joshuawayne.com

How To Increase Your Positive Thinking

In Part 1 of this post, I identified that the choices you’re making on an ongoing basis are either moving you in a positive or a negative direction.  Now what do we do with that?  Where do we go from here?

This is a very important part of the equation, so please really take this to heart.  This is where the potential lies to move from just making weight loss “simple” to actually making it “easy” over time.

A close friend was recently visiting me who is getting his PhD in Philosophy.  He was telling me about a course he recently took in practical approaches to Eastern Philosophy, and he said that the whole thing could be summed up in roughly 2 sentences:

If it’s good and it’s working, follow it.
If it’s not good and it’s not working, let it go.

The point is this: you have to keep moving forward staying focused on the positives.  If it’s good and it’s working, then keep moving in that positive direction- follow it.

If you make a bad food choice that brings you down in any way, then acknowledge it and then let it go. When you let go of a bad choice, you are by definition already moving forward in a positive direction.  Ask yourself, “What is the next thing to do?  How do I move in a positive direction from here?”

Maybe you drink a couple extra glasses of water to flush your system, maybe you go for a 10-minute walk, maybe you call a friend or write in your journal.  It doesn’t matter so much what you do; what matters is that you make the choice to quickly regroup and move forward in a positive direction. Like  I’ve been saying: simple, huh?

So, the “art” here is actually two fold:

1. Getting really good at making positive decisions in the first place. Mostly this involves being mindful and aware of what you’re doing.  Are you being conscious when you make a food choice?  Are you using the tools and resources at your disposal to help you make good choices (calling a friend if you’re in a bad spot or committing to logging your food)?  The more mindful, present and aware you are in each moment, the better your choices will be- guaranteed.
2. Getting really good at getting back on a positive track if you fell off. This is actually a huge skill and cannot be overlooked.  We all make mistakes.  Don’t demand perfection from yourself, but do hold yourself accountable to keep putting yourself back on a positive track.  Like I said before, if you make a mistake, acknowledge it and use it as an opportunity to be more conscious of your choices and to get right back on track.

There’s one final little piece I want to add that I think is really helpful (and by the way, in case you haven’t figured this out by now, these ideas can help you in many ways in your life beyond just weight loss).

When you make a choice in a positive direction, really celebrate it. It know it sounds a little cheesy, but it’s important.  When you do well, you need to get psyched about it.  It reinforces your positive thinking in a powerful way.

Remember, you’re building habits here.  The more you feel good and proud of yourself for positive choices, the stronger you build the habit in that direction.  Positive thinking leads to positive habits. It’s just the way things work. If you doubt it at all, that’s fine.  But I ask that you earnestly practice what I’m talking about here for one week.  Really apply these principles into your life and see how they affect you.

In fact, regardless of how much you “buy-in” to what I’m talking about, I’d love to hear your thoughts.  If you’re doubting what I’m saying here, that’s actually great!  I invite you to go test out these ideas for the next 7 days and get back to me with your results.

How To Make Weight Loss Simple

The ideas I am going to share with you about how to approach weight loss are about how to make it a simple process. Now I know this may sound like one of those phony sounding headlines we all read on the covers of countless magazines about “How to Lose 20 Pounds in 2 Weeks By Eating This One Vegetable” but I assure you what I’m talking about is different (yes, I shudder too when I read those empty promises).

I want to assure that my choice of words is very deliberate. I carefully chose the word “simple” as opposed to “easy”.  My experience is that they are often two very different things, and it’s usually helpful to keep them separate.  But what I want to share with you is an idea I had recently that can give you a simpler way to approach weight loss (and that will hopefully make it easier in the process as well).

Here’s why I think that at it’s core weight loss is really a simple process.  There is only one thing you ever really need to pay attention to, and that is what you do next. That’s it.

Think about that for a second. We make it so complicated and we overwhelm ourselves with all our non-stop thoughts and worries.

• We stress about what we ate yesterday (or even several days ago!) and how it will show up on the scale
• We worry about what we’ll eat tomorrow when we’re out with friends
• We drive ourselves crazy worrying about how we’re ever going to successfully lose the 20 or 30 or 50 or 80 pounds to begin with
• And all the while we’re terrified of the possibility that we won’t and we’ll be dealing with this frustration the rest of our lives!

