Are you Telling Yourself It's Too Hard to Lose Weight?

Telling yourself you have to "struggle with this weight issue for the rest of my life," is as good as telling yourself there's no point in trying. "Why bother? I'll just gain it right back. It's no use. I might as well eat more cake. Poor me. Life is hard." You know the drill. Life's a beach and then you die. But it doesn't have to be this way. You can change from talking trash to talking yourself right into doing what you say you want to do. Here's how.

Stop the struggle by Stopping Self Talk that Supports the Struggle

You've heard it before -- what you focus on is what you receive. Nowhere is that more true than in believing it is a struggle to stay healthy. Who would want to be healthy if it's such a horrible chore? Yet, you've probably seen plenty of people who are fit, healthy and happy? You might even know a few. They seem to bounce when they walk. They're animated, excited about life, and no, if you asked them, they probably wouldn't say it's a struggle. "What do you mean," they'd ask? "Struggle? Nah, I love my life," and they'd mean it.

Forget the notion that you have to struggle and eat celery sticks for dinner. It's not true. Despite the fact that you've lost the weight many times in the past only to gain it right back, despite your belief that you can't even look at food without gaining weight. All of those thoughts are just more beliefs that are keeping you stuck. What you focus on becomes your reality.

Stop Struggling with Your Appetites

I'm a prime example. I don't struggle. Some days I eat a lot. Some days not so much. Some days very little. Yesterday I ate my usual breakfast and then, strangely, I just didn't feel hungry all day. I felt different somehow. Not ill, but I just didn't want to eat. "What's up with this?," I thought to myself, but I decided to just ride it out and see what happened. Well, I'm here to tell you that nothing happened. I lived to see another day. Nothing fell from the sky and the world didn't stop spinning because I didn't eat much yesterday. It was just another day.

Today I ate a few handfuls of malted milk balls. No big deal to me, but I know many of you are thinking, "I'd never be able to eat just some, I'd have to eat them all," and that is my point. Telling yourself you can't eat "some," or as many as you want, but that you believe you'd be compelled to eat them all, no matter how many there are, is a strongly held belief that is keeping you stuck. I don't believe that to be true, and so, for me it is not true.

Changing a Fundamental Belief with EFT

How do you change a fundamental belief? You start with basic EFT using it for every issue that pops up, even though they are seemingly not at all related. Use it for every worry, fear, doubt, and struggle. Use it on everything and those issues that do make a difference in your eating will start dissolving away. Try it. What have you got to lose but some weight?

Just what is EFT? It's Emotional Freedom Training and it's taking the world by storm as an easy, self administered practice to help reduce or eliminate the emotional issues that keep us stuck. Free information is available at EmoFree.com. I added EFT to my toolkit as soon as I learned it because it's easy to learn, easy to use, and it's very effective in helping people lose their weight by losing their emotional issues.

Remember those healthy folks I mentioned earlier? They don't view how they eat or how much they exercise as a struggle. They believe they are fit and happy and that life is meant to be lived to its fullest. They are active because they want to be active, and they eat foods that make them feel great. They probably eat some of the things you won't allow yourself to eat too. These are every day folks who have learned to feel good about themselves. None of them are perfect, despite the common belief that there is some "perfect" body, it's just not true. Everyone has a wrinkle here, extra skin there. Every single one of us is flawed in some way or another. It's what makes us unique.

Choose to Focus on Benefits, Rather Than Sacrifice

Everything worthwhile takes effort; having a baby comes to mind. All mothers will likely agree that childbirth has some negatives (weight gain, pain), but the ultimate reward makes it all worthwhile (yes, some women feel great while pregnant, but I wasn't one of them). If that were not the case, all kids would be only children. Think about it.

What are the benefits to changing your self talk? You'll start to want to fulfill your words with your actions. You'll stop the pity part and start the feeling better about yourself party instead.

