Change Your Mind-Set to Start Losing Weight: Part 1

By Kristen Gunderson, BA, Nutrition Educator

Just what goes on in the head of someone that is fighting to lose weight? If you’ve ever been that person, you know there’s a lot going on in there. All the time. It never stops. That’s why I call it a fight. There is that constant inner monologue regarding perfection and failure. Being good and being bad. Eating less and moving more. It’s exhausting.

I want to give you some tools that may help you to change your perspective. And that’s really what needs to happen. The way you are thinking about things needs to change. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing four concrete ways to turn that fight into a more peaceful mind-set about weight.

Tip 1: Have a specific action plan

Declaring you are “going to get healthy” or need to start “being good” is not going to cut it. These statements are way too vague and therefore, unmanageable and unrealistic. It’s time to get specific and come up with some solid definitions of what being healthy means to you and what behaviors are appropriate within your action plan.

An example would be determining how much water, specifically, you should be drinking per day. In the past, you may just have said “I need to drink more water.” But how did that work for you? Knowing you need to drink more water is not enough. You need to have a specific action plan.

Take a good look at yourself. For the water example, you would ask yourself:

1. How much water am I currently drinking? Be honest with yourself. You need to know where you are in order to figure out what needs to be done to move forward with your health.
2. How much water would I like to drink each day? This is the improvement you would like to make.
3. How specifically will I accomplish this? For you, that might mean finding the right glass or container that works for you to get the water in. Maybe you use an alarm to remind you to drink a glass of water at certain times of day. Or, you find a fun water bottle that has numbers on it that you can click as you track each bottle that you drink in a day.

The lesson here is setting smaller, specific goals that are achievable. That’s what an action plan can do for you.

Do you find that you are more successful when you set specific goals? Leave your comments below.

Stay tuned, I’ll have three more ways you can change your mind-set to lose weight in the next few weeks!