Whoa!  That’s a lot of thinking!  But in my experience it’s what most of us do.  Do you see how complicated we make it? We get so busy in our heads thinking about all the things we need to do and all the things that can go wrong, and in the process we forget the most important thing of all: the present moment, and that single, simple choice in front of us about what to do next.

Do you get how simple that is?  There is only one decision you actually have to make.  You don’t have to make a decision about what happens 30 minutes from now, or 10 hours from now or 10 days from now.  You just have to decide what to do next.

So let’s take it a step further…

What I want you to realize is that every decision you make is going to lead you in either a positive or a negative direction.  Just two choices here (remember, we’re keeping it simple) and it’s definitely one or the other!

(more…)

What Do You Want?

A client, “Marcy”, came to see me yesterday and said, “I’m always on a diet!  I lose 10 pounds and gain back 5…then next time I lose 5 and gain back 10.  It goes on and on like this; I just can’t maintain my focus on losing weight.  What do I do?”

“Well”, I told her, “the first thing you have to figure out is what you really want.”

“I already know what I want”, she said, “I want to lose 25 pounds and go down four dress sizes!”  That is what she said, but the look on her face was impatient and had “Duhhh!” written all over it.

“Look”, I said, “on the surface I understand that this is what you want.  But you have to go deeper and figure out ‘the want behind the want’.  That is what will keep your focus on losing weight.”

“Huh?”, she now said.  She had moved from “Duhhh!” to “Huh?”, so I knew we were making progress.

“There is a reason you want to lose 25 pounds,” I said.  “You believe that if you did, your life would be dramatically better in some specific ways.  You need to get in touch with exactly how it would be better.  That is the ‘want behind the want’.”

You see, a key aspect to lasting weight loss success is knowing why you want to lose weight at the deepest level, what I call “the want behind the want”.

So what is the want behind your want- that deeper value that losing weight will add to your life? Is it:

• To feel more comfortable dating or to feel sexier in the relationship you’re in?
• To be healthy and active with your children?
• Because you’ve been diagnosed with an illness and you want your health back?
• To look better and have more self-confidence when you interview for a job?
• To look better at a high school or family reunion?
• To really love yourself and feel good about your body.

Whatever your deep desire is, I want you to get in touch with it specifically.  Write down all the answers you come up with in as much detail as possible.

“The Want Behind The Want” Is Your True Motivator

When you know ‘the want behind the want’ you understand what truly motivates you because it stirs you emotionally and is strongly connected to your sense of happiness.  If the list of deeper wants you came up with do not stir you emotionally, then you did not dig deep enough.  Keep going.

You want to get to this ‘core desire’ because it gives you something to focus on that has much greater power and significance that simply focusing on a number.

(more…)

So I was traveling recently and had a couple hour layover in the Charlotte, NC airport.  Usually I do two things when I’m in an airport with time to spend waiting for a plane: eat some kind of Mexican food (it’s the usually the most reliably healthy option- you can’t go too wrong with black beans, salsa and fresh guacamole) and thumb through a bunch of magazines.

Sure, I’d like to say I’m the kind of a person who only reads magazines of taste and substance- but you wouldn’t likely completely buy that now, would you?  For good reason- it wouldn’t be exactly true.  Before I get around to the likes of “Harpers” and “The Economist”, I’ve first gotten my fill of Sports Illustrated, Maxim and Rolling Stone.

Well, I must have gotten caught up on A-Rod’s latest blood test results, the 8 must-do exercises for rock hard abs, and a review of Bob Dylan’s new album, because I found myself reading an interesting article in “Newsweek” (or was it “The Atlantic Monthly”- don’t remember) about the “glass ceiling” in American corporations.  It was talking about how in spite of Barack Obama’s election to office, many minorities and women still perceive that there is a visceral glass ceiling in their companies that typically doesn’t allow them to rise above middle management positions.

It really got me thinking about the weight loss struggle that so many of us go through, and how in many ways we bump into a “glass ceiling” as well- only this one is entirely of our own creation.  We usually know it too, but we still can’t figure out how to break through it.  We keep bumping our heads on this imaginary ceiling.

