The Psychology of Weight Loss (4 Mindset Steps I Use With Clients)
If you read my article on how mindset affects your weight, then you know how powerful a positive and serving mindset can be in influencing your weight loss journey.
It can make losing weight easy or it can make it hard and challenging.
The good news is you can program and train your mindset to help you lose weight. It’ll take some work and it’s not easy but I promise that when you understand yourself on a deeper level, it’s much easier to make changes because you know your limiting beliefs and self-sabotage tendencies.
It’s a 4-step process that I use with my clients. So let’s get started and dive into your mindset!
Step 1 – Learn Your Language
We all talk to ourselves whether we’re listening or not. We all have an inner dialogue and that can be a positive or negative dialogue, it can be our voice or it can be the voice of someone else.
But to change our outcomes we need to pay attention to what stories we’re telling ourselves on repeat that are not serving us.
They negatively influence our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and physical symptoms to pull us away from making progress on our goals.
To change them we need to identify what they are.
You do this by spending a few minutes journaling and answering the question, “What am I feeling that is not serving me?”
This can be anything from negative thoughts, uncomfortable feelings, unhealthy behaviors, to any type of physical symptoms.
Write everything down and try not to judge yourself. This is the ‘language’ of yourself.
You’re writing this to create awareness of your non-serving thoughts and patterns.
Step 2 – Imagine Your Outcome
Your mind cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined.
You can use this to your advantage in 2 different ways.
First, imagine yourself reaching your goal. Daydream and play a short clip of how you’ll look, how you’ll feel, and what’s going to happen when you get there.
The more vivid the details the better.
Second, if you’re struggling with one part of weight loss like getting to the gym after work imagine yourself getting past it.
Spend 10 seconds multiple times a day replaying the same clip where you see yourself successfully making it to the gym after work.
Done often enough, imagining your outcome is an exercise that makes your brain believe that you’ve already reached your goal or gotten past your challenge.
This helps you to gradually adjust your behavior to be in alignment with what you’re imagining.
Step 3 – Review Your Direction
We set goals for the future but we still have to take action in the present to get us there.
Taking action consistently is building steps to create the momentum for change to happen.
Some days are harder than others to take action so we must review this step daily.
With your goal in mind ask yourself what you need to do in the next 24 hours to move you closer and write this down in your journal.
Since each day can be completely different you want to make adjustments on what you can accomplish towards your goal.
Adapt your actions but don’t abandon your goal.
Step 4 – Count Your Wins
This last step can be the hardest for most people because we are negative thinkers by default.
Counting your wins is reflecting back on the last 24 hours and making a list of everything you did or happened to you that contributed to your goal.
It trains your brain to look for the positives.
Instead of going to sleep thinking of the things you didn’t get around to or didn’t do and feeling bad, you flip the narrative and list your wins so you go to sleep feeling good.
This creates a positive cycle of waking up excited to take action toward your goals again so that you have another list of wins the next night.
Putting The 4-Steps Together
Ideally, all these steps except Imagine Your Outcome are done in a journal.
To help my clients get into the process, the easiest step for them to do first is Counting Wins. Before they go to sleep, they go through their day and jot down all the little wins for them. Once they get the hang of daily wins then we start implementing the other three steps.
The most powerful but uncomfortable step for many of my clients is Learning Your Language. This is where you face the harsh critic inside your head and list down the truth of what you’re saying to yourself.
Once you identify the non-serving language, the limiting beliefs, and stories you keep telling yourself that hold yourself back then you start reconstructing a serving story that helps you reach your goals.
You Imagine Your Outcome of reaching your goals, you Count Your Wins every night, and Review Your Direction every day so you know what’s important today that needs to get done to move the needle.
Mindset For Successful Weightloss
There you have it.
How to reprogram your mindset to help you successfully lose weight and keep it off in 4 steps.
The process takes commitment but you’ll be rewarded with understanding and having a better relationship with yourself.
As the ancient philosopher Lao Tzu once said, “Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.”
Candace is the owner of Rhodes To Strength. She provides weight loss and mindset coaching services to women around the world to create sustainable habits that work for their lifestyle.
You can find her rollerskating, hiking, and bird watching in her spare time.