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"Three Crucial Skills For Winning At Weight Loss"
2002 by Dr. Frank B. Smoot
Too often, we let life's problems darken our spirit and ruin our day. Believe it or not, this can also add to the amount of excess weight on our body. Here are three crucial skills that can help you keep this from happening.
One of the main reasons we can't lose our excess weight, or put it on in the first place, is that we just aren't coping very well with life's daily rough spots. As a result, our stresses and strains aren't dealt with as they happen. So they accumulate, piling up on each other -- like layers of garbage at a landfill.
It's said that into each life a little rain must fall. For some of us, this rain simply quenches our thirst and waters our flowers. For others, it muddies the road, makes our hair look nasty, and generally ruins our day.
But whether we like it or not, the rain's gonna fall. So how do we deal with it?
We all have our ways of responding to life's ups and downs. Some of these ways help us blow off stress, or at least keep our problems in perspective. Other ways are actually non-coping approaches, and result in stress that either accumulates or is dealt with in destructively.
It's these destructive ways -- and especially, the self-destructive ones -- that we need to identify and get rid of. To help us do this, we're going to explore three subjects:
1. Mood / Attitude Enhancement
In life there are few things as important as your mood / attitude and your ability to control it. How many times have you come across people with bad attitudes? How do you feel when you're around them? How do you think they feel?
How do people around you feel when you're in a bum mood? The truth is, bad moods and attitudes are a lose/lose scenario for everyone involved.
Sometimes crummy moods just seem to come over us, with no advance warning and maybe no clear reason. And when they do, we may feel powerless to fix them. Often as not, it seems like all we can do is wait until they "blow over."
Is there any way to eliminate these bad moods from our life?
The truth -- the liberating truth --i s that your mood and attitude are highly controllable. In fact, like a well-trained horse, our moods and attitudes can be steered with very little effort, once you know how. All it takes is a bit of conscious guidance.
But just as with a horse, you first need to show your attitude who's in control.
Why is it so important to be able to control your mood and attitude? Because they color every aspect of your daily experience. Your attitude either reflects or determines you mood. If your mood is lousy, your experience of life will also be lousy for as long as your bad mood lasts.
Many of us do things to "compensate" for our bad moods, or for the fact that we can't dump them quickly. Some of these "compensatory" behaviors are externally destructive. We hit walls, we break stuff, we drive aggressively. Men tend to do these kinds of things more than women do.
Other compensatory behaviors are self-destructive -- like overeating. If you tend to be a compensatory eater, your response to the stress of bad mood/attitude may be to head for the fridge. Perhaps you seek something sweet, to help compensate for a sour day. Maybe you want to "feel" full because your life seems empty. Women seem to gravitate toward these more self-destructive behaviors.
But regardless of your gender or the nature of your destructive behavior, the solution lies in finding healthier alternatives. The best alternative is to stop being the victim of your moods and attitudes, and learn to take charge of them. The ability to control your mood will make a tremendous difference, not just in your weight loss efforts, but in the overall quality of your life, right now and from now on.
Gaining the power to control your own mood / attitude involves asking yourself...
Three Powerful Questions
Learning to control your mood/attitude is actually surprisingly simple. And you can do it immediately, any time, and any place. The following three simple questions can change your life instantly All you need to do is to ask yourself:
Of course, before you can consistently control your mood, you must believe that it really is under your control. The good news is, it is! The fact is, what you experience in life is determined, not by anything or anyone outside yourself, but by what goes on between your ears. And that is 100% up to you!
This single awareness can change your life forever!
Unfortunately, our culture doesn't teach us that we have this power. In fact, it works hard to teach us that we don't. And we pay a very high price for abdicating the control that is rightfully ours. That's why we each may need to learn this lesson for ourselves.
Once we learn it, our lives become more pleasant and powerful than we had ever dared imagine. But if we don't learn it, we'll continue to be buffeted around by every ill wind that blows from any direction -- and suffer accordingly.
When we truly understand that our mood is entirely under our own control, we can take Question Two (above) seriously, and then get a valid answer to Question Three.
We really need to understand the high cost of not controlling our moods. In daily life, attitude is everything. That's because, in every moment of your life, your own attitude is the "filter" through which you interpret all your other experiences.
