Losing weight and becoming healthier is hard.

The society we live in makes it hard.

The social norm is to sit down all day and eat Mcdonalds. 

And if you get brought up in this environment with these social norms, is it any surprise we have a health and obesity epidemic?

Disease or injury that affects a group of people is never a matter of chance. It is invariably the stresses and strains to which they have been exposed, a response to everything in their environment  

Calvin Wells

Yet, there is still a lot of judgement and shame towards being overweight as though it is solely down to individual laziness and a lack of willpower.

You are just told to ‘drop the excuses, eat less, and move more’.

But this is like telling someone with depression to just ‘feel better’.. 

It doesn’t even attempt to understand your situation and what you’re going through. 

The current solution from the health and fitness industry is to be bombarded with the latest diet book, expensive corporate gym memberships, military style hero workouts, running ultra marathons and ‘dream abs’.

It’s all focused on the physical. 

But weight loss is just as much, if not more, a mental and emotional challenge than a physical one. 

What do you think about yourself?

Being overweight isn’t laziness or lack of willpower.

You don’t need to be shouted at to eat less and move more. 

You need someone who cares and is willing to try to understand you and to help you.

Help such as learning to speak positive affirmations and have empathy for yourself. 

Start by writing down everything you think about yourself. Do you think that you are fat? Do you hate the way you look? Do you believe that you are worthy? Do you believe that you are doomed to failure?

If the answers to these questions is ‘yes’, then this is the root cause of why you are overweight. 

It’s the fact that you’re self talk has been like this for so long that your subconscious now makes you believe that you are fat and that this is just the way you are.

But the subconscious lies to you!

How do you start to reframe your mindset?

A good way to challenge your identify and reframe your mindset is through positive affirmations. 

By speaking these affirmations out loud every day they become much more powerful than if you just think about them.

For example, instead of thinking to yourself, ‘I am fat’, Say out loud ‘I am a human being with a level of X (insert weight loss target here) weight loss I want to lose’.

This reframes your perspective and paints a more realistic picture (because body weight and fat is all temporary and constantly changing) and it doesn’t allow you to keep thinking and reaffirming your subconscious (false) identify as someone who is fat and that is just the way you are.

This is another reason why I don’t advocate diets such as weight watchers or slimming world.

Their names reaffirm that it is designed for a fat person and the mere action of following one of these diets can reinforce the subconscious mind to believe that you are fat and that you have to go on one of these diets because they are designed for you. 

This is another reason why they are not sustainable for most people long term.

It also reinforces the negative connotations we have with food and movement; food is simply calories which we are made to feel guilty of and movement is thought of simply as burning calories and a chore or punishment for eating food. 

But this is totally false.

You are a human being.

A human being who just so happens to want to lose a level of body fat.

However, it’s not going to happen overnight and will take time and commitment.

Try speaking this out loud in front of the mirror once a day every morning for 3 weeks.

This will hopefully help and make you more likely to achieve lifestyle changes for sustainable weight loss.