The psychology behind weight loss and what I learned this year

I am just 5 days away from celebrating my one year anniversary of starting to reclaim my health and happiness through a healthier lifestyle using whole foods. For those of you that have followed along this past year you likely have an opinion about what I’ve done and how I’ve done it.  You many even have thoughts or opinions about what it appears I may have sacrificed to reach my goals.  Some of you may wonder if you could make the same changes in your life.  I am here to tell you that it is possible but I also need to tell you that it’s not only what you put in your mouth that determines your success!

What I know for sure is that losing weight isn’t actually all about the food.  You are probably saying – yeah right… this coming from someone that has just lost 50 pounds eating salads, dozens of eggs and countless heaps of kale!  Don’t get me wrong those things are a big huge part of why I’ve been successful this time but they don’t work alone.  The real truth behind why I was able to make it work this time was because I did and continue to do the hard work of fixing my mind.   Weight loss, can and will become the natural result of you tackling the things in your life that are out of balance.  Unfortunately the people selling diet books don’t want you to know this.  Most people go about losing weight the wrong way, they try and control what they eat, restrict calories and workout like crazy.  While this can work in the short term, this method is too hard and most people can’t sustain those type of changes for long periods of time and they eventually go back to their old way of eating because they feel too deprived.  This is also the reason why weight loss is such a personal experience, each individual needs to figure out exactly what is going on in their lives beyond food that may be preventing them from making the changes necessary to achieve a healthy state of being.

For me I had to tackle a series of areas of my life, and to be honest I didn’t even know what they all were at the time I started as some things revealed themselves along the way.  The truth is that what I did that was the single most important piece of the puzzle this time is that I learned to love myself.   If I can tell you the one single thing you can do that will change the way you think and behave it’s to wake up every day and be grateful for yourself.  You need to believe you are special and that you are worth all the joy and happiness that the world is offering you. When you do that every morning it opens up the possibility that doing anything that is in opposition to loving yourself is worthless.  Once I learned this one piece of the puzzle I realized that being good to myself produced all sorts of amazing rewards. For me being good to myself meant making health a priority, getting proper sleep at night, eliminating sugar as much as possible to prevent unnecessary mood swings, learning and practicing meditation on a regular basis, drinking lots of water and tea, cooking, doing yoga, walking and strength training.  What I still work on is finding more confidence in myself, estabilishing healthy relationships and managing my stress levels.  These things can be constant struggles for me but I am more aware of them now than I ever was in the past.  I know that they each need focus and attention so that I can continue to evolve to become the best possible version of myself. The beauty of the weight loss journey is that it is a total examination of your entire way of being.  It’s doing the hard work of constantly asking yourself who is it that you want to be and then living in the present moment focused on the things that are going to help  get you there.

This is why I called my blog “My Whole life” because being healthy is about the whole person, your spirituality, your relationships, your career and then it’s about what you eat and how much you move.  A whole life is one that has each one of these areas working in balance.  Once you learn this you’ll be on the right path to a healthy weight.

I hope this article helps you if you struggle with being good to yourself and accepting yourself as you are right now.  My hope is that by sharing my own personal experiences that I might reach someone else that struggles with the same things.  If this post helped you please leave a comment – I would love to hear from you!

Namaste!