I was looking at my bookshelf and I was amazed at the collection of diet books I have managed to amass over the years, I can honestly say none of them ever did me any good, in fact all they did was confuse me. In some of the books they prove without a shadow of a doubt that eating carbs will make you fat, other books say that eating meat is wrong, others say the way to go is low fat, so is pasta ok now or not..hmm not sure, and what about potatoes???

You know the only way I finally managed to lose weight is when I decided to ditch the diets and get my head in gear, I set some goals, made losing weight a priority, sorted out my mindset and then I followed 1 simple rule as far as food is concerned. This one simple rule that I stick with is this, you can eat anything you want, whenever you want, as long as it is whole, in other words it hasn’t been mixed up with anything else, if you want to mix it up you have to do it yourself. That cuts out most unhealthy, fattening food right away and it doesn’t really limit your choice much either. You don’t really have to think about it much, it simply means that you are not buying anything boxed or packaged that has been laced with strange sounding chemicals and preservatives. It means you can eat any unprocessed meat, any vegetables, any fruit, you can even eat cakes and cookies if you like….but you have to make them from scratch – and everyday time constraints put a limit on that.

It just works, I don’t know exactly why, it could be something to do with the lack of chemicals, it could be something to do with the lack of restriction you are imposing on yourself, it could be something to do with eating real food in a normal way. If nothing else, at least it is a healthier way of eating.

When you finally do gather your courage and begin moving forward, what usually happens?  You realize it’s WAY harder than you thought it would be, right?  It feels like you’re trying to run uphill.  You keep tripping over obstacles, facing setbacks and delays, and fighting a daily battle to stay motivated.

It’s during this difficult phase that most people give up.  They decide that ‘it isnít meant to be’ right now, so they set their goal aside, vow to try again later and carry on just wishing they could be thin.

Have you done this?  Most people have!

However, this doesn’t have to be the end of the story.  You can pick up your goals, dust them off and try again.  But this time you should know about a little something called Momentum.

You see, the difficult phase I just described is what happens at the beginning when you’re trying to gain momentum.  Most people quit during this phase because they think it’s ALWAYS going to be this hard.  What they don’t realize is that every effort they put toward the achievement of their goals will build on the previous efforts.  With every step forward the process gets easier and easier.  Finally, they’ve put so much energy and effort into the process that momentum begins to take over.  Suddenly they realize that they don’t have to push so hard to keep moving forward.  It becomes fun . . . even easy to achieve their goal.

This same experience can be yours!  All you have to do is keep moving forward.  Keep working toward your dreams and never quit. Don’t quit when success is just around the corner because you will have to start again, do the hard work again, and never reap the rewards. Momentum WILL take over eventually, sooner than you think.

The concept of goals when it comes to achieving results is also one that is often either overlooked or overworked in personal change programs. Yet even among those who write about or teach goal-setting techniques, few understand the necessary strategies and systematic approach required for maximum effectiveness.

There is little question that goal setting works, and once you learn how to power up your goals with the necessary strategies, you can create a level of accomplishment self discipline and control over your life that at this point may be beyond your imagination. In fact, you can become so good at generating goals that it will be necessary for you to be careful what you plan or ask for because you will most assuredly experience it.

Goal setting is as important to the successful operation of your life as eating or sleeping. The only difference is that your life won’t end if you don’t set goals. However, without goals directing your life, you will miss out on much of your potential for experiencing the positive emotions of excitement, aliveness, enthusiasm, joy, and even happiness. Without goals, you can end up living from problem to problem instead of from opportunity to opportunity. Setting goals will steer you toward opportunities while enabling you to overcome the obstacles and break through the barriers necessary for their accomplishment. Running your life without goals is about as effective as attempting to drive your car from the passenger’s seat. To be effective in the goal-setting process, you must go far beyond the usual ideas of how to set goals.

Forget Excuses And Start Making Choices!

•    I don’t have time to set goals. I’m too busy.
•    I don’t set goals so I won’t be disappointed.
•    I’m really not sure what I’m after.
•    I set goals but they just don’t seem to happen.

You have the right to make excuses, but excuses won’t produce results. In reality you have one of two choices: you can design and direct your future by setting goals and working to achieve them, or by default you lose the opportunity to create and control your own life. In the latter case, you allow not only your future but also your present to be controlled by other people, events, and daily pressures, all of which produce plenty of stress and frustration but not a feeling of accomplishment.

