Change Your Thoughts Lose Weight by Dr. Becky Gillaspy
About The Author Happily married to her college sweetheart since 1993, Dr. Becky Gillaspy is mom to a wonderful daughter. She is a Doctor of Chiropractic and College Professor in Health and Wellness. She is the author of Lose Weight without Losing Your Love Affair with Food and creator of the Lose 10 Pounds This Month. DR. BECKY S BOOK: Lose Weight without Losing Your Love Affair with Food WEIGHT LOSS SPECIAL REPORTS: Lose 10 Pounds This Month Late Night Snacking: How to Outsmart the Late Night Snack Attack The 10 Day Diet 2
Introduction Have you lost weight in the past only to gain it back again? Do you feel that in order to lose weight and keep it off you have to learn to live with deprivation? Do you secretly fear that your body just isn t meant to be thin? My name is Dr. Becky Gillaspy and in this special report Change Your Thoughts Lose Weight I want to challenge you to think differently. In fact I want to show you how you can identify those thoughts that are making weight loss a struggle and how you can transform them into thoughts that actually support your weight loss efforts. This report is put together in a straight-forward manner so you will be able to walk away with some very practical tools that can be implemented right away to start changing thoughts and beliefs that you have that are making weight loss much more difficult than it has to be. This information is based on teachings from my weight loss courses where I help people change their weight and their mindset and you will be introduced today to some of the very techniques used in these courses. My intention is for this report to show you how you can live your life at your ideal weight and I thank you for allowing me to be a part of your weight loss success. Is it possible? Let s begin by answering the obvious question, is it possible to change your thoughts and lose weight? My short answer to that question is absolutely; in fact I think trying to lose weight without addressing your thoughts about what you are doing is the single biggest mistake dieters make and the reason so many people lose weight only to gain it right back again. You have probably had the experience of having an upcoming event that you wanted to lose weight for and so you start a diet and discipline yourself to cut back on portion sizes, give up dessert, and start exercising. Yet as you do all these right things if your thinking is locked on how you can t wait until after the event so you can eat again or your thinking how much torture losing weight is how long do you think your weight loss is going to last? At best a few hours after the event is over. 3
And let s face it; there is no good reason to put the effort into weight loss if you are just going to gain the weight back again. The only way to prevent that is to change the thoughts in your head that are causing you to return to your old habits and behaviors This is very important, the reason people gain weight back after losing it is because they try to force themselves to change their habits, change the way they eat, change their behaviors without changing the thoughts and beliefs they have in their head that are driving those original habits and behaviors. This leads me to share with you my favorite equation, it is really a pillar of what I teach in my book and in my weight loss course. My favorite equation: Thoughts & Beliefs >> Habits & Behaviors >> Results In words this equation states that your Thoughts and Beliefs lead to your Habits and Behaviors and they in turn lead to the Results that you see. It is always your Thoughts and Beliefs that drive your Habits and Behaviors. If you think it might rain (your thought), you carry an umbrella (your action). If you think you ve already blown your diet (thought), you go ahead and eat dessert as well (action). If you think eating helps you deal with stress (thought), you will turn to it next time you need a stress reliever (action). No matter what the situation, what you do (your Habits & Behaviors) are directly impacted by your Thoughts and Beliefs. You can force your Habits and Behaviors to change. You can force yourself to give up dessert until your class reunion or you can refuse to eat when you are stressed, the only problem is that this typically requires willpower and willpower always fades and you return back to your old ways. The opposite, if you will, of willpower is to change your way of thinking about something. And, you will find that when you change your thoughts you naturally develop new Habits and Behaviors with a lot less effort and without the anxiety and force you get with willpower. It would be like being a captain in a boat set on autopilot to head due north. If you decide to change directions you have two options, you could grab hold of the steering wheel and force the boat to head east and of course this would work as long as you hold on to the wheel. But let go of the wheel and you boat goes back to the direction it is programmed to go which is north. This is the equivalent 4
of using willpower. You can force yourself to change temporarily but once you let up you are back to the way things were. Your other option as the boat captain would be to simply reprogram the boat s autopilot to now head east. So punch a couple buttons and boom you are heading a different direction - no willpower needed and a lot less effort. This is the equivalent of changing your thoughts, when you change your thoughts about food, eating, dieting, and weight loss, you get long-lasting results with a lot less effort. So you want to start moving away from relying on willpower and start moving toward the more permanent solution of changing your limiting thoughts and beliefs. And this requires you to first notice the limiting thoughts you are holding on to. What are your limiting beliefs? Have you ever heard yourself say I have been overweight my whole life, I don t think I ll ever change. One day of not caring is not going to matter. I am just not someone who exercises. I have already blown my diet today, I might as well give up. It is rude not to eat with my friends at a party. Dieting is not worth the effort, I am just going to gain the weight back. I work hard, I deserve to eat what I want. I can lose weight later. 5
