Disclaimer: The content on this page and in this program is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your physician before starting any diet or exercise program. 

Weight Loss Mindset

Welcome to the most important part of your weight loss journey!

There is nothing that will provide you with more energy to get started and to continue your weight loss process than having the proper weight loss mindset. Having the proper mindset will save you in the moment of temptation from making the wrong choice when you are hungry or when old thought patterns present themselves. 

Establish the Why!

The place to start is the place is most neglected by most patients but is the most important. No matter what you will not be successful if don't learn how to establish your why (most powerful reasons for making a change) and develop a weight loss mindset.

Nietzsche: "He whose life has a why can bear almost any how"

Part of establishing the proper mindset is asking yourself why.  Why do you want to be healthy? Why do you want to eat a better diet and lose weight? Why do you want to change?

Common reasons that I have heard people cite for losing weight including getting a better job, improving sleep, relieving depression, being there for your kids, having more energy, enjoying your retirement, improving your income, and being able to have more income. These reasons are good but often not deep enough. 

​Start with Sacrifice

Perhaps the most important reason revolves around the idea of sacrifice. The idea is that learning to eat properly and lose weight is a sacrifice, a life long sacrifice of short term pleasure. The sacrifice will make life slightly less pleasurable in the moment but will make it much more meaningful and dignified in the long run. It will allow you to love, to serve, to exemplify, and to decrease the burden and suffering of others. Suceeding at managing your weight will expand your zone of confidence and competence. It is the sacrifice of useless suffering (future suffering due to poor decisions) for useful suffering (momentary discomfort in the present) as I have written about previously article called weight loss excuse #1. We also need to bear a cross up a hill and part of your cross may be your weight. As I wrote about in another article entitled "Favor the Future and Lose the Weight" those that are successful at maintaining a proper weight tend to treat their potential future selves at least as favorably as their present self. 

Jordan B Peterson: "We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better. If we did not see things this way, we would not act at all." 

Over the long run the cost of maintaining a bad habit is far more than the short term sacrifice required for making proper choices. The long term results of poor decisions and good decisions add up. 

Take for example the set of lines above. At first they are close together. After time and different trajectories or decisions they become far apart. The same is true for our lives and our health. The sacrifices we make now will add up to a totally different person one year, 5 years and 20 years from now. This is what separates the highly successful from the rest of us. They follow a pattern for success every day and make consistent small choices that add up over time.

​This is the some of the basis for the Pareto Principle where 80% of the results come from 20% of causes. In health terms this means that 80% of your results come from focusing on a few key decisions each day. 

Never underestimate what a small choice can make. An alcoholic knows what giving in to just one drink can add up to.

Be a Hero

From 12 rules of life by Jordan Peterson: 

"Vice is easy. Failure is easy. It's easier not to shoulder a burden." 
"Success: that's the mystery. Virtue: that's what's inexplicable."

The willingness to work on your weight and health is to act a hero to yourself and others. It is the decision to live a meaningful life. It is the opposition to living as the victim which only leads to resentment, bitterness, envy, vengeance, and destruction. You can be the hero for your own life and others.  Being a hero means standing up voluntarily to take on the challenge rather than bracing for a catastrophe. It means to act and to not be continually acted upon (let life happen to you). People stand up and cheer for those that face down difficult demons, persevere, and come out on top. It is the story of Rocky Balboa in the Rocky movies.

Be the hero in your own movie instead of a cringeworthy character. It can be helpful to visualize you being cheered on by the crowd in a movie theater as you make the right choices. I would also recommend finding admirable figures to emulate. These can be family members, religious figures, or others. There are many great examples of real life heroes. Find one and copy them. 

Tell the truth

To begin the weight loss process you need to not lie to yourself. Eating poorly and being overweight is not healthy and will seriously impact your whole life. You need to be honest about yourself and how you feel and not sugar coat it. Being overweight is not healthy or empowering. You can accomplish a lot more and help a lot more people when you are at a healthy weight. Don't soothe yourself with untruths. They may help absolve you of temporary distress but will cause much more distress down the road. 

Food Impulses

I have personally found that whatever you are tempted to think or do when you are stressed if often the exact opposite of what you should do. Generally, in periods of stress, we are tempted to withdraw, mask or ignore. When we withdraw we avoid the stress temporarily, when we mask we cover it up with food/substances, and when we ignore we pretend like nothing every happened. All of these reactions are not beneficial. As it pertains to diet and food, we often give in to food impulses to help us feel better or to relieve the nagging thoughts. Food also stimulates the pleasure receptors like dopamine in the brain. 

