5 Ways Youre Sabotaging Your Weight Loss

     While diet and exercise are clearly important for weight loss, the real key to slimming down steadily and keeping the weight off for good lies in your head.

If you find yourself eating mindlessly rather than because you're hungry, odds are it's because your subconscious is feeding you self-sabotaging thoughts. And if your subconscious is undermining you you're going to carry on getting the poor results you've always got in the past.

If it's only your conscious mind that wants you to lose weight, you're tackling just the symptoms, not the root causes of your weight. You need self-supportive beliefs at both the conscious and subconscious levels to reach a weight you're happy with, and to stay there.

So what are the self-sabotaging thought patterns that your mind may be feeding you, and how can you tackle them head-on? Here are 5 of the worst offenders:

Putting yourself down
If you constantly undermine yourself with thoughts like, "I'm so terrible, I have no self-control", or "I'm too heavy to be attractive" you'll feel - and look - all the worse. The messages you give yourself are self-fulfilling prophesies. So instead, start to tell yourself "I have a strong, healthy body and I'm loving it slim", or "My friends and family love and appreciate me for the individual character I am". When you notice a self put-down, catch it and feed yourself a positive thought instead. This becomes easier with practice. So start now!

Believing you don't deserve to be slim
This is an insidious one which will surely undermine your efforts unless you face up to it. It happens when deep down you feel, for some reason, that you should be miserable and that you're less deserving of happiness than other people. You know rationally that this is nonsense. So tell your subconscious all the reasons you're a fully deserving person. Make a list of all the reasons you're entitled to be slim and repeat them to yourself often.

Comparing yourself with others
Don't do it! If you refuse to engage with these thoughts, not only will you be happier in yourself but you can start to appreciate people in all their diversity without feeling envious or threatened - however slim they are! Take pleasure in the person that you are. Think about who the real you is. Enjoy the fact that you're a unique character and think about your good points. And please, please, please stop beating yourself up for not being perfect.

Using your weight to protect yourself from something
This happens when you want to hide, to be invisible, not to attract attention. It could be for a whole variety of reasons, some very complex, and there isn't space to go into them all here. But if you know you feel more comfortable in the background, ask yourself why this is. Why on earth shouldn't you attract - and enjoy - attention? If this is you, it's time to do some soul-searching. And then allow yourself to emerge into the foreground.

Letting your emotions dictate your eating
Unfortunately we're taught to do this from an early age. We're given sweet treats for being good, fobbed off with unhealthy foods when our parents haven't time for us, and encouraged to stuff ourselves with food in times of celebration. So we're led to eat for both negative and positive emotions. No wonder we continue emotionally overeating as adults. Now, next time you think you feel hungry, ask yourself whether it's physical hunger or emotional. If you feel depressed, lonely, angry or bored, try to address that emotion. Recognise that pushing the emotion down with food isn't going to eradicate it, and see what you can do to eliminate it without using food.

The first step to overcoming self-sabotaging thoughts is to recognise them. Only then can you begin to dismantle them and move forward positively with your weight loss. And always keep your goals in mind. Think of the slim, healthy, energetic body you're moving towards and don't allow all that negative nonsense to hold you back!

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