So, first thing every morning (yes, even before your coffee), do an attitude assessment. Then adjust as needed. Done correctly, this simple act will set a positive tone for your entire day. Not done at all, who knows what will happen?
So the question is, do you want to leave your mood and attitude to the winds of chance...and risk ending up with your face in a pie to compensate for a "lousy day?" Or would you rather take active, conscious charge of what happens between your ears, in your life -- and ultimately in your stomach and around your waistline?
2. Learned Helplessness
One of the most famous and most revealing experiments in the history of psychological research involved the subject of learned helplessness. I don't have the room here to tell you as much about it as I'd like to, but any Psychology 101 textbook will cover the topic.
However, there is one experiment that offers powerful insight into the impact of learned behavior. Although this experiment was conducted using dogs as subjects, the discoveries apply to human behavior as well. The core of the experiment revolved around setting up unpleasant conditions from which the dogs were initially unable to escape. Eventually, they stopped trying. They simply gave up and "accepted their fate."
That was no surprise. Later, however, the same dogs were subjected to the same unpleasant conditions under circumstances where the means of escape was both obvious and easy. Yet the dogs -- now "conditioned" to accept the unpleasantness -- made no attempt at all to escape. This came as quite a surprise to the researchers.
But the real shocker came a bit later, when a new and "unconditioned" group of dogs was put in with the conditioned ones. The minute the circumstances became unpleasant, the same easy-and-obvious means of escape was made available to all the dogs. The new, unconditioned ones left immediately.
But the conditioned dogs made not the slightest attempt to leave their very uncomfortable circumstances -- even when they saw the other dogs leaving from the very same pen they, themselves, were in!
So what does this have to do with your ability or inability to lose weight? Everything! First, it shows that extremely self-sabotaging behaviors can be learned, and learned very quickly under the "right" circumstances.
Secondly, it shows that a sense of helplessness can be maintained long after the circumstances that first caused it have ceased to exist.
But most importantly, it shows that if we are conditioned to feel helpless, we can fail to act in our own best interest even when the opportunity for healthier action presents itself -- and even when others around us are making progress right before our eyes!
What this means to you is that, if you are chronically overweight, you almost certainly have been exposed to some disempowering circumstances in your life. Further, it means that, even though those circumstances that made you feel helpless may be long gone, you may still be acting -- reacting -- as if the threat or problem still exists.
In other words, a small chunk of "bad programming" may be all that's keeping you overweight!
This landmark experiment also proved that maladaptive behaviors (like those that may underlie your excess weight) can exist indefinitely, and for no good reason.
The god news is, what was learned can be unlearned. But only if your eyes are open! Until you can acknowledge the problem and seek the solution, you have no choice but to suffer endlessly and needlessly -- just like the poor, unfortunate dogs who "learned" to be helpless.
Is that OK with you?
3. Fear And Self-Disempowerment
Fear is the most disempowering emotion we humans can experience. We need to understand that fear is not a static thing, or something that can easily be put in a box or a neat little pigeonhole.
Fear is not always easy to identify. It comes in many disguises, and has many faces and flavors: anxiety, worry, guilt, greed, and anger to name but a few. But all these negative experiences -- indeed, all negative experiences in life -- have the same thing at their core: fear.
For example, anxiety typically involves fear about the future, whereas worry involves fear about the present, and guilt is fear related to the past. Greed is the product of fear about money, and anger involves the fear that we're either not getting what we should, or that we'll have to put up with something we shouldn't have to.
All negative feelings, emotions, and experiences are, in some way, the product of fear. That's why I call them "The Children Of Fear."
Why should we eliminate fear from our life? Because it's a true double-edged sword. On one hand, any time we're experiencing a fear-based emotion, we feel bad. That's a given. No matter what the "flavor" of our fear-based experience, it feels bad. To us. Right now.
But equally important -- or even more so -- is the fact that a negative experience results in diminished coping ability. In other words, the negativity we're stuck in robs us of the very resources we need to get our lives back on track!
My goal is for you to see, and to totally believe, that you have every bit of the power you need to eliminate fear from your life.
As you learn the skills necessary to make dramatic changes and improvements in your life, you will discover that you have virtually unlimited power to determine the way you feel in each moment. You will learn to control your mood and attitude, your present moment experience, and even the course of your life by eliminating fear and negativity from it.
- Summary -
The purpose of this Report has been to help you discover that:
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