From a physiological perspective this happens because under stress conditions the hormone cortisol is released which increases appetite and weight gain. This makes sense when we realize that when we are stressed our bodies interpret this as danger. The leads to a cascade of responses which cause release of the hormones that will keep us alive including the hormones that stimulate us to eat more food. 

Jordan B Peterson: "Suffering motivates desire for immediate gratification" 

So when you are stressed pay attention to your temptation to eat. There is a both a biological and psychological reason for this impulse. The bottom line is that when you are trying to lose weight the first impulse, thought, or action that comes to mind is invariability wrong. 

The theory of eternal recurrences (Nietzsche)

To help establish a powerful step of motivators it can be helpful to visualize two extreme scenarios. To create these visualizations it is helpful to the eternal consequences of infinitely repeating actions.  

For our purposes it is useful to visualize how hellacious your life could be if you were to repeat the same wrong decision infinitely.  For example, if you are faced with the opportunity to eat a bag of chips first visualize how bad your life and health could end up being if you were to eat the bag of chips an infinite number of times. You want to make this horrific vision and palpable and real as possible. This is the vision that you want to run away from. If you have trouble envisioning such a character sometimes you can utilize a particularly vile character from the movies. Two examples that I have utilized include the character Baron Harkonnen as portrayed in the famous sci-fi movie Dune. This monstrosity of a being is severely morally corrupt, lustful, and despotic. He has boils and sores over his body and he is truly repulsive. Another famous example is Gholam from the Lord of the Rings. Any of us can devolve into one of these characters given enough poor choices. Conversely, you will want to run toward the most celestial, powerful, invigorating, enduring, and meaningful vision of yourself (heaven) that you can visualize that will come as a result of making the right choice an infinite number to times.

As you utilize this strategy I would ask yourself if you can be proud of the decision your about to make in one hour, one day, one year, and 10 years from now. If you can answer yes to all these timeframes then you tend to make better choices. Focus on the eternal and not the expedient. The more you shrink from the challenge of life the smaller you will get. The more you move forward confidently with a clear vision of what you are aiming at the more you will expand. 

These visions and your reasons for losing weight need to be written down. They should be posted in key areas of your house including your bathroom, bedroom, and your kitchen. Things that are written down have true sticking power. You will have difficulty being successful without writing. 

Focus on the pattern/process/journey and not the goals

While goals are important they are just yard sticks. If your process is correct you will reach your weight loss goals as long as your goals are reasonable. If you are not reaching your goals then your process is not correct and needs to be adjusted. This is a common reason why people hit a weight loss plateau. It is because the process needs to be adjusted. The correct process is like a compass. It will get you in the right direction if used and followed properly. As you meet your weight loss goals along the way you will be invigorated by the fact that you are following the correct pattern. Another way to look at it is that the weight loss process is like planting a seed. If the process is correct the seed will grow and bear fruit. The fruit are the benefits that accrue through following the process. The fruits will serve as a testimony to you and others that you are doing is correct. 

Be Strong

Say and do things that will make you strong. This is so key. Don't short change your progress or effort. You should be proud of anything that you do that is noble and dignified. You should feel able to celebrate every move forward. There is no reason to feel guilty or like you are a failure. I have had a weight loss patient that lost 20 lbs in a month which is extraordinary. As I began to discuss her progress she broke down in tears about how disappointed she was about her progress. I was taken back by her disappointment as I was thrilled with her progress. After some discussion it became clear that she had a goal to lose 25 lbs in one month so in her eyes she had failed. Don't circumvent your success by imagining failure. 

Appreciation

The following is from an article I wrote entitled "How to have a great day! Start with Appreciation!"

"Few of us stop to think about how we can change our thinking patterns or that we can learn new thinking behaviors. We tend to think that our thoughts and feelings are on autopilot or that we were born with them and that the only way to change them is through medications or by trying to suppress them. While for a minority of us medications may be necessary, the vast majority of us have the ability to create new ways of thinking that are empowering, energizing, grateful, loving, and giving.

It starts by realizing that we are in charge and have the power. One of the biggest things that I have realized from my examining my own thinking patterns and from talking to patients is that is very easy to feel powerless when dealing with depression, anxiety, or habits. It may seem that there is no way out of the feelings they we are having and this makes us feel even more depressed or fearful. I have felt this way myself.

But it doesn't have to be this way. We are not powerless. Powerlessness is a myth that we tell ourselves that prevents us from making the necessary changes in our lives. While we may have developed this myth to help protect us as children so that we would fit into our family or tribe, it no longer serves as adults.  These patterns, which were once self-preserving, are now self- destructive.

