Three Crucial Skills For Winning At Weight Loss

Too often, we let life's problems darken our spirit and ruin our day.
Believe it or not, this can also add to the amount of excess weight on
our body. Here are three crucial skills that can help you keep this from
happening.

One of the main reasons we can't lose our excess weight, or put it on
in the first place, is that we just aren't coping very well with life's daily
rough spots. As a result, our stresses and strains aren't dealt with asrnthey happen. So they accumulate, piling up on each other -- like layers
of garbage at a landfill.

It's said that into each life a little rain must fall. For some of us, this rain
simply quenches our thirst and waters our flowers. For others, it muddies
the road, makes our hair look nasty, and generally ruins our day.

But whether we like it or not, the rain's gonna fall. So how do we deal
with it?

We all have our ways of responding to life's ups and downs. Some ofrnthese ways help us blow off stress, or at least keep our problems inrnperspective. Other ways are actually non-coping approaches, and
result in stress that either accumulates or is dealt with indestructively.

It's these destructive ways -- and especially, the self-destructive ones
-- that we need to identify and get rid of. To help us do this, we're going
to explore three subjects:

1. Mood / Attitude Enhancement
2. Learned Helplessness
3. Fear And Self-Disempowerment

Mood / Attitude Enhancementr
In life there are few things as important as your mood / attitude and
your ability to control it. How many times have you come across people
with bad attitudes? How do you feel when you're around them? How do
you think they feel?

How do people around you feel when you're in a bum mood? The truth
is, bad moods and attitudes are a lose/lose scenario for everyone
involved.

Sometimes crummy moods just seem to come over us, with no advance
warning and maybe no clear reason. And when they do, we may feel
powerless to fix them. Often as not, it seems like all we can do is wait
until they "blow over."

Is there any way to eliminate these bad moods from our life?

The truth -- the liberating truth --i s that your mood and attitude are
highly controllable. In fact, like a well-trained horse, our moods and
attitudes can be steered with very little effort, once you know how. All
it takes is a bit of conscious guidance.

But just as with a horse, you first need to show your attitude who's inrncontrol.

Why is it so important to be able to control your mood and attitude?
Because they color every aspect of your daily experience. Your attitude
either reflects or determines you mood. If your mood is lousy, your
experience of life will also be lousy for as long as your bad mood lasts.

Many of us do things to "compensate" for our bad moods, or for the fact
that we can't dump them quickly. Some of these "compensatory" behaviors
are exte
ally destructive. We hit walls, we break stuff, we drive
aggressively. Men tend to do these kinds of things more than women
do.

Other compensatory behaviors are self-destructive -- like overeating. Ifrnyou tend to be a compensatory eater, your response to the stress of bad
mood/attitude may be to head for the fridge. Perhaps you seek something
sweet, to help compensate for a sour day. Maybe you want to "feel" full
because your life seems empty. Women seem to gravitate toward these
more self-destructive behaviors.

But regardless of your gender or the nature of your destructive behavior,
the solution lies in finding healthier alte
atives. The best alte
ative is to stop being the victim of your moods and attitudes, and learn to take
charge of them. The ability to control your mood will make a tremendous
difference, not just in your weight loss efforts, but in the overall
quality of your life, right now and from now on.

Gaining the power to control your own mood / attitude involves asking
yourself...

Three Powerful Questionsr
Learning to control your mood/attitude is actually surprisingly simple.
And you can do it immediately, any time, and any place. The following
three simple questions can change your life instantly All you need to dornis to ask yourself:

Question #1: How do I feel?
Question #2: How do I want to feel?
Question #3: What can I do to get from "here" to "there?"

Of course, before you can consistently control your mood, you must
Believe that it really is under your control. The good news is, it is! The
fact is, what you experience in life is determined, not by anything or
anyone outside yourself, but by what goes on between your ears. And
that is 100% up to you!

This single awareness can change your life forever!

Unfortunately, our culture doesn't teach us that we have this power. Inrnfact, it works hard to teach us that we don't. And we pay a very high
price for abdicating the control that is rightfully ours. That's why werneach may need to learn this lesson for ourselves.

Once we learn it, our lives become more pleasant and powerful than
we had ever dared imagine. But if we don't learn it, we'll continue to be
buffeted around by every ill wind that blows from any direction -- and
suffer accordingly.

When we truly understand that our mood is entirely under our own
control, we can take Question Two (above) seriously, and then get a
valid answer to Question Three.

We really need to understand the high cost of not controlling our moods.
In daily life, attitude is everything. That's because, in every moment ofrnyour life, your own attitude is the "filter" through which you interpret
all your other experiences.

So, first thing every morning (yes, even before your coffee), do an
attitude assessment. Then adjust as needed. Done correctly, this simple
act will set a positive tone for your entire day. Not done at all, who
knows what will happen?

So the question is, do you want to leave your mood and attitude to the
winds of chance...and risk ending up with your face in a pie to compensate
for a "lousy day?" Or would you rather take active, conscious charge ofrnwhat happens between your ears, in your life -- and ultimately in your
stomach and around your waistline?

