joshuawayne.com

On a wee bit of an end of the summer break.  Looking forward to coming back with a bunch of new material in early September…

I have a bunch of new stuff planned:

• expanding on the Motivational Tips series
• launching an e-book on Ending Emotional Eating with my friends over at PEERtrainer.com
• a battery of cool videos on ending emotional eating, finding your center, being the calm in the middle of the storm, deep breathing, smiling, being at your best
• and other charming ideas to create a life of substance and happiness.

So enjoy these dog days of summer, and check back here in early September…or just sign up for my RSS feed (over on the right there) and you’ll be the first to know.  It’s good to be in the know…y’know?

Cheers,

Joshua

So in Motivation Tip #1, I talked about determining your innate motivational strategy when it comes to weight loss.  Specifically, I helped you determine if you are more naturally motivated Towards Pleasure or  Away From Pain.

So now I want to focus on how you effectively apply this valuable little nugget of information.

In the simplest of terms, your motivational strategy tells you how you have to think about your weight loss goals in order to consistently take action.

Let me repeat that in a slightly different way: in order to consistently take positive, forward-moving action to lose weight, you need to think about it in the right language and with the right pictures in your mind.

What To Do If You’re More Motivated Towards Pleasure

If you’re Motivated Towards Pleasure, then really spend some time thinking about what you want in rich and colorful detail. Find pictures (of yourself or from a magazine) that inspire you and make a vision board (this can be as simple as a few pictures in your journal or a complex mural on your bedroom wall- whatever works best for you).

What To Do If You’re Motivated Away From Pain

What I have found is that most people who are struggling with their weight are more motivated away from pain when it comes to their health.

(Side note: I’m not going into this much here, but it is possible to be have a different strategy in different areas of your life; for example ‘away from’ with your weight and ‘towards’ with your career.  Obviously here we’re just focusing on the weight issue.)

As a result, you need a slightly more sophisticated motivational strategy because somebody trying to inspire you by how great you will feel when you lose 30 pounds is going to fall on deaf ears.

However, thinking about how you’re going to feel 5 years from now if you don’t make a change is likely to make your ears perk up.

They key is to go in your mind to the place where the consequences lie  so you don’t have to go there in reality.

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Came across this video the other day while traversing digital glaciers on YouTube.  What struck me in particular was what she says toward the end of the video: finding her value as a person and that was the thing that ultimately made the difference for her to lose the weight.

The trick, of course, is how do you get the lesson without having to go to the dark place she wound up?  In any event, I think she nails it in her remarks at the end.

I’m starting a series of Weight Loss Motivation Tips.  Why?  Because I was working out in a park in Asheville, NC (great place, check it out) in the steamy heat earlier today, and then walking hither and thither to the river with the dog for a swim…somewhere in the midst of swimming in the heat, humidity and the river the idea occurred to me.

It will be an ongoing series, and I think a lot of them will be rather pithy, but the first few will probably be longer to communicate some basic ideas about Motivation in depth.  I also think over time there will be a lot of them and that they may make a really useful series.  So here goes:

Weight Loss Motivation Tip #1: Towards or Away?

In order to find more motivation in your effort to lose weight and be healthier- be it choosing and sticking with the right foods or getting off the couch to exercise) there is a very fundamental thing you need to understand about yourself:

Are you primarily motivated Towards Pleasure or Away From Pain?

Why is this so important?

Because not all cars are created the same; neither are all people.  Different people are motivated in different ways.

You need to understand where you fall on this continuum when it comes to weight loss and improving your health.  If you want to create a motivational strategy that will work, meaning one that consistently helps you take action in a positive direction, you need to know this about yourself.

So how do you tell if you are motivated Towards Pleasure or Away From Pain? “Meditate” on these questions, meaning read them, take a couple of deep breaths, “go inside” and feel which you respond stronger to.

Do you feel more motivated to make changes in your diet and exercise lifestyle habits when you think about:

Question 1:

a) You’re hiking up a mountain on a sunny day.  You’re heart is beating but you feel great.  The view is awesome, the air is fresh, and you can hear the sound of the wind in the trees.

b)  It’s two years from now, and you still haven’t really made a change.  You’re tummy is getting bigger, and your knees and hips hurt when you get up and move around for more than a few minutes.

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For the fine folks at Technorati:
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Early this year, Jackie Wicks (the co-founder of PEERtrainer.com) and I created a 12 week coaching program called “The Point of No Return”. We did it live with an initial group, and recorded everything so we could share it with others.  We shared some really innovative ideas about losing weight (and ending emotional eating).  The results were excellent.