So how we can we start to change our thinking patterns?

In my experience, there is nothing that will have more impact on our lives than what we think. How we perceive our life experience will in large part determine our happiness. But this doesn't mean that we should suppress bad thoughts. Thought suppression may make these thought patterns worse. In my view, it means creating new thought patterns that are empowering. It means seeing the abundance of goodness that is already in you and around us instead of the seeing the scarcity of badness in our lives and in others. There is really nothing bad in our lives. There are only results. Every event in our lives can be perceived as an opportunity to learn and grow and give. We can thrive no matter what the circumstance.

When I think about how many blessings I have in my life at any one moment I usually can find at least 99 things that are going good for every one thing that is perceived as inconvenient. Yet, I have found that most of us including myself tend to focus on the negative one thing and disregard all the rest. We tend to disregard the abundance in our lives and focus on the scarcity.

I have a daily reminder of this in one of my bathrooms in my house. In that bathroom there are three light bulbs. Two are burning brightly and one is burned out. I could easily focus on the burned out bulb but instead I have left that bulb in place to serve as a reminder to focus on the things that are burning brightly in my own life.

The great news is that there are some practical ways to start down the road to appreciation. A good place to start is to begin a daily ritual of being grateful and appreciative of all the things that are going right. I start every morning by spending 5-15 minutes meditating about things I am grateful for. I do the same thing in the evening.

Being grateful starts with appreciating the simple things  in our lives like the beating of our heart, the ability to breath, the feeling in our bodies, or the simple necessities that we enjoy like food or clothing. We can think about the wonderful experiences we are having or have had in the past that have made a great impact for the good in our lives. It is also helpful to visualize how we will continue to thrive no matter what happens in the future. Shorter versions of this practice can be utilized throughout the day whenever we begin to experience self-doubt, anxiety, or fear. Some people even have gratefulness reminders like beads that they leave in their bedroom and before they go to bed they count the things that they were grateful for that day.

With this practice I caution you to not have expectations or need of immediate and permanent changes in your outlook. Learning to change your outlook from one of expectation to appreciation is a process and most people tend to overestimate what can be accomplished in a short period but underestimate what can be accomplished over a long period. We all want immediate results but persistence is the key. It is okay to want and desire change but it can be self-defeating to have a self-imposed time frame for certain changes to occur."
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Fear/Vunerability

The following is excerpted from my article entitled "Are you fearful, anxious, depressed, or Addicted?"

"It is key to remember that for most of us the fear, anxiety, depression, and addictive behaviors we experience in life come as a result of our brain trying to preserve us. It is pain based. It is an attempt to respond to deep and searing physical or emotional experiences from our past and present. They are attempts by the brain to prevent us from taking an action that could result in suffering or even more powerfully in the case of addiction promote activities that are certain to bring pleasure and cover over pain at least temporarily. The problem is that these solutions tend to run out of steam.

In my experience, people that try to avoid life "stressors" because of a desire to feel completely safe often tend to be either depressed or anxious. This is because there is no safety or security in life. There is virtually no activity in life that is 100 % safe or secure all of the time. Eventually, the list of safe activities that are tolerable for avoiders dwindles down and down until, for some, they cannot leave the house or even their bed. The bed becomes the last safe zone. Thus, some people that avoid things tend to become more and more reclusive over time.

The same happens for addicts. The addictive activity tends to be less effective over time at masking the pain that is underneath and more and more of the activity is required. That is why for an addict it doesn't matter how much of something they have. They could have 15 million dollars or 150 million dollars of discretionary spending. They could have sex or be watching pornography and then 30 minutes later be desiring more. It doesn't matter.

Both of these activities bring painful consequences for the person and acting on these impulses and thoughts bring diminishing returns over time. They also impair our ability to magnify our true potential and to help others because as we grow personally our competency and ability to serve others also grows.

So how do we begin the road to overcoming fear or addiction?

The first thing to realize is that you are a unique and special person worthy of feeling loved and capable of changing your patterns of behavior. You can definitely be successful as you work on confronting your fears and addictions.

One potential starting point in beginning the process to overcoming your fears or addictions is to find the source of the pain that these behaviors are attempting to mask. Some people may say that they behave in a certain way because they are masking the pain of a divorce, death of a close family member, loss of childhood, having an abusive father, or a mother who didn't care. On a more surface level these may be some of reasons but they are not the deepest reasons.

