Sabotage-Killing Your Success

For people who've never struggled with their weight, the path to weight loss seems simple. Diet! Exercise!

People who have never struggled with excess weight have it all backwards – it's not their fault -- they've just been listening to the standard media misinformation we all hear.

Thin people just love to tell us to simply diet and exercise, further reinforcing feelings of frustration and guilt.

Actually, those of us who have lost large amounts of weight permanently, know better!

Highly restricted diets backfire with hunger, cravings, and feelings of deprivation. Exercising too much depletes the body of its energy, nutrients and often leads to injury.

All the evidence on long-term weight loss says the path to permanent weight loss is a reasonable approach combined with consistency.

But what about the word "consistency"?

Why is it so hard to be consistent with healthy eating and activity?

The answer is the "s" word: "sabotage."

Sabotage is the way we all get in our own way. It's also the route back where we came from – living with too much fat on our bodies.

Weight loss is complicated and often frustrating. That is because it isn't just physical. It's not just diet and exercise. It's also mental, emotional and spiritual. It's a complicated maze of decision-making, conditioned thought, eating patterns and emotional needs.

On top of it all, we're encouraged to overthink the situation by the proliferation of ill-informed media around the topic, further complicating it!

A lot of food behavior runs very deep in our lives and psyches. If we try to simply change food behaviors without changing the underlying thought processes, it works for a short time only.

Then, our own mind sabotages us and we revert to old behaviors during times of stress, non-mindfulness and emotion.

That’s the only thing in between what you want and what you’ve got in life. That’s true, no matter what the goal or dream is. We tend to sabotage ourselves with our limited beliefs and with attitudes we learned at a young age.

For instance, if you believe "food = love" and you've been living that equation for many years, you have no doubt received great comfort from food. Deep down, you won't let go of that "source of love and comfort" without some real, conscious effort.

The sabotage happens when we revert to "food = love" in times of stress or difficulty in our lives, or when we're bored or progress slows.

Although it's understandable to hold onto that source of comfort, real freedom comes with an alte
ate source of feeling loved, one that doesn't impair your health or self-esteem.

When old thinking patterns have brought excess weight into your life, it will take a new way of thinking to banish it forever. But we all deserve to be free of addictive behaviors with food, and the negative feelings that go along with those behaviors.