FLP eBook 4 - 8 Steps To Keeping Your Resolutions Plus 12 Great Tips for Losing Weight
Ask Yourself. Am I Present? Awaken the Observer and Come Present to Now.
With great gratitude, appreciation and praise we welcome you to the creation space of self love, courage, inspiration and the peace of mind that comes from gently balancing and lowering your brainwaves.
Listening to this THETA wave will assist you in creating a transformative meditative state, that will quiet your mind, relieve tension in your body, soothe your spirit, and help you remember how good it feels to be fully present in this beautiful moment of now.
Listen to this THETA brainwave as you study the following lesson.
The New Year often brings a feeling of new possibilities. We see it as a chance for renewal, change and starting fresh with our wishes and dreams. We dream again of new possible selves, of our ideal self that is in various ways different from what we seem to be everyday.
Many of us roll that dreamy film in our heads just because it's the beginning of a new year, but we aren't completely serious about making changes. The cultural atmosphere encourages dreams of fantastic change beginning at the New Year, but often we have deep-down beliefs that prevent us from following through on our dreams and the resolutions we make. How can we keep our resolutions and experience the ideal self we know, deep down inside?
The difference between good intentions and failed intentions comes down to a few basic things.
First step, Ask yourself. Am I Present? Awaken the Observer. Next you must truly desire your outcome…to the point where you can feel it, taste it, sense it in every cell of your body.
Second step, you must be aware of the deep-down beliefs that may prevent you from achieving your goals. These manifest as negative self-talk, often experienced more as an interior and rather soft grumble, or even more subtly, as an emotional atmosphere of expectation that “things won’t work out”. Until you can become aware of this generally constant undercurrent within you, recognize it as something like a computer program, and truly realize that it is not your voice but simply an old program that is running you will be at its mercy.
Third step, you will need to make a specific plan and write it down for achieving your resolutions…and be compassionately attentive to the fact that your programs will be most easily visible in the first stages of implementing your plan. If you can stick it out regularly for two weeks it will become easier and easier after that until it takes no effort!
Fourth step, get specific and realistic, try choosing personal projects that have meaning for you and which embody your values, resonate with your identity, and hold some enjoyment for you.
Fifth step, it helps to track your progress. Maybe choose a friend to speak to about how you are doing, setting a regular check-in time that you adhere to (maybe twice a week) where you set aside 5 minutes to talk about your progress toward your resolution. Or you might do better writing in a journal regularly about your resolution, your progress, and your ongoing feelings about your progress.
Sixth step, focus on making the change manageable. Say your resolution is to lose weight. You will need to get specific about exactly what you are going to do – what diet, what exercise program. Try and find programs that will be fun and easy for you! For example, a raw food program may result in rapid weight loss but preparation of raw food meals may be too time consuming for your personal schedule. Or the Atkins diet may sound great but you are a vegetarian and most of your protein sources are carbohydrate based. Almost any combination of diet and exercise, if maintained, will lead to weight loss. Rather than get lost in the details of which one has the best results statistically, simply choose one you can enjoy so that you can stick with it! Then make sure you have the right foods in your kitchen, your recipes easily visible. Maybe lay out your exercise clothes next to your bed so they are easy to put on in the morning (if you are a morning exerciser).
Seventh step, allow yourself to build in a little leeway in your new effort at self-regulation. We will all fail at self-regulation at times. What you really have to guard against is what is formally known as "the what-the-hell effect." Say your goal is to lose weight by dieting and cutting out sweets. But one night you just have to have a cookie and you know there is a bag of your favorites in the pantry. You want one, you eat two, and you check the bag and find out you've just shot 132 calories. You say to yourself "what the hell" and polish off the whole bag.
Eighth step, stay conscious for at this point you might begin to draw all manner of unpleasant conclusions about yourself. To protect your sense of self, you might begin to discount your goal; you might think something along the lines of "well, dieting wasn't really that important to me and I'm not going to make it anyhow." Now you are in danger of abandoning the goal and what you’ve really done is wonderful, you have just seen your programs in action! The more conscious you are of when these programs “load” the more quickly they will lose their power. So don’t worry – you are right on track and the next time you will probably just eat two or three cookies or maybe, none at all!
In the language of psychology these 8 steps are called implementation intentions. They take the place of habits until the new behaviors lose some of their unpleasantness and become more attractive in their own right. After all, running is difficult in the beginning when you are out of shape, even though making the effort feels good and makes you feel good about yourself. So settle back and remember to enjoy the journey as much as the destination.
12 Great Tips for Losing Weight
Nearly everyone wants to be thinner and healthier. Some of us only need to lose just those last five pounds and many need to lose 20, 50 or even more than 100 pounds. Some of us have sincerely tried “every diet in the book” while others simply have tried, and then abandoned just a few.
Here are 12 great tips for losing weight. The first few may be the most important – except in the case of deep-seated physical or genetic issues (and even here there are exciting exceptions!) the reason most people don’t lose weight or lose it and then can’t keep it off is truly in the mind.
The mind is much more powerful than we realize. There are literally thousands of books and articles about how our subconscious beliefs, thoughts, and feelings dictate our world and reality. In terms of weight loss this means that if you truly believe you can lose weight and keep it off you will. This is not a truism, though you may have heard this before; it is actually the simple truth. Putting your mind to work focusing on your desired outcome (say, losing weight, being thin), and catching your mind in the act of focusing on your habitual outcome (not losing weight) is the most important thing you can do. Secondary (and still necessary!) are the following 12 practical tips.
