It Is All In Your Mind
Friday, June 13, 2008
One of the most important driving force for personal development is actually your willpower, your mind. Conversely, your greatest pitfall is the same too - your mind.
If you keep thinking you're fat (even if you really aren't), you are going to do destructive things to your body, like missing meals, eating very little, or to induce purging after eating. This usually happens in women.
As mentioned before in this blog, as well as in other health and fitness blogs, missing meals is really a BAD thing to do. Even if you're losing weight, you should not skip any meals. Your body has built-in mechanisms to trigger you to do something. You become thirsty when your body needs water. You get hungry when the body needs food. Depriving yourself of these when your body tells you it needs those, just makes the body go into survival mode.
While in survival mode the body does burn fat, but once you get to the weight you want, and start eating again, the food you eat goes right back into your fat stores - you are back to square one.
You have to have the right frame of mind, not just for this, but for everything else. Fearing to see your weight doesn't help you lose weight. It just gives you a false sense of relief, for want of a better word, that you aren't "fat" yet. Without having a baseline, you have nothing to work towards. Without regular weigh-ins, you'll never know if you're on the right track on losing weight.
Having a driving force, your motivation, helps you succeed. You will surely have come across numerous stories when reading about people who have been successful at losing weight the right way - they had motivation. Their mindset was right. They had a goal. They worked towards the goal, and if they ever strayed from the goal, they took corrective actions.
By not wanting to look at the numbers on the weighing scales, you are just fooling yourself.
Having a defeatist attitude, like "What's the use? It'll never happen" is the most destructive thought you can ever have. It doesn't necessarily have to do with losing weight, but doing anything. Business, weight loss, it's all the same. Your mindset is very important.
The moment you tell yourself, "I can do it", you're already halfway there. The other half, is of course, the action you need to take to achieve the results. Start eating healthy (not "go on a diet"). Start working out - run, swim, do weights.
And ladies, working out with weights won't "bulk you up". Don't keep having the misconception of having "unsightly muscles" when you touch weights. In fact I'll tell you something interesting, something you probably never thought of.
When you carry your infant child, you're already "carrying weights". The baby will weigh something like 2kg or so at birth, and steadily grow heavier as the year goes on. In this couple of years that you've been carrying him/her (before he/she can walk), you've been carrying "weights". Do you see "muscles" on you?
Similarly, when you do train with weights, train with light ones. They are there to tone your body when you do lose the fats. By toning, I mean to give your underlying muscles (ie those that were covered by fats) definition. You work them so they are defined and not flabby-looking.
Also, by eating healthy, you don't even need to "eat less" to lose weight. More often than not, you can eat your normal portions of HEALTHY food and still lose weight (instead of junk food like potato chips, tortillas etc). "Going on a diet" for ladies usually means "eat less, skip meals", which I have explained before, is actually BAD for you.
If you keep thinking you're fat (even if you really aren't), you are going to do destructive things to your body, like missing meals, eating very little, or to induce purging after eating. This usually happens in women.
As mentioned before in this blog, as well as in other health and fitness blogs, missing meals is really a BAD thing to do. Even if you're losing weight, you should not skip any meals. Your body has built-in mechanisms to trigger you to do something. You become thirsty when your body needs water. You get hungry when the body needs food. Depriving yourself of these when your body tells you it needs those, just makes the body go into survival mode.
While in survival mode the body does burn fat, but once you get to the weight you want, and start eating again, the food you eat goes right back into your fat stores - you are back to square one.
You have to have the right frame of mind, not just for this, but for everything else. Fearing to see your weight doesn't help you lose weight. It just gives you a false sense of relief, for want of a better word, that you aren't "fat" yet. Without having a baseline, you have nothing to work towards. Without regular weigh-ins, you'll never know if you're on the right track on losing weight.
Having a driving force, your motivation, helps you succeed. You will surely have come across numerous stories when reading about people who have been successful at losing weight the right way - they had motivation. Their mindset was right. They had a goal. They worked towards the goal, and if they ever strayed from the goal, they took corrective actions.
By not wanting to look at the numbers on the weighing scales, you are just fooling yourself.
Having a defeatist attitude, like "What's the use? It'll never happen" is the most destructive thought you can ever have. It doesn't necessarily have to do with losing weight, but doing anything. Business, weight loss, it's all the same. Your mindset is very important.
The moment you tell yourself, "I can do it", you're already halfway there. The other half, is of course, the action you need to take to achieve the results. Start eating healthy (not "go on a diet"). Start working out - run, swim, do weights.
And ladies, working out with weights won't "bulk you up". Don't keep having the misconception of having "unsightly muscles" when you touch weights. In fact I'll tell you something interesting, something you probably never thought of.
When you carry your infant child, you're already "carrying weights". The baby will weigh something like 2kg or so at birth, and steadily grow heavier as the year goes on. In this couple of years that you've been carrying him/her (before he/she can walk), you've been carrying "weights". Do you see "muscles" on you?
Similarly, when you do train with weights, train with light ones. They are there to tone your body when you do lose the fats. By toning, I mean to give your underlying muscles (ie those that were covered by fats) definition. You work them so they are defined and not flabby-looking.
Also, by eating healthy, you don't even need to "eat less" to lose weight. More often than not, you can eat your normal portions of HEALTHY food and still lose weight (instead of junk food like potato chips, tortillas etc). "Going on a diet" for ladies usually means "eat less, skip meals", which I have explained before, is actually BAD for you.
Labels: dieting, mindset, weight loss