But when you set goals, they become your navigational tools, guiding you toward a predictable future or destination despite the sometimes not-so-predictable events that may occur along the way. And as you begin to define your life in terms of goals, you automatically increase your level of excitement, aliveness, enthusiasm, self-confidence, and self- motivation.

I’m working on a free goal setting program specifically for people who want to lose weight – look out for it soon.

Bye for now.

Dianne

We all have within us an incredible ability to achieve whatever we set our minds to, the one main obstacle standing in the way of you achieving your goals is you – or rather, your subconscious mind.

What Exactly Is The Subconscious Mind?

Briefly, the mind can be divided into two parts;

The subconscious also called the unconscious, where permanent memory, habits, and beliefs are stored,
and the conscious mind where short term memory, willpower and rationalization faculties are stored.

The subconscious operates differently to the conscious mind, it uses pictures and imagination as its language, it does not rationalize but simply accepts any information that enters it via the conscious mind, it is the job of the conscious mind to edit beliefs and perceptions before accepting them.

This is how it works – Long term memory, personal experience, early conditioning, upbringing and culture, combine to form your belief system, these beliefs are not necessarily the absolute truth of course, but your perception of the way things are. These beliefs inform everything about you and how you behave, which causes you to think, feel and behave in the way you do, and this, in turn, produces your results – wanted or unwanted.

So to put this sequence into context here is an everyday example:
You have had a hard day at work, nothing is going right, so to make yourself feel better you sit down at the end of your day and eat an entire family sized bar of chocolate. And while you are eating that chocolate you do feel better, but only while it is still there, when its all gone you’re back to square one, the chocolate was only a fleeting distraction from your bad day.

So why choose food as a distraction from feeling bad? There are any number of reasons, it all depends on the individual, but generally choosing food as a distraction from emotion is compulsive behavior directly relating to your subconscious conditioning. Your subconscious belief is that the chocolate will make you feel better so you are driven to eat the chocolate for comfort.

It is the job of your subconscious mind to protect you at all times and in this instance it is protecting you from feeling bad by directing you towards the chocolate which your subconscious believes will give you comfort. There is nothing wrong with eating chocolate if you want to, the problem arises when you are actively trying not to eat chocolate, because you want to lose weight, or because you are following a particular healthy eating program. This is where the conflict arises, consciously you want to give up chocolate, subconsciously you want to eat the chocolate a fight between conscious willpower and subconscious conditioning ensues and nine times out of ten, the subconscious wins.

So how can we ever change? Well, essentially, to change a habit or unwanted behavior so you can finally achieve your goals without wrestling daily with failing willpower, you need to change the belief, habit or feeling at a subconscious level. There are many techniques and strategies that will allow you to do that. For example, visualisation, goal setting, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, NLP, Affirmations and hypnosis are all extremely powerful tools for personal change.

For more information have a look at www.succeedatslimming.com/Motivation.html.

By Dianne Maurer
Weight Loss Coach

I was intrigued to find out why we keep making the same mistakes over and over again, we get fatter and hungrier and the diet industry gets richer. This, very briefly, is what I discovered.

Excuses

There are any number of perceived obstacles in the way of pursuing your goal of being slim, fit and healthy. As you already know, there are certain things you really need to do if you want to lose weight -  you need to eat appropriate amounts of healthy food and be moderately active. The only problem is, most of us have difficulty in actually getting ourselves to do this, we tend to rationalize why it is difficult for us to do something, we make excuses.

We blame our parents, our upbringing, the fact that being overweight is a family trait, our slow metabolism. We blame our kids, our spouses, our jobs, never having enough time. These may be factors that do indeed make it more difficult for us to lose weight. But it is important to note that these are simply reasons why we have not been successful in the past, they are not insurmountable obstacles that must prevent us from achieving our goals. By identifying the potential blocks to successful weight loss and dealing with them ahead of time, any obstacles can be effectively removed.

Lack of Organization

Achieving weight loss goals are made far more difficult when the appropriate foods are unavailable or there is no time  left to do some exercise. If you have cookies and chips lying around in the cupboards and no fruit to snack on you know what the likely outcome will be. The temptation to grab a handful of cookies to stave off hunger is often too great to resist. This is a major reason people fail to stick to their weight loss plans and it can be easily avoided by proper planning. Make your life easy, spend sometime planning your weekly routine, including what you want to eat and when, what you need to buy in the supermarket and how much time you need for regular exercise. And do yourself a favor, clear out all the junk food so there are no temptations.