According to Gary Zukav, the deeper reasons that are important to uncover include "feeling inadequate to be in the world, a pain of feeling ugly inside, a pain of wanting to belong and not belonging, a pain of needing to love and feeling that you are not capable of loving, the pain of needing to be loved and knowing that you are unlovable. It is the pain of feeling defective, inherently flawed, broken and not worth repairing. It's not wanting others to see as you really are inside yourself because they wouldn't want to have anything to do with you if they did."

Gary Zukav goes on to say that this pain is the "pain of powerlessness" and "that everybody has it...Every frightened part of your personality strives to cover that pain of powerlessness. So when you become angry, for example, and when you shout or when you withdraw emotionally you are attempting to mask from yourself the pain of powerlessness, the pain of the world not being the way you want it to be, and what the frightened parts of your personality need the world to be in order to feel safe and valuable."

I have personally found it very powerful to write in a journal all the things that tend to get me anxious, depressed, fearful and any addictive tendencies that I may have. I would urge you to do the same. I would then ask yourself why you experience these emotions and try to get as deep as you can. You can follow this exercise with asking yourself if these fears are well founded or exaggerated? Are they empowering or immobilizing in the present? If they are immobilizing then they are holding you back."

Trials/Change

It is difficult to understand why it is difficult to lose weight or why change is so difficult in general. Why can't it be easy? The answer lies in the concept of neuroplasticity. Our brains are composed of neurons. Neurons make connections that help make actions and habits automatic. The process of changing these connections and making new ones takes time and is a continual process. I often illustrate the process of neuroplasticity to learning a piano piece. It often takes months to learn a challening piano piece proficiently or even longer. The brain needs time to learn and to create the new neural connections that allow the piece to be played without having to think about every note. The same is true for weight loss. It will be a difficult process. One way to look at it is to look as trials or difficulty change as an opportunity. An opportunity to gain experience and grow. This process will make you not only strong about your health but also stronger in other areas. The roots of change will spread and give you more confidence to tackle other areas of your life. It will be for your good. 

​Loss

In our lives it can be easy to convince ourselves of loss. This is often true with weight loss or any habit change. It is easy to focus on the loss of foods that we can no longer eat or loss of pleasure in the moment and what we are missing out on by not eating what others are eating. We can convince ourselves of what we lack and are missing. But what do we gain from this? This line of thinking just leads to suffering, mental suffering. It saps us of energy.

​Instead it is much better to focus on what we will gain and what more we can have by making a successful change or correct choice in our lives. It is useful to think about what additional opportunities, choices, and strength you will gain from starting and continuing to live in a healthier and more meaningful way. When you stack up the loss you will experience during weight loss it will not compare the gains. It will not be even close in the end. Don't sell your future gains for fear of loss in the moment. Say no to the words loss, less, and never and say yes to the words gain, more, and always. To unlimited possibility and potential. You are not a loser but a winner. 

Mindfulness

Be aware. Watch and observe your thoughts and cues as it pertains to food. Watch especially when you are stressed, frustrated, hungry, or tired. For some of you invariably your thoughts will turn to food in these circumstances. You are not bad for having these thoughts. Don't judge yourself for these thoughts. Tell yourself that you are aware. Focus on your future self and what you have to gain by making the right choice in the moment. Don't make any choice about food until your conscious about what you are eating. 

When you are eating focus on the food. Savor the bites, the chewing motion, the smells and aromas. Take your time. There is no rush. Don't be distracted. No TV or phone. Just eat and enjoy. You will eat less in the moment and some studies show that you will eat less the next meal. Your working memory will remember the previous meal more accurately. You will be more satisfied and eat less. 

Reward

One question to ask yourself is if your parents rewarded you with food as a child. My father used to reward my brothers and I with sandwiches, fast food, buffets, and other treats after we worked for him at his businss. That is how we were paid in many circumstances. This taught us that food could be the reward for hard work and could help relieve stress.

​Think of your childhood. How were you rewarded? If you were rewarded by food then you will need to find reward elsewhere. Maybe you can reward in more meaningful activities such as in love or service. Perhaps you can think what more you will be able to do for yourself and others as a result of the journey to better health. 

​Sin of Ommision/Proscrastination

​JBP:"When you let something bad happen when you could do something to stop it." The time is NOW! In my experience there is never a good time to accomplish anything in your life. That time will never come. Don't commit the sin of omission with your life or health. We all know what the results of poor health will be. Just go to a hospital ward and you will see. I have seen gangrenous limbs from diabetes. The smell of rotten and decaying flesh is not something I ever want to smell again. So don't let it be you. Start today and without delay. 