2. Learned Helplessness

One of the most famous and most revealing experiments in the history ofrnpsychological research involved the subject of learned helplessness. Irndon't have the room here to tell you as much about it as I'd like to, but
any Psychology 101 textbook will cover the topic.

However, there is one experiment that offers powerful insight into the
impact of learned behavior. Although this experiment was conducted using
dogs as subjects, the discoveries apply to human behavior as well. The
core of the experiment revolved around setting up unpleasant conditions
from which the dogs were initially unable to escape. Eventually, they
stopped trying. They simply gave up and "accepted their fate."

That was no surprise. Later, however, the same dogs were subjected to the
same unpleasant conditions under circumstances where the means of escape
was both obvious and easy. Yet the dogs -- now "conditioned" to accept the
unpleasantness -- made no attempt at all to escape. This came as quite a
surprise to the researchers.

But the real shocker came a bit later, when a new and "unconditioned"
group of dogs was put in with the conditioned ones. The minute the
circumstances became unpleasant, the same easy-and-obvious means
of escape was made available to all the dogs. The new, unconditioned
ones left immediately.

But the conditioned dogs made not the slightest attempt to leave their
very uncomfortable circumstances -- even when they saw the other dogs
leaving from the very same pen they, themselves, were in!

So what does this have to do with your ability or inability to lose
weight? Everything! First, it shows that extremely self-sabotaging
behaviors can be learned, and learned very quickly under the "right"
circumstances.

Secondly, it shows that a sense of helplessness can be maintained
Long after the circumstances that first caused it have ceased to exist.

But most importantly, it shows that if we are conditioned to feel
helpless, we can fail to act in our own best interest even when the
opportunity for healthier action presents itself -- and even when others
around us are making progress right before our eyes!

What this means to you is that, if you are chronically overweight, you
almost certainly have been exposed to some disempowering circumstances
in your life. Further, it means that, even though those circumstances that
made you feel helpless may be long gone, you may still be acting --reacting -- as if the threat or problem still exists.

In other words, a small chunk of "bad programming" may be all that's
Keeping you overweight!

This landmark experiment also proved that maladaptive behaviors (like
those that may underlie your excess weight) can exist indefinitely, and for
no good reason.

The good news is, what was learned can be unlea
ed. But only if your
yes are open! Until you can acknowledge the problem and seek the
solution, you have no choice but to suffer endlessly and needlessly –
just like the poor, unfortunate dogs who "learned" to be helpless.

Is that OK with you?

3. Fear And Self-Disempowermentr
Fear is the most disempowering emotion we humans can experience.
we need to understand that fear is not a static thing, or something that
can easily be put in a box or a neat little pigeonhole.

Fear is not always easy to identify. It comes in many disguises, and has
many faces and flavors: anxiety, worry, guilt, greed, and anger to name
but a few. But all these negative experiences -- indeed, all negative
experiences in life -- have the same thing at their core: fear.

For example, anxiety typically involves fear about the future, whereas
worry involves fear about the present, and guilt is fear related to the
past. Greed is the product of fear about money, and anger involves the
fear that we're either not getting what we should, or that we'll have tornput up with something we shouldn't have to.

All negative feelings, emotions, and experiences are, in some way, the
product of fear. That's why I call them "The Children Of Fear."

Why should we eliminate fear from our life? Because it's a true
double-edged sword. On one hand, any time we're experiencing a fear-based emotion, we feel bad. That's a given. No matter what the "flavor"
of our fear-based experience, it feels bad. To us. Right now.

But equally important -- or even more so -- is the fact that a negative
experience results in diminished coping ability. In other words, the
negativity we're stuck in robs us of the very resources we need to get
our lives back on track!

My goal is for you to see, and to totally believe, that you have every bit
of the power you need to eliminate fear from your life.

As you learn the skills necessary to make dramatic changes and
improvements in your life, you will discover that you have virtually
unlimited power to determine the way you feel in each moment.

You will learn to control your mood and attitude, your present moment
experience, and even the course of your life by eliminating fear and
negativity from it.

- Summary -
The purpose of this Report has been to help you discover that:

A little bit of rain will always fall into your life. But whether it ruins
your day or waters your garden is totally up to you.

A great many of us learn in childhood or in adolescence to be helpless.
It is not inborn! More importantly, what was learned can be unlea
ed.
If a behavior isn't serving you, you can get rid of it. In fact, you owe it tornyourself to do so.

All negative experiences are based in fear. No matter what "flavor" ofrnnegative experience you're having, there is fear at the bottom of it. Ifrnyou will learn to identify the fear, challenge it's validity, discover
that it is false, and let it go, your life will improve dramatically! Irnguarantee it.

You have a great deal of control over your present-moment experiences,
which truly are the only experiences there are. Learning to take charge
of your mood and attitude will make a tremendous difference in the
quality of your "now."