It’s like we keep getting snagged- like when you’re walking through a doorway and your shirt or jacket pocket gets snagged on the door handle (don’t you hate that?) and you get unpleasantly jerked back.  Only when it comes to weight loss, we get jerked back to the place where we began- and it leaves us feeling very frustrated and stuck.

So how can we break through that glass ceiling once and for all?  How can we shatter it to tiny, miniscule, meaningless pieces- and even get to the point where we realize it was in our minds the whole time? In other words, how can we break through out own barriers to finally have the results and happiness we desire?

What I’d like you to contemplate for a moment is that the way you’re going to break through this glass ceiling is by finding the “Hero Within”. Not exactly the answer you were expecting?  Let me explain.

There was a great mythologist named Joseph Campbell who studied literally thousands and thousands of myths and great stories from all over the world.  Campbell said that all of these stories were always about a heroic character who was fighting for truth or justice, or to find her passion and true purpose in life.

Campbell’s greatest contribution, though, was the realization that the tales of all of these great hero’s were ultimately just metaphors- metaphors for your life and mine.  He said that each of us is the hero on our own journey- a journey (and often a struggle) each of us is on to find our truth, our passion and to create what we really, really want in life.

Here’s always the catch though: in order for the hero- meaning you or I- to have the life we deeply desire, we inevitably come upon a threshold- a “glass ceiling” if you will.  Campbell calls this “The Threshold of Adventure” and in order to really claim the life we want, we have to get across it.

This can be tricky, though, because in order to get across it we have to change.  To at least some extent, we have to leave behind what is comfortable and familiar.  Think about this a bit.  What is comfortable and familiar is exactly what has gotten us to exactly where we are today.  It’s not what is going to get us the new result we want.

Campbell says that when every hero gets to his or her threshold of adventure it’s always scary, because what lies on the other side is the unknown.    The hero almost always experiences the desire to retreat, quit and seek comfort in what is more comfortable and familiar.

Think about this in terms of your struggle to lose weight and keep it off.  How many times have you tried to make changes, but you keep bumping into that same glass ceiling over and over again? Maybe you do great for 3 or 4 weeks, but then you get stressed at work, lose your focus and go right back to your uncontrollable night snacking.  Maybe you do great for a few months, lose 15 or 20 pounds, but then for some inexplicable reason you just start sabotaging your success and find yourself back at square one.  You hit that darn glass ceiling again!

In many ways, I think of the weight loss struggle as a classic Hero’s Journey scenario (and it’s one of the main ideas that PEERtrainer co-founder Jackie Wicks and I built our 12 week Mind Coaching and Training program around). There is something you deeply, deeply want.  I know this, because you wouldn’t be reading this article if it wasn’t true.  Maybe you want your health back, or a sexy body and to start dating again; maybe you just want to feel ‘normal’ again and not constantly plagued by the fear that you’ll binge and eat all night.  Maybe you want to go home for the holidays and not be anxious about what your parents and sister are thinking.

Whatever it is, you wouldn’t be reading this if there wasn’t some major change you really wanted to make in terms of your body and health.  And yet, you keep bumping into that threshold.

So how does the hero finally get across this threshold?  In a word: Courage. It requires the courage to change.  It requires the courage to fully commit to ourselves and our highest good; to commit to breaking out of this little jail cell we created.  It requires the courage to face our fears, “slay our dragons” and fight for what we want!  Your issues with food are the “battle” you must fight as the hero on your own journey.
(more…)

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about the weight loss mindset necessary if you have a lot of weight to lose- say 50 or more pounds.  In this second part, I will begin breaking down a 6 step process for losing the weight and creating the health and happiness you desire.  But before I get started, a necessary quick disclaimer before reading this article:

I am not seeking to diagnose or treat any physiological or mental disorder that would require the services of a trained and licensed physician, psychiatrist or mental health counselor.  The information I am sharing is intended to be strictly educational in nature.  If you think you may have either a physiological or mental disorder that requires the treatment and/or supervision of a licensed physician, psychiatrist or mental health counselor, I highly encourage you to seek out that consultation.

1.    Create a picture of the person you want to become.

This may sound like a simplistic step, but it’s actually very important- and it’s important to begin here.  Always start your self-inquiry on a positive note.  Do this by envisioning the person you want to become.  Write it down or create a ‘vision board’ with some images that represent the life you want to be living.  This is important because it’s easy to get bogged down in your problems and the things that aren’t working well in your life.  Having this picture gives you a positive, forward-looking image to inspire you, and also gives you something positive to return to again and again when the going gets tough.

