FITNESS Friday: The Ultimate Guide to Weight Loss

Do you want to leave the change in your life up to chance or choice?

Adapting A Healthy Lifestyle

So the question is, if you're going to change from one day to the next, regardless of whether or not you want to, do you want to leave the change that happens to you in your life up to chance or choice?

Without practicing awareness (which can also be called mindfulness, presence, or living in the “now”), a person is simply like a robot running on autopilot, following programmed routines and habits without much conscious thought.

A more everyday example of this would be driving in a car, and then not remembering the last few minutes of driving only to “snap back to reality” and realize that somehow or another, you've safely driven the past few miles without even being aware of it.

Or perhaps eating an entire tub of ice cream and then looking back and going, “Wow! How did that happen?”

All of these instances, from the more deep trances of driving and TV watching, to the more everyday decisions of what to eat, result from the habitual way our brain works. Over 90% of our decisions are made without any conscious effort or deep understanding why we made those decisions in the moment. In essence, the feeling that you are always aware of your thoughts and rationalizations for making most of your decisions is an illusion.

Awareness is, quite simply, observing your thoughts and feelings without judgment. Nothing is labeled as right or wrong, it's just “interesting.” You become both a participant and an observer of your life. This practice is powerful, because it teaches you that you are not your thoughts and feelings. You are simply that which is aware of thoughts and feelings that flow through you. I remind myself of this by asking “am I this thought or feeling, or am I simply that which is aware of it?”

Awareness / mindfulness requires being present. This is critical because the only point in time where a person can change anything is now. Your past can be reinterpreted right now. Your present can change with any choice you make right now. And your future is determined by what you do right now.

In other words, success and opportunity hide in the very place people are sometimes distracting themselves from - the present moment.

Opportunity is here with you in this very moment, as soon as you choose to let go of thinking about the past and future and notice what is here with you in this moment.

By actually practicing awareness, you can start to notice your habitual thoughts, feelings, and underlying beliefs behind every action you take. The biggest trick with awareness is that you're not actually trying to change your behaviors, thoughts, or feelings when you're observing them. A person may go ahead and eat an entire tub of ice cream, but they should notice all of their thoughts, feelings, and everything they are experiencing before, during, and after eating the ice cream.

While this may sound odd at first, consider that this person eating the ice cream may discover how they didn't want to eat the ice cream because they were physically hungry, but rather because they're experiencing an emotional emptiness inside. The ice cream was satisfying an emotional want, not a physical one. Being aware of this is the first step to breaking the pattern, and sometimes it takes nothing more than awareness to break the pattern.

But awareness isn’t just a onetime thing; it should be an on-going practice. One of the benefits of practicing meditation is that it helps the brain become trained to be more present and mindful at all times. In a sense, awareness is applying meditation to your everyday life so that everything you do becomes meditation. This has been promoted for thousands of years as a spiritual practice for one big reason – it works.

Changing The Attitude

The first step is simple acceptance that you will make mistakes. The second step is to re-frame mistakes as potential successes in learning. A lot of the world's most successful people, whether in fitness, business, or other areas, were successful because they A) made mistakes and B) learned lessons from those mistakes that they could have never otherwise learned had they not been willing to fail.

Tell yourself right now “I'm going to screw things up, and that's okay! A mistake isn't the end, it's just an opportunity to learn how to do better going forward.”

When a mistake is made, some empowering questions to ask are: “What can I learn from this?” “How can I prevent this from happening again?” “Why is everything still okay?”

Your success is not determined by how many times you fall down, but by how quickly you get back up. And the more times you fall, the more “practice” you can have at getting up quicker each time.

Another way to handle mistakes is to realize it's not about the end goal as much as it is the process of striving for your goals that really matters. “It’s about the journey and not the destination” or “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” are statements that have unfortunately become cliche, but they express a profound truth.

Some people are so obsessed about reaching their goal that seems so far away they feel like they can't be happy until they're there. But I'll let you in on a secret: there is no “there.” There only is and ever will be now. You can only be learning, be happy, or experience anything else in this present moment.

If you can embrace and focus on what you enjoy about the process (which will include both mistakes and successes) of growing and developing into your fullest potential, you'll find you can be happy and motivated each and every day regardless of your body's current condition.

Continuing Challenge:

I’ve been posting my weight at the end of each week’s FITNESS Friday article and will continue to do so each Friday until I achieve my goal weight. The intent is to accomplish two things: 1) It will serve to hold me accountable. And 2) It will show you that you’re not alone, that we’re all fighting the same battle.

Weight as of January 17, 2025 is 210 lbs. Weight as of January 10, 2025 is 210 lbs. Can you say plateau? That seems to be what I’ve hit. I’ll have to revaluate my diet and work out routine to reignite the weight loss. Still pushing for 205 lbs.

dhf

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