The one thing that will have the biggest effect on whether or not you achieve your weight loss goal is your attitude. You must have a winning attitude. Many people, although they would like to lose weight and get in shape, deep down don’t truly believe they can do it. One of the reasons they think that is because they have failed so many times before. They have trained themselves to expect failure. As the saying goes, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you are right.”
So, what is a winning attitude? Whether you realize it or not, we all talk to ourselves. Sometimes the talk is negative and sometimes it’s positive. People who don’t have a winning attitude talk to themselves like this: “I can’t control myself. If I see a piece of chocolate, I must have it. What’s the point of losing weight; I’m only going to gain it all back. I can’t lose weight, I’m genetically programmed to be overweight. I’m fine compared to everybody else. I don’t have time to exercise. I can’t stop eating. I can’t do this. “
You see, the focus is on why we can’t do what we need to do and why we shouldn’t even bother. A person who truly believes any of those statements will never be able to lose weight, and here is why: Your brain is like a search engine. You put your question in, it comes up with answers. The problem is, that it will not reject any questions or statements that are not true, it will simply come up with answers. If you say to yourself, “I can’t lose weight,” you brain finds reasons to support that statement.
This does not help you, so what can you do about it? Ask a better question, or make a better statement. The best questions to ask are “How” questions. Instead of saying , “I can’t lose weight” change that to, “How can I lose weight?,” or “What can I do today to move closer to my weight loss goal?” These are much better questions because now your brain will start searching for things you can do today to help you move closer to your goal.
Having a winning attitude will help tremendously to keep you positive as you go through the process of eliminating bad habits and adopting new ones. As you might already know, there will be times when you will fall off your weight loss plan, and that’s normal. Having a winning attitude will help you get back on the plan. All my successful clients fell off the plan at some point, but they got right back on it. The difference between people who succeed and people who do not is that, people who succeed learn from any setbacks, shrug it off and move on. People who are not successful dwell on setbacks, justify their failure, and quit. Let me tell you ahead of time, you will have setbacks as you are trying to lose weight; they’re part of the learning curve. Just learn from your setbacks and move on.
