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Article Two

Weight Loss Success - Why You Need To Stop Thinking About Weight

Stopping thinking about weight in order to lose weight might seem like a strange idea. Knowing how the mind works and being a therapist gave me an advantage in designing a weight loss program and this article explains how changing your thinking will help you achieve success with your weight loss.

 

 

Weight Loss Success - Why You Need To Stop Thinking About Weight

I’ll explain the rather strange idea of stopping thinking about weight loss to lose weight via a story:

I was at a birthday party once where the gentleman hosting had found some rather amusing party games to play. One of them was as so: four people, split into pairs, facing each other, with their elbows bent and hands held up, their index fingers stretched out and the rest in a fist, and a simple garden bamboo cane resting over their outstretched fingers. The instructions were simple, "keep your fingers touching the cane and lower the cane to the floor, just make sure you keep your fingers touching the cane."

So it commenced… we all started to giggle as the cane started rising… the people standing there with the cane were wondering why on earth when they were ‘trying’ to lower the cane to the floor, the cane was, in fact, rising. Their arms where moving higher and higher. After a short while the cane tipped and rolled off their fingers. It was very funny, for those of us watching at least!

They then wanted another group to have a go, so ‘the men’ decided that they could do it! So they tried. The same thing happened; they stood there trying to lower the cane to the floor and watched in amazement as the cane just kept rising! Everyone enjoying the fact that no matter how hard they ‘tried’ to lower the cane to the floor; the cane just kept rising up!

Having been trained in how the mind works it was fairly simple for me to see where they were going wrong. So when urged I jumped up with my sister and a couple of female cousins and ‘the girls’ had a go.

I told the others that gravity would take care of the cane; the cane would stay on our fingers all by itself, we just had to think of staying level with each other and moving our hands and arms down to the floor. So we started, slowly at first, I was repeating ‘think down, think down’ and we slowly started to lower our arms to the floor. Low and behold, a few very amusing minutes later (it took a while as we were careful to stay level) the cane was on the floor! We got a round of applause of course. It was very funny!

Why did this happen? Well, the two groups before were focussing on the cane sitting on their fingers; because they were worried that their fingers would come away from the cane they were putting the tiniest amount of pressure upwards to ensure that they were always touching the cane. So of course, the cane rose upwards! Why did we succeed? We didn’t think about the cane, we did some positive thinking and thought about moving our arms down and about getting to the floor, with the odd bit of making sure our arms were level. So we succeeded!

When you ‘try’ to do one thing while focussing on another, the cane will rise. When you focus on your actual goal and the few little things you need to do to get there, the cane will fall.

You can think of the weight you want to lose as the cane, as you focus on the weight, you are so focussed on the weight it is almost difficult to think of anything else. But if you shift your focus to other things, (in our story, this was the arms moving down, thinking down and staying level), such as eating healthily when you are hungry, exercising, drinking a good healthy amount of water, the weight will take care of itself!

You will notice I have emphasised the word ‘try’ or ‘trying’ on occasion throughout the story. This is because when you think about ‘trying’ something, you are actually giving yourself another option, failure. You simply need to make the decision and ‘do it’! This is why I was repeating ‘think down’ during the party game. What you think of, your mind will focus on, and you will attain. So, ‘think water’, ‘think exercise’, ‘think healthy’ and you will drink water, you will do exercise, and you will become healthy!

This is really why you need to throw away those weighing scales, or, at least, hide them away so you are not constantly thinking of your weight. Focus on the little things that lead to your goal, focus on your aspects of success, and you will get there!

This is one of the ways I lost over three stone in a year, it is included in the weight loss program i designed.

 

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"About the authors: Elizabeth Brown & Christine Hines are internationally registered therapists specialising in the treatment of weight loss, IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), stress management & habit control. They have also produced an excellent range of professionally produced hypnosis, hypnotherapy & acupressure point tapping related products, available to download now from http://www.ilkleytherapies.co.uk/ Where you can also download a free Self Hypnosis pdf. Visit us to see information on the wide range of products & treatments available & find out how we can help you improve your life."