - A simple solution to overcoming the traps that your mind creates so you can stop screwing up your diet and start winning the weight loss game
- 3 commonly distorted behaviours that you need to know so you can be powerfully prepared to stay on track with your diet and get the weight loss results you deserve

Let's get into it:

You give yourself that permission to ease up a little, to do only that little bit less.
I'd be okay with a little bit less results, I'm doing so well right now.
​Give it an inch and then it takes a mile.

What I want to do is give you one simple solution and then go through three key things that are commonly distorted but if understood properly they can be utilized as powerful tools to keep us on track.

introducing the traps of the mind

To get the gratification of the problem behavior the mind finds a way to make it okay.

This happens a lot with training and eating as well, where it's just like there's a high element of self-deception.

It's always framed in a way that's like 'you deserve this' and 'there's a program out there that's the perfect program that's going to inspire me and keep me going and keep me getting results' and then we keep searching for that one program and as soon as it gets a little bit hard 'oh well the program must be wrong' or the other one is 'it shouldn't be so hard'. Look why shouldn't it be that hard?

We're living in fantasyland here if you can just eat chocolate and you should be allowed to.

​But ultimately that is all just distortion.

The challenge is what it is.
​
The amount of work and the difficulty of it is what it is and letting yourself be victimized by any of that stuff is just fighting reality and it just doesn't lead to consistency it doesn't lead to staying engaged with it.

Every time you sort of flick back and start trying to justify why you're not doing something, cut that out that's not helping.

Because it is what it is and we're just gonna just get to work.

How to overcome the distortions

So this is the solution here is to accept the challenge and see it as a journey where we're learning and growing and applying ourselves and seeing things accurately so that we don't buy into the distortions.

And understand where they are and where you're gonna typically find yourself lying to yourself.

If we know what those challenges are, if we know what those distortions are and we know we can say 'I'm not going to buy into that one'. You know that they're going to come up when you see it coming then it doesn't have the same power because you don't buy into it it's like 'yeah okay I know that one, I know that little trick'.

You know when you get tired you start saying 'oh it's okay you deserve it'. Wanting some comfort food. You see it coming from a mile away and you say 'don't try and give me that one again I know that is not where I'm heading that's not where I want to go'.

This is difficult to the degree that you buy into the BS it really is.

​It only has the power that you give it, really it only has that. And the more that you think 'yeah I think I do believe that, I think I do deserve it', it's like then you're giving your power away. You're making it harder.

Look enjoying eating too much from time to time is not a sin but that's enough, don't justify it, because then you're giving it power.

three commonly distorted derailments

So now we're going to go through the three commonly distorted things that throw us off track.

1. Change your relationship with the scale.

That one is important. I know there are some programs out there that say don't look at the scale and it messes with your mind, it's a horrible thing and just look away from it.

But I think it's not about running away from these things, I mean most of the time when someone says to me that they've come in to want to make a change - what was the turning point? A lot of the time it's that they looked at the scale and thought 'oh I really have to change'. That was the trigger. It has a lot of power. There's something that's really really positively powerful in how it can be, to just go don't look at it, don't look at it. It's not about not looking at these things it's about looking at them right, looking at them in a way that helps you know.

I'm saying look at it and go and then make a big drama about what it is.
Just look at it and say 'yeah that is it, it is what it is. What is it telling me? What do I need to shift here?' It's feedback.

Changing the way you think about it not not thinking about it that's never a good idea. We can't change something if you're not thinking about it, you're not paying attention to it. And there's a lot more I could say about how to do that and I'll go into that in a separate video but that's very important to do that.

2. Changing your relationship with your goals

I think the word goal sets up kind of a pass fail thing, it has a little bit of pressure attached to it.

Instead I like to think of them as directions and intentions.

This is where I'm heading, this is where I'm going, this is what I want to create in my life.

There's no timeline on this, there's no deadline. And you can say I'd like to achieve this around this sort of time because there's no pressure you don't have to do it by any particular point.

When there's pressure these distortions start to come in. Start to mess with them because we don't like to have pressure on us to 'oh you must do this by this point'. We want to run away from that stuff, so don't create an environment that you want to run away from and distort. That's no good.

3. Being aware of the motivational dip

There's been books written about this by Seth Godin and it is a very powerful piece to understand this thing called the motivational dip.

At the beginning of anything there's a lot of motivation there, there's a lot of energy. Yes I'm making this change and it's happening and then that's when it sort of leads to this all or nothing approach which you know in and of itself is a distortion and leads to just being burnt out by the whole process and that you want to run away from.

The important thing to understand with the dip is that after that initial phase there is, no one gets out of it, it happens within sort of the first three months usually but it could be more could be less but the point is at some point YOUR MOTIVATION will go down.

It's not a matter of whether hopefully it won't and if I get enough results then it'll just keep going. No it won't there will be a dip right. And then in that dip - how you pull yourself out of that? -> that is everything.

And then the thing is this doesn't just happen once, this happens consistently. Consistently you will fall off the motivational peak. You have to be conscious enough to know that that will happen and when it happens how do you pull yourself out of it? You've got to be prepared for that and that whenever you hit a dip action plan out of the dip. 

Be inspired by Jeff's understanding, passion and experience of Weight Loss especially in areas of the human mindset, changing behaviour and building motivation.

​Find out more about Private Weight Loss Coaching Sessions with Jeff here.

Keep up to date with our latest content on Hypnotherapy and Weight Loss Coaching by:

•  Subscribing to our YouTube channel here. ​
• Following Jeff on LinkedIn here

---