Impatience

Going for the quick fix is a tendency that most unsuccessful dieters have. Once we have decided that we want to lose weight, we want that weight to come off as quickly as possible even though, as intelligent people, we know it’s just not going to happen. Going on crazy fad diets that promise 12lbs weight loss per week is simply counterproductive – but hey, you already knew that didn’t you?

Choosing the wrong diet

Some diets are impossible to stick to. If you decide to go on a diet that only allows you to eat grapefruit for example or cabbage soup, failure is inevitable. Your body is physically programmed to protect it’s fat stores, when those fat stores are threatened by famine it does everything it can to hold on to them, it will give up muscle for energy before it gives up fat. These starvation diets simply have the effect of making you fat and miserable.

Not setting proper goals

There is a whole art and science to setting goals, there have been many studies to show the magic of goal setting and there are hundreds of goal setting programs on the market. The truth is by setting down, in writing exactly what you want to achieve and then defining the steps that you are going to take to achieve it, your likelihood of success increases phenomenally. Generally, however, most people tend to ignore this  important aspect of achieving their goal when they embark on a weight loss program this makes failure almost inevitable.

Your mind

The reasons I have listed above are all major reasons why people fail to lose weight permanently and why the diet industry is so buoyant. Americans spend about $35 billion a year on diet products, and the obesity problem is just getting worse. But there is one factor above all the others why we find losing weight so difficult and that is our subconscious conditioning.

All your habits, experiences, beliefs, attitude, thoughts, feelings and behavior make up your mindset, you eat the way you do because of your thoughts, feelings and beliefs so embarking on a diet and ignoring this aspect of weight loss is generally doomed to failure from the start.

It is essential to change your mindset before you can achieve lasting and comfortable weight loss. Find out how at www.succeedatslimming.com/Motivation.html.

And it is not willpower that is the problem either, we are all intelligent, successful people, who in other areas of our lives show real strength of will, discipline and a capacity to achieve our goals, but for some reason find ourselves completely incapacitated when it comes to the issue of losing weight. WHY?

Well, after dieting and failing for years and finally finding a way to lose 47 stubborn pounds of fat, I have discovered why it is so hard to lose weight. And here is the reason: it’s all about feelings, emotions, thoughts and how you handle it, in short, your attitude is making you fat. Now I’m sure that is not news to you, you probably already know, if you have been around the dieting block a few times,  that successfully losing weight starts in your mind. What we really need to know of course is how to change our subconscious programing from  fat to thin.

Over the next few weeks and months, I am going to go into detail about a rapid change formula that I have come accross, it is  based on tried and proven strategies and techniques that will enable you to take back control of your eating and your weight. I will be showing you how cognitive behavioral therapy can change your thinking, how using powerful affirmations and self hypnosis can help reprogram your mind and how to harness the power of your subconscious to defeat those dieting demons for good.

Watch this space.

Regards

Dianne R Maurer

Change your habits, change your life

When it comes to losing weight, most of us confirmed dieters are pretty much experts in how to lose the fat, we know about calorie counting, we know about correct nutrition, we know which exercises burn the most fat, in short we know exactly how to lose weight. But knowing how to lose weight and actually doing it are two entirely different things. If you just had to read a diet book to drop 20lbs, the diet industry certainly wouldn’t be as buoyant as it is today.

The truth is we are all creatures of habit and routine, our behavior around food is generally a conditioned response to events or simply habitual. That’s why it is so damn hard to stick to a diet for longer than a day! So rather than attempting to force ourselves past habitual, ingrained behavior with the tiny amount of willpower we posses why not do it the easy way and set ourselves on an automatic course to weight loss. In the end it is the quickest, surest and easy route to permanent weight loss. So here’s what you need to do:

Because most of our actions, thoughts and behaviors are based around automatic behavior that previously we have established unconsciously, we can use this automation to our advantage and this time consciously construct useful habits and routines. For example, an important part of healthy eating is consuming a well balanced breakfast that will see your appetite through until lunch time and give you energy to start your day. Many of us, however, are in the habit of grabbing a quick cup of coffee and maybe and slice of toast for breakfast or even foregoing food altogether. So, say we want to establish a routine/habit of having a fresh fruit smoothie every morning, well all you have to do to make this a habit is to do it every day for at least 30 days. The first 10 days will be difficult but I have identified 8 strategies that I’ll talk about another time that can get you through this start up phase, then the next 10 days, you will probably still experience some resistance but it will be easier, and then if you make it through the last 10 days you will have formed a habit for life. The same applies to any automatic behavior you want to install. It is best to concentrate on one or two new habits at a time, but very soon you will have changed your unhealthy, high fat eating routines to new healthy, low fat ones and consequently you will lose weight on auto-pilot.

