Yesterday you read about Leilani’s process of getting healthy and fit and learned how she’s had a very important awareness, an awareness that is a vital point in life in general – whatever you focus on is what you will create more of.
She realized that she was focusing on what was “wrong” with her instead of what is right with her and she immediatley shifted her focus.
In addition to sharing that great point about her awareness Leilani asked me how to create her own personal, strong, weight loss affirmation – an affirmation that will help her get past her fear of weight loss. (by the way if you missed the link above and haven’t read yesterday’s post yet go ahead and do that to get the full scoop on this topic 😉 ).
How To Create A Strong Weight Loss Affirmation
Affirmations are thoughts that you either repeatedly think, speak, and/or write. Notice I didn’t specify that affirmations are positive because any thought that you currently think over and over again is an affirmation, even if it’s negative! What happens though, is if you think it long enough it becomes a belief and if that belief is a negative statement about yourself it’s going to limit you.
In How to Use Your Brain to Lose Weight, I outlined an exercise you can use to uncover your negative, limiting beliefs that are often subconscious because you have been thinking them for so long. I’ll let you read that post for all of the details and here I’ll outline an example using Leilani’s specific situation of feeling fear of losing weight for fear of not being safe as a slender person.
It’s a Personal Process
It’s important to go through this exercise on your own so that you uncover your own negative beliefs. I have some examples for you however through this post I am not able to guide you personally, and it’s important that you find affirmations that you resonate with strongly. So if you haven’t read How to Use Your Brain to Lose Weight yet go ahead and do that now so you’ll know how to do this yourself…
Ok, now that you’ve done that let’s say that Leilani did that exercise and her response to the statmement “I can lose weight” was:
No way that’s happening, too scary for me!
That is just one response and I would suggest continuing on like I outlined in my post, continuing to write “I can lose weight” so that you can get to the bottom of that scary thought about losing weight by bringing up more of the negative, limiting beliefs that you have.
When you keep going maybe you would get responses like:
Too many people will try to hurt me.
I won’t be able to say no.
It’s not safe to be attractive.
Ok, you see how this works. Keep writing until you stop getting the negative responses to “I can lose weight” and then go back over your list and pick out one or two of the negative beliefs you wrote down. Those are the ones that are at the root of your fear about losing weight, the fear of not being safe if you are slender.
Once you have the one or two strongest, negative beliefs you need to turn them into positive, present tense affirmations. For an example, I’ll use the response I wrote above, “I won’t be able to say no”.
If you don’t feel safe being thin and you use your overweight to keep people away then the negative belief, “I won’t be able to say no” makes sense. If you were slender you think you would be more attractive and would attract attention – then what would you do if you feel you don’t have the right to say no? Maybe you’d stay overweight to avoid the whole situation. !
In reality we cannot control how anyone else feels about us, therefore we cannot control who is attracted to us. When we stay overweight and unattractive in essence we are trying to control other people’s attraction to us. We have NO control over anyone else except ourselves and this means that we need to work on our own personal power, and we always have the right to say no to unwanted advances.
Once you are comfortable saying no then why would you need to push people away? And if you don’t need to push people away and the reason you keep yourself overweight is to push people away, then why stay overweight?
Turn It Into a Positive
This was a roundabout path although necessary groundwork to share before turning, “I won’t be able to say no” into a positive, present tense affirmation. Now here are a couple of examples of positive affirmations:
I am safe in my power to say no.
I feel comfortable saying no.
I can say no.
Once you create a positive affirmation out of your negative belief if it doesn’t resonate with you because it sounds like a lie because it’s too much of a stretch for you right now then just back up and append “I am willing” to the affirmation. So, if “I can say no” doesn’t ring true for you then start with, “I am willing to choose to say no” or “I am willing to feel safe saying no”.
Uncover Your Limiting Beliefs to Affirm Weight Loss
This exercise of uncovering your limiting beliefs and then turning them into positive affirmations is an excellent way to create your own strongest weight loss affirmation. When you go through the exercise in How to Use Your Brain to Lose Weight you just might be surprised at what you uncover and that’s a great thing! Uncovering your limiting beliefs will bring them into the light of day, make you aware of them, and then you will have the power to change them.
As long as they remain unconscious they will sabotage your best efforts to lose weight because no matter how hard you force yourself to “diet and exercise”, if you have the limiting belief that “it’s not safe to be slender”, then you won’t be.
Photo by a. venefica
I wrote a post today on my blog titled “The Mindset of a Champion” it applies to a wide variety of situations, but after reading your article I thought it might be of value to your readers.
Thanks for the inspiration.
Dr. Ron from Zriis last blog post..Mindset Of A Champion
Thank you for this post. I completely believe that if you can change your thoughts, you can change your life. Focus on what you want and you will get it!
Judies last blog post..Gym Yoga