These are common limiting thoughts shared by a lot of people. But when they are presented to you in this way, can you see how having these in your head can be a barrier to weight loss? These Thoughts and Beliefs lead you to eat more just because of your thinking. Take for instance one of the limiting belief I mentioned above I have already blown it today; I might as well give up. Well, what happens when that thought goes through your head? Most likely, you throw caution to the wind and you eat a lot. These Thoughts and Beliefs won t change just because you want to lose weight and they cannot be changed just by changing your behaviors like, going on a diet or starting an exercise program. So going on a diet and hoping that your thoughts will come along is an exercise in frustration and can leave you feeling like a failure. But you don t fail you simply overlook one of the pieces of the puzzle meaning that in order to succeed and change your weight you need to address your thoughts along with your diet. So the million dollar question becomes how do you do that? How do you change these thoughts and beliefs especially the ones that have been with you for years and years? Well there is a step-by-step approach to it and the rest of this report is dedicated to sharing this with you. This is the same process I walk clients through in my 7-week weight loss course. The course is a unique approach to weight loss because it combines the motivation of losing weight with the power and peace of mind that comes with changing your weight mindset. By combining these two elements you not only lose weight but also develop a new way of thinking about food and dieting and these elements work together to produce long-term results. The first thing to understand as you move through this process is that your thoughts and beliefs are part of your Mindset and when those Thoughts and Beliefs have to do with diet, eating or your weight I call it your Weight Mindset. Everyone has developed their own personal weight mindset based on past experiences and their interpretation of those past experiences. A very simplified example of this would be someone who was told as a child to clean their plate because there are starving children in China and now today as an adult they have trouble leaving food on their plate. That thought that was formed years ago impacts their habit today. So the mindset you developed now impacts how you eat and how much you eat. And as you can imagine this Weight Mindset that you carry with you has really had a lot of time to take hold. Think back to that list of old limiting thoughts and beliefs earlier in this report, those thoughts and beliefs have likely been going through your head for years. And it was already pointed out that your Weight Mindset cannot be changed by learning a new diet or gaining more knowledge 6
and it will not automatically change when you lose weight. You must become aware of your current Weight Mindset and then consciously change it in order for your weight loss results to show up. Desire begins the change So the first step you must take to change your thoughts and your Weight Mindset is to Build Your Desire. Whatever you want to create in your life begins with desire; it is what allows you to enter the change process. So you need to ask yourself this question Why do I want to lose this weight? And this is by no means a question with only one answer in fact I encourage you to make a list, a long list, of reasons you want to lose this weight. This simple exercise can uncover some powerful emotion-packed reasons that can provide an incredible amount of motivation. I have had people come up with reasons such as I want to accomplish this while my mom is still alive, I want to attract a husband, I want to spare my kids from having to deal with weight loss, still others have said they are tired of hiding from the world or they want to prove to themselves that they can change. It is that deep feeling inside that says this isn t the body I m supposed to be living in and it s a hard thing to face but when light is shown on it really drives you to action. You can feel the emotion it brings to the surface. So take that first step toward changing your thoughts and your Weight Mindset by building your desire. Your next step is to Build Your Belief Your beliefs live in your subconscious mind. These subconscious beliefs really drive your actions so it is very important that you build supportive beliefs. If you believe that losing weight means a lifetime of struggle then that is going to make it hard for you to take on weight loss and even harder to sustain weight loss because who wants to struggle? Beliefs can feel pretty solid and leave you with the sense that this is just the way it is but they are not facts they are just things you have come to believe as fact, so you can start to shift them and you can start with accepting some things. To change your thoughts and build your beliefs, you must accept that you have what it takes to lose weight. You can t expect results if you go around feeling like you were dealt an unlucky hand of cards. This is not out of reach for you. You have what you need already inside of you, you have determination, persistence, patience, inner strength and all the knowledge you need to get the body you want. I realize you might not always demonstrate these traits, no one is perfect 100% of the time, but they are in there and you have had accomplishments in your life where these traits were very visible. All you need to do is bring them to the surface so they can be used. 7