The title came from an observation we had of people who really get over the hump in their effort to lose weight.  Obviously it often takes some time to get there, but we see people finally get to a place where the struggle with food- and as a result, of course, their weight- is not so constant and not so diffcult.

We call it “The Point of No Return” because once you get there, there’s really no going back.  This is a crucial part of the concept.  You fundamentally change your relationship to food and yourself, and you don’t go back to old habits.  You may slip up here and there, but you get yourself back on track much sooner than later.

It’s actually a place that anybody can get to, and we built our 12 week program as a “roadmap” if you will to get there.  When you get to “The Point Of No Return”:

• You know exactly what to do to lose weight, and there is no struggle anymore to do it.
• You can comfortably live at your ideal weight without the constant anxiety of falling off track and starting over again at square one.
• You can gain a bit of weight because of the holidays or a vacation, but know you can get back to your ideal weight without any sense of helplessness or fear.
• Your relationship to food and exercise is relaxed and comfortable rather than an ongoing struggle or chore.
• You enjoy food, but don’t obsess about it.
• You enjoy a happy, balanced life where you’re in control of your emotions and food choices rather than them being in control of you.

(more…)

I wanted to write an article so people who are just getting to know me and my work can have a frame of reference for why I focus specifically focus on emotional eating.  Yes, I cover other weight loss and personal development related topics, but my particular interest and focus as a coach and writer is emotional eating and the various synonyms that come with it (binging, night snacking, overeating, etc).

As a quick side note, I’m writing this, I’m sitting on the back porch of my mother’s home in Asheville, NC and a big, beautiful butterfly just flew in front of my face.  I’m relaxed after a run and swim in the river with the dog…a nice cup of earl grey tea by my side, and the bullfrog resident of her little pond just surfaced to make himself known.  I think it’s mating season for him…he’s been around a bunch this week.

Why am I talking about this in the middle of the post?  Because it illustrates a point I’ll come back to which is that we get so absorbed in ourselves and our struggle and the incessant thoughts/activity in our heads, and we neglect to appreciate the simple things in life.  We get way out of the habit of slowing down and getting involved in the world that is going on outside of our head.

Reminds me: Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh says something to the effecct that if you can’t meditate when you’re washing the dishes, then you can’t really meditate on a cushion either.  In other words, savor and rejoice in the mundane.

So here we go, Why I Focus on Emotional Eating (hopefully in some sensible order):

1. I struggled with it myself. There was a period in my early 20’s when I was food obsessed.  I was not in balance in my life.  I was avoiding dating and relationships because I was scared of commitment, and food was my outlet.  I was actually rail thin because I was obsessive with healthy food and exercise.  Crazy amounts of my mental energy were absorbed by food and my body. I had some distorted body image issues as well (I was somewhere between chunky and meaty growing up and had an internal image of myself as fat).   It was finally when I began really confronting the underlying issues (for me it was intimacy) and started dating in particular that the issues with food and my body finally normalized- and quickly at that.  They have been normal and in balance ever since.  I enjoy food, but I don’t think much about it when I’m not hungry.  In fact, even when I’m hungry, I often find preparing food and eating it to be something of a chore rather than a source of anticipation and excitement.  More than anything food is fuel to me- which I think is a normal and healthy relationship to have to food.
2. I’ve always been into health, fitness and mind/body wellness. Since my days as a high school athlete, I’ve always been interested in fitness and nutrition (well the nutrition part came later at the hippie college I went to- you can learn more about those days in my full bio if you’re interested).  I’ve also been very interested in mind/body stuff like meditation, yoga, martial arts and guided visualization work since that time as well.  In the course of learning all these things, I’ve learned a lot about how to help people make powerful shifts in their life.
3. I’ve always had ‘the ‘therapist gene’. Since around the time I was 16, I’ve been very interested in personal growth work.  Someone once said to me that I have ‘the therapist gene’, and I think that’s pretty accurate.  I was the kind of person who others naturally came to for personal feedback, and it’s no small wonder that I went on to get my Masters Degree in Counseling.  As I’ve evolved in my work and transitioned to what I call Personal Development Coaching, focusing on weight loss challenges- and emotional eating in particular- has  been an obvious and natural fit for me.
4. I “get it”- meaning I instinctively get what is involved in losing weight and keeping it off, both from the mental/psychological point of view and also from the physical point of view (how to exercise, what to eat).
5. A lot of people struggle with emotional eating. Of all the various aspects of the weight loss process, I think the strong emotional attachment to food dogs people the most and is one of the most difficult to overcome, because it’s almost always symptomatic of deeper issues going on.  As I’ve gotten deeper into working with clients on their weight loss issues, it’s become apparent how much an imbalanced relationship to food is so many people’s achilles heel.   (more…)

Warning: I’m going to begin this post by being presumptuous and saying that above all else:

We all want happiness in life.

