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There is a Native American story of a wise elder who is in charge of teaching the younger members of the tribe.  One day he is giving a lesson and says, “There are two dogs in my head.  One is very good; he is positive, optimistic and kind.  The other one is very bad; he is negative, angry and judgmental.  These two dogs are always fighting.”

One of his young students asks him, “So which one wins?”

The elder replies, “Whichever one I feed the most.”

Like the wise old man of this story, many people experience a similar inner conflict with their weight loss.  It is like there are two conflicting voices inside their heads.

One voice is frustrated and is on the verge of begin depressed and giving up hope.  It says things like:

• “Will I ever find something that works?”
• “Will I ever eating to deal with my stress?”
• “I can’t imagine how to live without my Oreos!”
• “Will I ever be thin?
• “Will I ever be ‘normal’?”
• “Will anybody ever want me?”
• “Nothing has worked up until now, so what’s the point of still trying?”

The other voice, in spite of the frustration and lack of results, refuses to give up hope.  It says things like:

• “There must be something out there that will work for me.”
• “It has to be possible.”
• “I’m not willing to give up.”
• “I want to get there.  I will do whatever it takes.”

The challenge is, which voice will you listen to? Will you give in to the whispers inside that say what’s the point, what’s the use?

Or will you stay focused, optimistic and keep going until you find the right solution or support?

Deciding which voice to listen to is the crucial first step, but there is a second step that is equally important.  The second step is having the right information that will help you get where you want to be.

Consider this: what you have done up until this point has gotten you to exactly where you are right now. If you’re feeling stuck and the number on the scale isn’t moving, then you need new information to shake things up.  New insights and ideas come from new information.

Whatever path you choose to follow to get where you want to be, remember the choice between hope and despair is always up to you. It’s a choice you make every minute of every day.  You make it by deciding which voice to listen to.  You make it by deciding which dog to feed.

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!

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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.
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Happy 2009 to all.  While my blog is focused on weight loss, with all that is going on in the world right now, I want to dedicate this first post to talking about a Mindset.  In my next posts I will come back to weight loss specific topics, but I believe this is a timely subject to address, as it also has huge implications on your weight loss success.  So…

In spite of all the many reasons to be scared about what’s going on in the economy and the world, and the temptation to be timid and worrisome in the face of it, I keep coming back to this key, fundamental idea:

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3 Simple Steps to Make Your Weight Loss Affirmations 10 Times More Powerful

Affirmations are a very popular strategy for assisting in weight loss.  However, most people don’t know how to maximize their effectiveness and therefore don’t get the full results they can from this powerful tool.  And yes, affirmations are- if done correctly- a powerful tool and not just new age hocus-pocus as some people believe.
If you don’t know what affirmations are, they are statements you repeat over and over again to train your mind to create a positive outcome. A couple examples relevant to weight loss are:

I am losing weight easily and effortlessly.
I feel healthy and attractive at my ideal body weight.

Here are 3 simple steps to make your weight loss affirmations 10 times more powerful:

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