So what I want you to do right now is think of something you accomplished in your life. I don t care how big or small, maybe you have a successful marriage, or you got a promotion, or won an event or contest, or you got all your work done yesterday, take a moment right now and recall one accomplishment. Okay, got it? Now I want you to honestly ask yourself, what traits did that require? Did you need determination, persistence, patience, or inner strength? You see you do possess the traits you need yet many people have attempted weight loss so many times they develop a pattern of failure and then wrongly assume that they are a failure but that is so far from the truth. Remember, traditional weight loss methods set you up to fail because they try to make you change your Habits and Behaviors without changing the Thoughts and Beliefs that drive those actions. Now you know a different way and so your results can be different. Your next step is to Build Your Commitment When you are not fully committed you do what is convenient when you are fully committed you do whatever it takes. If you pick up a double cheeseburger at the drive through instead of packing your lunch, you did what was convenient. If you sleep in instead of getting up to exercise you did what was convenient. It is always going to seem more convenient to sit in front of the TV at night eating snack foods but this behavior will get you more of what you don t want. Committing to a goal can seem scary to some people because if feels like it might shift your world around too much but when you really reach that level where you feel fully committed you actually are overcome with a calm sense of confidence and that is a very strong place to be and it is a place where supportive thoughts just flow. One way to strengthen your commitment is to let other people know that you are working toward your goal or follow a group of people working toward your same goal. And this is a part of why good weight loss courses are effective, you are working with others who share your goal and this builds a sense of positive responsibility and helps your level of commitment stay high enough to produce results. Research on what truly makes people change showed that there are 3 R s of change: Relate, Retrain, Reframe. Meaning you must relate or feel part of a group of people all moving through the change together. Retrain which means you must have a teacher or guide leading you through the change and letting you know you are taking the right steps. And Reframe which means you must take 8
on a new way of thinking about the original problem. Any good weight loss program will address all 3 of these R s because losing weight and keeping it off is all about change. Your next step to creating a new way of thinking is to Build your Self-Worth If you tend to be someone who puts yourself down or allows a lot of negative self-talk, you really must stop that now. This does not serve you in any way, shape or form and in fact really hurts your ability to lose weight. If you are constantly telling yourself what is wrong with you and what is wrong with your body -- why would you ever do anything nice for it like feeding it vegetables, exercising it, or giving it plenty of rest? Imagine you are driving an old rusty car, are you going to do anything extra for the car like wash it or change it s oil regularly? I doubt it, because it s not worth it. On the other hand if you have a brand new car, you are likely to take it to the car wash, vacuum it out, and give it regular maintenance, because you appreciate the car. You have to appreciate your body as if it is your most prized possession. And you must start appreciating it in this way right now, as it is right now, because the human body is amazing and that includes yours. A great way to start building this appreciation and creating more positive thoughts that lead to better results is to create a gratitude habit. When you are in a state of gratitude you are in a state of growth and potential and with time you find more beneficial thoughts just naturally appearing. And starting a gratitude habit is as easy as focusing on what you DO have instead of complaining about what you DON T have. Each morning even before you get out of bed in the morning take 5 minutes and think about what you are grateful for. This can be as simple as I am grateful that I have two legs that allow me to get out of bed on my own or I am so thankful that I was able to get a good nights rest. You can be grateful for anything the key is to let your attitude match your gratitude, in other words you must allow yourself to feel good inside when you are thinking about what you re grateful for. If you say Well, I m glad I have two legs, but I wish they were thinner, I can t stand how they rub together forget it that is not an attitude of gratitude. Instead, I am grateful that I have two legs, there are some people who don t, and it gives me my independence This will build your appreciation of what you do have in your life and your thoughts will start to focus in a more positive and beneficial way. 9
Lastly you must Build Your Flexibility I like to say that life will not slow down so you can focus on reaching your goal. You can expect to be invited out to the all-you-can-eat buffet right when you start your diet and have it rain when you have time to go outside for a walk and so on, therefore it is necessary to be flexible enough to stay the course and stay true to your commitment when things don t go as planned. The best way to do this is to become a curious observer. Curiosity allows you to remove emotion from the situation and encourages the brain to search for a solution. If, for instance, you go overboard with a snack, instead of beating yourself up, simply ask yourself Why did I feel a need to eat? This allows you to question your action and allows your mind to stay open, keeps you calm, helps you find the underlying reason and can prevent you from repeating the behavior. If on the other hand you beat yourself up and say, I never stick with my diet, this is what always happens. This becomes in a way a self-fulfilling prophecy that you will surely repeat and feel miserable about. Conclusion: So by building those elements Desire, Belief, Commitment, Self-Worth, and Flexibility you will change your thoughts and build a new Weight Mindset that work with you, supports your efforts and allows you to reach your weight loss goal. I hope that you were able to take away some practical tips from this report that you can use today to start this process of changing your thoughts to lose weight, this is such an important subject and will help end the struggle that surrounds weight loss. I have enjoyed bringing this information to you and look forward to building a relationship with you. If you would like more information on how to change your mindset along with your weight, then I welcome the opportunity to help in any way I can. Would you like to lose weight and change your weight mindset? Find out how in Dr. Becky s Book: Lose Weight without Losing Your Love Affair with Food 10