Changing from Negative Self Talk to Positive Self Talk

Starting from right now, go get a box of toothpicks or something small you can put in your pocket. Match sticks would work, marbles, small rocks or twigs from the yard. Something small enough you can carry it with you. Whenever you catch yourself starting to say something negative, "I don't want to ..., or, "I hate ...," or "I can't ...," then say, "STOP," and replace the words with something positive.

"I hate having to wash the ... STOP ... It feels good getting a chance to stretch and bend while I wash the car."

Yes, it's stiff and forced, at first. Anytime you attempt to change a behavior it will feel forced. Just allow yourself to learn to change your self talk, and that early discomfort with the process will pass. It will start to be fun to "catch" yourself. As soon as you start doing it, you'll realize how often you're been feeding yourself negativity, and you'll also see how easily you can change that habit.

"I'll never lose this weight STOP I'm feeling better about myself every day. I'm making progress toward my goal."

Even if what you are saying feels like a lie, it's better to say something positive than to continue feeding your negative words to your brain. Do this with anything negative you catch yourself saying or beginning to say, whether towards yourself or someone else, it doesn't matter. Work on changing the pattern of saying negative things to yourself.

Feed Yourself Positive Messages

Start noticing how often you're feeding yourself negative energy. Then, apply the STOP technique as soon as you realize you are doing it, you yell (to yourself) STOP, and immediately replace what you were saying with something else. Here's what I mean:

Positive people tend to be happier people. I'm not suggesting you get a personality change, but I am suggesting, if you ultimately want to drop some weight and never see it again that you change your thinking from how much you'll have to struggle to how much better you're going to feel.

Considering learning and using EFT and the Stop technique to help make the change from negative to positive self talk. You can either hear it raining and think, "Great! Now I won't have to water the lawn," or, "Great! It's raining and I wasted my time washing the car." Rain happens. It's not a good or bad thing except in how you represent it in your mind. Same with what we eat and what we do from day to day.

Kathryn Martyn, M.NLP

Kathryn Martyn, Master NLP Practitioner, EFT counselor, Weight Loss Coach and owner of OneMoreBite-WeightLoss.com is the author of "Changing Beliefs, Your First Step to Permanent Weight Loss," and "5 Steps to Blast Through Weight Loss Plateaus."

Kathryn was a curvy 16-year old when she met a boy who forever altered her life by uttering three little words. No, not, "I love you," but "You've gotten fat." She weighed all of 132 pounds at 5 foot 7 inches tall, a heathy weight for her.

That statement made her vow to never let him see her eat, and she kept that vow, yet at a very high cost. Whenever they were together she couldn't wait to leave so she could feed her desire for peace and comfort as well as quell her constant hunger pangs.

Denying hunger leads inevitably to eating far past full because we lose the ability to know when we've had enough or what enough even means. After the end of the boyfriend she began a relationship with food that also wasn't healthy. Eating enough for several people, buying enough groceries for a family of four despite living alone, and being diagnosed with high blood pressure at the tender age of 19.

She eventually realized she was unhealthy and unhappy with how she looked so she started to learn to get in touch with her "hungers." She taught herself to recognize what it felt to be satisfied with food. She read books about emotional eating, anorexia, bulimia and other eating disorders, owned a natural foods store, studied herbology and nutrition and discovered weight training for beauty.

Kathryn's gone from a low of 118 pounds to a high of 218 pounds. She knows how it feels to wake up every morning saying, "Today is the day I'm going to start eating right," and then by noon hearing, "Tomorrow would be better. Yeah, I'll start tomorrow."

Kathryn now maintains a healthy weight using the techniques in her 8-week Ending Emotional Eating online weight loss program, workshops and her one-on-one private weight loss coaching practice. Her motto is, "Every meal stands alone," which means no single thing you eat should cause, "Oh, well, I've blown it now," because you can't blow it. You can only overeat this one time. Your next meal is a separate event.

She's called the "Weight Loss Lady," because she get results when all else has failed.

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