MOTIVATION FOR WEIGHT LOSS
By Darius Mikolajewski
INTRODUCTION
As your body gets used to the Diet of Nature, as it becomes healthier, fitter and more energetic, it begins to pay you back for your care. It does that by releasing brain chemicals that not only repair and rejuvenate your vital organs, but also make you feel 100% better about yourself.
In turn, these feelings release more good chemicals into your body – you are on your way into a positive spiral that will make you become leaner, healthier, and younger.
This positive spiral makes it really easy to motivate yourself to keep away from the forbidden foods. Sugar cravings gradually go away, and the great feeling of being in tune with your own body becomes very precious to you.
However, I’d be lying to you if I told you that you won’t experience temptation. We all have, and we all will. It’s like with other areas in life; you may have a very happy relationship and be deeply in love with your partner, but occasionally you will see people attractive enough to make you experience temptation. This is just part of being human.
What makes the difference is how you deal with those temptations.
This handbook is designed to show you some simple psychological techniques you can use every day to control your temptations. It is based on the experience of people just like you, people who found successful ways to deal with their human weakness, and who were willing to share those ways with the rest of us.
The techniques fall into four categories:
1. Understanding your own body
2. Setting goals
3. Neuro-associations (controlling your feelings)
4. Psychological tricks
I will explain them in turn.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR BODY
Imagine yourself living with a tribe of Amazon Indians. You live in a place with abundance of food – just thrust your spear into the great river and you come up with a fish.
You can eat as much and as often as you like, just like the Indians do. How much and how often would you eat?
After experimenting with various schedules, I bet you’ll settle on the simplest of systems: you eat when you are hungry, and you stop when you are full.
This is called natural eating, and it’s the way things are meant to be. Unfortunately most of us in the Western world have forgotten how to eat naturally, and need to re-learn it.
One example: you are having a nice meal. You clean out your plate, and you’d like to have some more. But then you are worried about your weight, so you decide to quit eating before you’re fully satisfied. This is not natural eating.
Another example: On your lunch break, you had a good meal and are no longer hungry. As you walk back to work, you pass a coffee shop and catch a whiff of freshly baked doughnuts – you decide to have one. You allow the marketer to manipulate your tastebuds in order to sell you something you don’t need; this is not natural eating.
For so many of us, our relationship with food has become a roller-coaster between deprivation and indulgence.
We even make deals with ourselves: If I have this piece of chocolate today, I’ll skip lunch tomorrow… Who are we trying to cheat?
It is such a simple idea:
eat when you are hungry, stop when you are satisfied, don’t eat again until you become hungry, then eat until you are satisfied…
How can we re-learn it?
It all starts with listening carefully to what your body is telling you. If you need food, your body will tell you, just as it will tell that you need sleep, or fresh air.
Sometimes, however, your listening device plays tricks with you – it shuts down the line from your body, and opens a line from Hell – you hear the devil talking.
Often we are able to tell the difference straight away. For example, when you feel a pang of sexual arousal towards a child, you dismiss it immediately as devil’s work (at least I hope you do!), and your body falls into line straight away. You see, no human can claim to be free from devil’s temptations; the difference between decency and perversion is in how we handle it.
It’s the same with food. You will have a good, healthy meal, you will satisfy your hunger, and then you’ll look at the table next to you to see a guy attacking a wonderful piece of cheesecake, and you will experience a pang of desire.
There are a number of tricks you’ll learn in this book that will help you to deal with that, but the first thing you always need to do is to go back inside yourself and ask:
Come on, let’s get serious here, am I really still hungry, do I really need more food to feel satisfied, and if I do, what the best food that would nourish me, give me energy, health and strength?
And if the answer comes back that you don’t need any more nourishment (for now), they might as well parade all the cakes in the world in front of you, you won’t be interested. Just like after you had a good night sleep, the devil tries to tempt you with the most comfortable bed – you’re just not interested.
LISTEN TO YOUR BODY, TAKE CARE TO TRULY FIND OUT WHAT IT WANTS, AND THEN DO WHAT IT WANTS YOU TO DO.
This is a free preview of "Health and fitness motivation handbook" by Darius Mikolajewski. This book forms part of the Weight Loss made Simple Success Pack. Please click on the ORDER button to see the ordering options.