Martin Goodyer, author, life coach and psychologist writes a guest blog for SoSensational about long term, healthy weight loss.
Pretty much the only time anyone feels good about being a loser is when its weight they want to lose.
However, weight loss is a touchy subject – even when spoken about lightly. A good friend did a ‘gig’ in a comedy club for a bet. I and some other friends went to support him and. All was going well until he started talking about weight. That’s when the heckling started. “Leave it!” shouted someone from the back. My friend continued his story … again came the “Leave it!” even louder this time. Each time my friend tried to get on with the joke the shout was repeated and got ever louder.
Soon the heckling was getting more laughs than the story. My friend never did finish his story; worse still, he was accosted by audience members, outraged and furious that he found being fat funny. We stopped him from a pronouncement which might have led to some serious GBH: the argument that being fat was a choice and not a disease.
I share the tale here because it demonstrates how sensitive people are when it comes to this subject. Even so, there is an undeniable truth that, setting aside those with genuine medical conditions, the rest of us who stuff more into ourselves than we use up in energy are going to put on weight.
I don’t know anyone overweight who’d be surprised to be told that to shift fat they needed to eat less and move more; they know that already – it’s not a lack of knowledge that keeps us from shifting the pounds, it’s a lack of three essential ingredients:
Enough desire to raise our standards
Anyone who wants to change anything must have a strong desire to do it. If you don’t want it enough then you’ll convince yourself it’s not attainable and you won’t raise your standards and your expectations of yourself to a new level; high enough to create changes in the way you behave.
Enough belief to start acting as if we can be slimmer and fitter
If in your heart of hearts, you don’t believe something is possible, you won’t even try. Worse still, if you believe that you are “already doing everything you can” then you won’t accept the idea of changing that belief.
Enough idea of how to sustain new behaviours even in the face of adversity
That means having a plan. Without a plan, you won’t know where to begin or where to go to next. However, a plan is not a diet. Weight loss diets are almost always temporary quick-fixes to a long-term problem and so are unsustainable. You need a plan that causes you to change your behaviour forever – yes, for good! You need a plan that works even when you are under stress or the world feels like it’s conspiring against you, because that is when you need a plan that you believe in and to which you are truly committed.
It is in formulating a plan that asking better questions come in. In the short time since my book, WTF just happened?, has been in the shops, I’ve already had several people contact me to say how useful “asking a better question” has been to them. One told me he’d read a chapter about an issue so close to his own situation, he thought it must have been about him, even though we’d never actually met!
It caused him to ask a better question that in turn led to a better outcome for him. On the other hand, someone I actually know, has read the book, but has not spoken to me directly about the weight loss chapter despite having clearly shed pounds after previously being ‘stuck’ at his weight for years.
If I asked him directly, I’m sure he’d deny that my book had anything to do with his weight loss; he might claim it was a coincidence. It might be a coincidence, of course, but perhaps reading the rather harsh truth of someone else’s story caused him to
- Refocus his desire
- Ask better questions to push aside any limiting beliefs
- Ask better questions about what he could do and was willing to do to lose weight on a consistent and sustainable basis.
I ask this because after years of struggling with this diet and that diet; with one weight-loss-club and another, he’d finally made a breakthrough and stopped being a weight-loss loser and again started losing weight.
If you know someone who knows they need to shed pounds but seems unable to do so, listen to what they are saying about their desire to achieve it.
If they say they ‘I should’ or ‘I ought to’, then clearly they haven’t developed a strong enough desire to make real, sustainable weight-loss possible.
They must want to lose weight for a reason that matters deeply to them, a selfish reason, if you like, and they must acknowledge that reason. To have a selfish reason for wanting to change, doesn’t make them a bad person – quite the opposite; it makes them a person who cares enough about themselves to take better care, and that’s a good thing!
If you know someone who says they want to lose weight but keeps on behaving in ways that say something different, it’s likely they have a belief that is limiting their capacity to change.
The person I mentioned earlier who had been stuck at a weight had a belief that he knew so much about all health-related matters that he couldn’t be taught anything new. Worse still, he had a limiting belief that the way to deal with any challenge to his limiting beliefs was to attack – which is why friends gave up trying to help him.
It was only when he started asking himself better questions that he allowed those limiting beliefs to be replaced by a more empowering belief that supported changes in his behaviour. In other words, asking better questions helped him make a plan for successful weight loss.
If you don’t have a plan for yourself then you will find you are conforming to the plans of others: the supermarkets have a plan for you, the TV advertisers have a plan; the high-street cafés and restaurants have a plan – they all want you to spend more on food.
It’s likely that even your boss has a plan for you to which you will unconsciously conform unless you have a plan of your own.
If you know someone who says they want to change shape/lose weight, ask them what their plan is for the next few years. You don’t want to hear about their diet plan for the next few weeks, but their long-term life plan for sustained behavioural change. You may suspect that they don’t have one; if they did have a plan then they’d probably already be shedding weight and getting into smaller clothes. The fact that they are not tells its own story.
Everything can change for them, if they start asking better questions.
Obviously, the questions we ask need to resonate with us. There’s no point asking yourself a question that doesn’t sound like something you might say, so change these questions around to sound more ‘authentic’ to you – then ask them and listen to the answer!
The key thing to bear in mind is that these questions will not instantly ‘fix’ your problem, but help you begin a process that will create some momentum in a better direction; to help you form a plan to achieve your goal.
These are questions to ask yourself to raise your expectations in relation to your health and well being:
When in the past did I raise my own standards, making me proud of my achievements? What could I do now to begin a similar process?
What am I doing right now that is not helpful to my health? If I was to change just one thing to get me back on track, what would it be?
Am I truly doing the best I can to make the most of this one chance to live a full and happy life? If I realise I’m not, what immediate changes can I make that will help me?
These are questions to ask to support an empowering belief and to act as if success is expected:
What can I do today that demonstrates I’m serious about being the best I can be?
If I was already well on my way to achieving my health goals, how would I be behaving today; what would I do, say, and think?
These are questions to ask to support the creation of a dynamic plan:
At times when you have been successful in something (anything at all), was your success dependent on a plan working precisely as expected? It is likely that’s not the case, so what does that tell you now if you hit obstructions or difficulties?
Having some kind of plan is better than no plan at all, so if you had to figure out the first few steps of a new plan, what might they be?
Questions are essential to help you form a plan; without a destination in mind it’s hard to know if you’re on the way there…or somewhere else entirely!
Martin Goodyer’s ‘WTF Just Happened?’ – How to make better decisions by asking yourself better questions, is now available from bookstores and on Amazon.
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