Truly desire your outcome…to the point where you can feel it, taste it, sense it in every cell of your body. Have a fantasy where you actually feel yourself at your ideal weight; experience yourself walking into work or a party and wearing something that shows off your new body; sense the lightness of being as you walk through your house – how your feet feel as they touch the ground, how your waistline feels with your clothing a little loose around your tighter tummy. Get out some old thinner pictures of you or a magazine picture of someone with the ideal weight you want.
Become aware of the deep-down beliefs that may prevent you from achieving your goals. These manifest as negative self-talk, often experienced more as an interior and rather soft grumble, or even more subtly, as an emotional atmosphere of expectation that “things won’t work out”. Until you can become aware of this generally constant undercurrent within you, recognize it as something like a computer program, and truly realize that it is not your voice but simply an old program that is running you will be at its mercy. You have to rat on the mind, tell the truth about what it’s saying and remember that its not you saying it for you are the listener to what is being said.
For the first two weeks of your weight-loss program, maintain almost constant vigilance over the negative self-talk and correct it. To correct it, ask yourself “is this really true or is it just a habitual negative thought?”. Notice that there seems to be two different people in your head – one you call “me” and one that has a thought like “this will never work”. Pretend you actually are two separate people – one is you and the other is another person who has a bad self-image. Simply notice that bad self-image and allow yourself to feel compassion for it while recognizing it is not really you! You will be amazed at how powerful this can be, if practiced diligently for a couple of weeks.
Now for the practical: make a specific plan for your weight loss program. Do a little research – you probably already know there are dozens of programs out there. Nearly any of them will work – if you stick to them. So aim your research at finding one that you can actually enjoy – an exercise program you will have fun with, and a diet that has food that you like to eat. Otherwise you are programming failure in. If you want to start with a crash diet you believe you can stick to for a couple of weeks, go for it but with a back-up diet you will enjoy using when you are done with the crash program.
There are two physical components to basic weight loss: diet and exercise. Both are necessary for long-term weight loss.
For diet, the two most important issues are not protein versus carbohydrates, as currently debated, but food combining and calorie restriction. Generally speaking, if you avoid combining protein with starchy carbohydrates you will lose weight even if you don’t restrict your intake very much. For example, you can eat a baked potato and a salad or a salad and a serving of meat or soy protein. The reason is that the digestive process for converting starchy carbohydrates to energy conflicts with (actually almost cancels out) the process for digesting protein. The undigested food turns to fat.
Cut calories the easy way – eat slightly smaller portions at meals and avoid or cut way down on fruit juices, sodas, sweetened products, and fatty snacks such as potato chips or French fries. Notice subtle things like how much salad dressing you use (often two tablespoons of salad dressing has more calories than a baked potato alone…and most of it is fat!). Don’t drive yourself crazy – allow little bits of the foods you crave but try and cut them in smaller doses – eat a half a chocolate bar or a couple of teaspoons of ice cream slowly if you have to instead of resisting them until you end up binging on a whole pint.
Eat more often! It may sound wrong but it works! Eating more frequently keeps your metabolism running more consistently instead of speeding up and slowing down. It also keeps you from binging – those who skip meals actually gain weight more often than those who don’t.
When you feel like eating, especially if it’s a sweet or fatty food, ask yourself: “am I really hungry”? Rate your hunger on a scale of 1 – 10, with 10 being very hungry. If it’s less than 7, just ignore it – it will go away within 10 minutes. If it’s 7 or more, eat something but first eat something healthy like a little salad or a small handful of nuts. Then drink 12 ounces of water. If you are still hungry 10 minutes later, and still really want that candy bar or that bag of potato chips, allow yourself to eat just one or two small bites and see if that feels “about right”. When you give yourself the attention you need you will that more and more often you will easily and naturally chose not to eat…or at least not to eat the fatty or sweet food.
For exercise, find something you enjoy! There is something for everyone – you just need to find out what you will love. If you love nature, hiking and biking might be much more fun than a gym. If you love dancing, try an aerobics or dance class. Gyms might be great if you love listening to music or talking to people while you exercise. Take the time to experiment to find what you like, even trying things you expect not to like – many people don’t realize how much plain fun it is to move and strengthen the body; in fact many people have so bought into the idea that exercise is hard sweaty boring painful work that they never give themselves the attention they deserve in order to find exercise that’s fun.
Add little extra bits of exercise wherever you can. Park farther from the door to the mall or store. Use the stairs instead of the elevator whenever you can – see how many flights you can go up and down! When talking on the phone or watching tv you can stretch or do some simple yoga postures.
If you are one that has trouble achieving your resolutions, be compassionately attentive to the fact that your programs will be most easily visible in the first stages of implementing your plan. If you can stick it out regularly for two weeks it will become easier and easier until it takes no effort! Finally, it helps to track your progress. Maybe choose a friend to speak to about how you are doing, setting a regular check-in time that you adhere to (maybe twice a week) where you set aside 5 minutes to talk about your progress toward your resolution. Or you might do better writing in a journal regularly about your resolution, your progress, and your ongoing feelings about your progress.