Peer Pressure/Sabotage
You should obtain support from family and friends that will both support you and push you. They will not fall for excuses and give you a lift when you need it. Studies have shown that having a weight loss buddy can help you lose weight. Find someone that you will push you hard in a loving way and check in with them every day. 

There will also be people that will try to sabotage your efforts. They will tell you that you look just fine the way you are. They will tell you that you will look to thin if you lose weight. They will give you bad food advice and try to share their poor food choices with you. They are just trying to alleviate their own self-guilt. If they destroy your efforts they will not be forced to confront their own lack of courage. Don't pay heed to these people. If you can avoid them during your weight loss journey then do so. 

​Action
Take Action. Stop being ruled by your life and letting life happen to you. Weeds always grow. Beautiful gardens do not. To get your own garden of Eden you will need to create it on a daily basis. Cultivate, fertilize, and nourish your own success every day. Don't give in. Ever! Go to bed earlier and get up earlier. Move! You have the power within you. You are divine! Your body is a temple. Make it pure, clean, powerful, strong, enduring, central, sacrid, spiritual, peaceful, resolute, dignified, and majestic. Make it the sacrad abode of your most perfect self. 

Excuses
I heard on My 600 lbs life where the patient told Doctor   in response to why she had not lost weight : "I always stress out." His response: "You will always have stress." There is always an excuse. 

"Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today." Benjamin Franklin. 

After years of discussing weight loss, depression, anxiety, and addictive patterns with patients I have noticed that we are all full of excuses when it comes to making changes in our lives. When I have contemplated changing things in my own life the first thing that often comes into my mind is some sort of excuse. We all have created many internal excuses for why we cannot improve our lives. These excuses are designed to discourage us from tackling the unknown. We feel powerless.

If you are honest with yourself about the difficulties you are having with some aspect of your life you will realize that you are holding onto a lot of useless suffering. So why not opt for some useful suffering? There is also no absolute evidence that what you will do will be in fact difficult. It is just as likely to be easy as it is to be difficult. 

That brings me to the most common excuse that I hear from others. This excuse is simply that change will be too difficult or hard. When it comes to weight loss, people often say that it will be too difficult because of how much they have to lose, or because their wife only makes certain kinds of foods, or because they have too many sugar cravings. The list of reasons why it will be too difficult for them to make the changes are dizzying and endless. The funny thing is that they know that they are just making excuses and I think that they know that I know that they are just making excuses. 

So is it really harder to change a habit? A little perspective can help. 

Start by just thinking about all the things that you have to do to maintain the habit that you would like to change. A smoker, for example, has to have packs of cigarettes with them, dispose of ashes, earn extra money to support the habit, go to the store to buy them, have access to an ash tray, have a lighter, stand outside, worry about others getting exposed, the smell, social connotations, stained teeth, chronic cough, and an endless list of physical ailments.  On the other hand, the useful suffering that is needed to change this habit is to simply choose in the moment not to smoke. Now, I ask which choice is actually harder in the long run!

The same holds true for weight loss. All it takes is to obtain correct dietary information from someone who has expertise in the area (such as myself) followed by making the daily choices to follow the process. The alternative often entails poor sleep, heartburn, joint pain, poor energy, deconditioning, feeling terrible, social stigma, poor self-confidence, earning extra money to support the extra food, heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, buying medications, and much more. 

The key is to love yourself enough to make every decision in your life consciously and then count the benefits and the cost. Over the long run we suffer much more and encounter many more difficulties by maintaining a habit than by changing one.
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​Journaling

Writing is key to the success. It starts with writing down what you want to accomplish in regards to your health. You should write your weight loss goals and track your daily progress by writing it down. You should write down when you are tempted to eat and write down your accomplishments as you move forward. You should document your visualizations of what you want your future to look like. Keeping a daily journal will help to keep you going forward and force you to document that truth of what happened. 

Hell versus Heaven, satan versus Christ. Temptations

Weeds versus healthy lawn

Don't correct a bad habit with another bad habit. Eat like the person you want to become

Opportunity versus obligation

Two waves of being: Survival or Creating

The last 10-20%

Wiring the brain
You cannot get anything in life that you are not wired for. 

Heros
Our heros. Hold on to an abstraction. Hold on to observation, thought no matter what. I don’t care what if feels like. I will accept it no matter what. I don’t care what the environment thinks. 

Rehearse
Rehearse the greatest ideals.

​Stress hormones: Selfish, environment, body, time