2.    Determine what you need to let go of and what you need to address

As you travel along the journey of becoming the person you want to be- as outlined above- your issues are of course going to come up.  Consider that you need to do one of two things with them: 1) let them go, or 2) address them head on.

First, very often we continue to carry old, false beliefs that hold us back from the happiness and success we desire.  Often these false beliefs are about our degree of worthiness or desirability to others.  More often than not we adopted them when we were young- either because unconscious people around us put them in our heads or we invented them ourselves because we were stressed and scared and didn’t know any better.

Little by little we need to let these false beliefs go because they do nothing but limit our potential for happiness.  It’s like somebody put rocks in our backpack and we’re just carrying this dead weight around unnecessarily.  We need to let it go and step into the life we want to be living.

Other times there is just no alternative but to address our issues directly.  Maybe we have challenges in our relationships that need to be confronted directly; maybe our self-esteem is very low and we need the help and support of a therapist to help us work through it; maybe we are in unhappy in our career or job and need to get disciplined about making some changes.

How do you know the difference between what you need to let go of and what you need to address?  Simply put: if you can’t just let go of it, you need to address it.

3.    Don’t be shy about working with a therapist or coach

It’s interesting that in a society where having a therapist or coach has become quite commonplace, many people are still hesitant about seeking this kind of help.  They may foolishly think it’s a sign of weakness, or they may be mortified by what their friends would think.

Nobody needs to know you’re working with a professional to sort through your issues.  It’s strictly between you and that professional. If you feel you could benefit from the outside input and support but you’re holding back for one of the reasons I just mentioned, then with full care and compassion I offer this: get over it.

It doesn’t have to feel comfortable to make the appointment or walk in the door and share what’s really going on in your life.  In fact, if it doesn’t it may be a sign that you’re on the right track.  Regardless, if you need the support, get over whatever limiting beliefs you have that prevent you from taking action.

4.    If you do work with a therapist, make sure you find one that wants to get you out of therapy

(more…)

{Disclaimer before reading this article:  I am not seeking to diagnose or treat any physiological or mental disorder that would require the services of a trained and licensed physician, psychiatrist or mental health counselor.  The information I am sharing is intended to be strictly educational in nature.  If you think you may have either a physiological or mental disorder that requires the treatment and/or supervision of a licensed physician, psychiatrist or mental health counselor, I highly encourage you to seek out that consultation.}

Do you have a lot of weight to lose- meaning more than 50 pounds? Or perhaps even 100 or more pounds to lose?  Have you tried to lose that weight many times before- and perhaps successfully lost some of it- only to find yourself losing focus and gaining it all back again?

If this sounds like you, then in order to have the lasting success you desire, you may need to look at what is emotionally “below the surface” of the extra body weight you are accustomed to carrying.

Very often- not always, of course, but often- people who are carrying significant extra weight (50 pounds or more) have a deeper psychological issue (sometimes it may be more than one issue, but for grammatical simplicities sake, for the duration of this article I will just refer to it as an ‘issue’) that the extra weight is a symptom of.  In order to experience sustained, successful weight loss, very often they must unearth and address that deeper psychological issue at the same time.  They must deal with what’s beneath the weight.

If you fit the profile I describe above, then it’s possible that you already know what that deeper psychological issue is.  Perhaps you have even been working on it for some time- by yourself, in a support group of some sort, with a trust friend or with professional support.

If so, then good for you!  Being willing to look at your personal issues is an important and crucial early step to resolve or let go of what stands in the way of having the health and happiness you desire.

If you don’t know what that issue may be, then it’s an important thing to consider as you move forward on your trajectory to lose weight.

Here is the first crucial question to ask yourself:

What do I get to avoid in my life by carrying this extra weight?

If you are carrying significant extra weight on your body, there is something you ‘get’ out of it.  We could say that the extra weight has a ‘positive purpose’ in your life.  That may sound strange because it costs you so much in terms of your health and happiness, but nevertheless it is most likely true.  The ‘positive purpose’ is what it allows you to avoid dealing with.  So ask yourself, “What does this extra weight enable me to avoid?”

• (more…)