It really doesn’t matter where you come from…

It really doesn’t matter  how much money you have…

It really doesn’t matter what neighborhood you live in…

What you ultimately want in life is happiness.

You want to feel good about yourself, the people around you and you want to feel positive and optimistic about what life has to offer.

If you’re reading this, then it’s also likely that at some level you believe that losing weight will help you get closer to your happiness.

Happiness can be a bit of a tricky topic, though, for 2 reasons:

1.  It’s such an individual thing, and means something different to everybody.

2. Because very often the things that we think will bring up happiness in reality will not.  They might even bring us greater frustration and unhappiness.

When it comes to understanding and mastering the connection between weight loss and happiness, I have found that there are three different things you need to look at that can really make the difference.

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Finding The Motivation to Exercise

There are a couple of common trends I’ve noticed in people who don’t currently have a steady exercise habit in place.  Both of these ‘attitudes’ towards exercise make ‘logical sense’ but there is a big problem with them:

They just don’t work to get people off the couch and planted in a routine that they enjoy and that lasts.

Here are the two common attitudes we’ve noticed that keep people stuck in their ‘not-exercising habit’, and a few suggestions about how to begin changing them.

1.    “I’m just not motivated to exercise!”

People who carry around this attitude towards exercise actually have the ‘motivation formula’ backwards.  They wrongly think motivation will be like a light bulb that finally goes off in their head and then they’ll finally be motivated to take action.

What they don’t understand is that the motivation is much more likely to flow one they begin taking action.  Action leads to motivation, not the other way around.

The art is in getting off the couch.

One key reason this is true is actually biological in nature:

Once you start breathing harder and get your heart rate up, your brain will automatically start releasing endorphins (those little ‘happy chemicals’ that lift your mood and make you feel good) and your energy level will shift.  You will be feeling good, and consequently your motivation naturally builds.

I know this sounds a little trite and obvious, but there’s a reason Nike has clung to the same marketing message for so many years.

“Just Do It” has stood the test of time for them because there is a fundamental truth in the idea.

The art is in the start- not in thinking there is some hidden secret out there that will strike like a bolt of lightning and then make it somehow magically happen.

It’s sort of like an old fashioned ‘spinning top’.  Remember those?  One little flick of the wrist would set the thing in motion for minutes at a time.

But you had to pick it up and set it into motion- otherwise it was just an object that sat there motionless and did nothing.

So if this is you, then your challenge is to be that top and just pick it up and spin it.  Don’t think about it; don’t strategize about it; just do it.

Here is something specific you can try: (more…)

This is part 2 in my series on self-sabotage in the weight loss process.  You can find part one HERE.  Part 2 picks up with the 3rd most common reason I see people sabotaging their weight loss effort.  Enjoy.

3.    You Don’t Believe You Deserve It

It’s also possible that you continue to sabotage your own success, because at some deeper level you still don’t believe that you really deserve the body and happiness you desire.  In a strange way, carrying the extra weight may be much more inside your comfort zone than being thin. As unhappy as you may be, you already know what to expect in life- things are familiar and predictable.

If this sounds familiar, then what I want you to understand first and foremost is that these are beliefs you either learned from others or created for yourself- nothing more.

You don’t have to carry them any further with you ‘in your suitcase’ than you already have.  Sure, changing these beliefs requires some deep reflection and earnest effort, but any negative belief you may have about yourself, your body or your worthiness as a person can be changed.

The solution?  As you bump into these old beliefs start reflecting on where they came from.  Who encouraged you to think and feel this way about yourself?

• Your family?
• Friends?
• An old boyfriend?
• Or maybe you just created it all by yourself.

Regardless, the first step is recognizing these old limiting beliefs and being willing to ‘exchange them’ for new beliefs that help you get where you want to be rather than blocking the way.

The truth is this:

You deserve all the health, happiness, positive relationships and fit, sexy body you desire.  You need to own that truth.  You need to fully believe this yourself and get out of your own way.

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