Weight loss is 90% mindset. Mindset is 90% habit. Change your habits, lose weight.

Just Do It!

Hi, I just wanted to tell everyone about this fantastic new Wii game I just got, if you have a Wii and you want to get fit, this game blows Wii Fit out of the water and is definitely worth a try.
EA Sports Active UK version EA Sports Active USA version

Manufacturer’s Description
Introducing EA SPORTS Active exclusively for the Wii. Designed in collaboration with fitness experts, EA SPORTS Active gives you fun, easy to learn exercises and activities that create a western fitness circuit you can do with family and friends, all from the convenience of your living room. It’s like having your very own personal trainer in the comfort of your home, offering the promise of a better you.

EA SPORTS Active tracks your movements on screen to give you real time feedback on your workout. Track both upper and lower body movements and experience Wii controls in a whole new way with our specially designed leg strap.

Embark on the 30 Day Challenge and use the structure as a road map to reach your goals. Your trainer will be the focal point of the experience and create a new minute workout for you every day, providing clear instruction, motivation and positive encouragement.

EA SPORTS Active features a wide variety of activities that target upper body, lower body, as well as cardio. Each daily workout will feel different then the last and increase in intensity as you work up a sweat towards your goals. In the custom workout mode, you can cater the length of the workout to the time you have available, which body areas you want to focus on and identify your favorite of the over 20 exercises – and you will see how many calories you are burning in real time.

EA SPORTS gives you the benefit of a personal trainer right into your living room and the promise of a better you.

It is really easy to underestimate the number of calories or unhealthy fats that we habitually consume, our minds have a way of ignoring those minor diet transgressions that eventually mount up to a whole lot of extra fat on those thighs.

A diet journal can make all the difference by bringing these extra calories to your attention. Studies have shown time and again that by simply recording what you eat your calorie intake will be reduced.

Many people fail to keep a diary because it can seem an onerous task, but very quickly keeping a food diary will become natural to you and you will rapidly see the benefits in lost pounds and inches.

How to keep a diet journal

Its really up to you what you want to put in your journal, but the more information you put in the more helpful it will be to your weight loss.

1. The first thing you should do is write down your weight loss goal, make a contract with yourself that you are going to do everything you can to achieve this goal and sign it.
2. Record where you are now in terms of weight, measurements etc. and update this every month. It is also helpful to keep a photographic reference of your weight loss so you can really see progress.
3. Make sure you record everything you eat and drink, and I mean everything, even tasters while cooking, or a bite of the kids’ sandwich – it all adds up and these are the excess calories that we tend to forget about if they are not written down.
4. It is helpful to write down what time you are eating foods, drinks and snacks so you can get an accurate pattern. Do you tend to consume sugary snacks at certain times of the day? This is all helpful information when altering your eating habits.
5. Also if you write down how you are feeling at those times of the day when you feel the impulse to eat you can become aware of emotional eating patterns. You could also record what you were doing when eating, for example; do you habitually eat potato chips which watching TV without even noticing? With awareness you can bring rapid change to your lifestyle.
6. Set yourself a daily goal, rather than going crazy and planning only to eat vegetables for a week or try and stick to impossibly low daily calorie intakes, break your weight loss goals up into bite size pieces. Write down your target for the day or even for the morning and then the afternoon, sticking to an eating plan for one day is a heck of a lot easier than a whole week, then you can adjust the following day. Taking things one step at a time always works better.

Your diet journal will provide you with an accurate assessment of what you are consuming, how you feel when you consume those foods, where you were and what you were doing. You will have a precise roadmap of what you want to achieve and how you are going to get there, and you you will have a motivating visual record of your journey.

If you stick with your diet journal, you are much more likely to succeed at losing the weight you want by making a permanent and natural lifestyle change.

Download your free Weight Loss Success Planner, just enter your name and email in the form on the top right for instant download. Don’t worry we hate spam as much as you do, we won’t give your email out to anyone.

Privacy Policy