You may think it sounds ridiculous, but its true. You can use mental visualization to make many positive changes in your life, including losing the weight you have not been able to take off. To start all you do is picture exactly how you want to look in your mind. Once you have created the image, you concentrate on making that vision as real as it can be. You should also focus on the emotions you will feel when you have lost the weight, and let them make the vision even more powerful.
In the past all this visualization stuff was dismissed as nonsense, but it has become much more accepted recently. People who use it know that you really can create a clear picture of you at your ideal weight. If you focus on this vision enough, your subconscious mind starts to accept it as what you should look like, and starts working to make it happen. Now This may seem to make any sense to you but, whether you think it works or not, we all use this every day without realizing it.
A common example of visualization being used in a negative way can be seen in overweight people who firmly believe they will never lose weight. They won’t tell you this is their belief in so many words, but you can tell that they mentally see themselves as an overweight person. People like couldn’t accept weight loss even if it did occur. Even if they somehow were able to drop a few pounds, their subconscious mind will get them right back to looking like the vision they have of themselves. Without realizing it, these people have programmed their subconscious minds in such a way that it will be impossible for them to ever succeed in losing weight permanently! They never will be successful until they change the vision they have of themselves.
There is a core secret to understanding how visualization works and this is it: behavioral researchers have long known that our minds can’t hold on to two beliefs that conflict with each other. To give you an example, let’s say you think that you are a very poor public speaker. If you believe that, you cannot also believe that you are a great public speaker. It has also been discovered that, when things happen conflict with the belief you do have, this creates conflict in the mind. Using the speaker example, for instance, if you absolutely believed yourself to be a terrible speaker but then you gave a wonderful speech, you will have mental conflict. Your mind would work to minimize what you had accomplished to minimize the conflict with its belief that you are a terrible speaker.
So the secret is this: if you use visualization techniques to make your mind really believe that you are thin, the mind goes into conflict when evidence is presented to the contrary. Your mind must either remove or resolve the conflict. If you have convinced yourself that you are thin but you are reaching for an ice cream cone, your mind sees the conflict coming and will work to avoid it! You may just hear yourself saying something like “Ice cream makes me feel bloated. No thanks.” It is just like the good speaker denying that they speak well, only in reverse!
Many of us are surrounded by negative images and words from our own minds or from friends and family who may ridicule your diet plans. Fortunately, they cannot dictate what you think if you are determined to change. So create that image of yourself at your desired weight as often as you can and make it as vivid as you can. You may as well try it, since you have already tried many other things. The only thing you may lose is your extra weight! Work hard at creating enough positive visions to counteract these negative ones and use these very clear visions to determine your future.
Practice doing your visualizations every day and many times a day, really every spare moment you have. Losing weight is important and you need to make the effort to break out of the negative cycle you are in. When you can spend a few minutes in a quiet place to practice making your image more and more vivid and more emotional. This is easy for some people, but most of us have to practice quite a bit to get it right. One good technique is to find a photograph of yourself from the past when you were at your target weight and focus on that. If you don’t have a photo like that, just cut a photo out of a magazine and paste a picture of your face onto it. Use any technique you can to make your vision more vivid and real.
Throughout the day think of your self as being at your ideal weight already. Picture yourself thin doing whatever you are doing. Formulate positive statements and memorize them, then repeat them to yourself often. An example could be “I am glad to be flexible, fit and slim” or “I enjoy being thin more than eating a lot of pasta”. Over time, these affirmations of your positive self image will keep you from doing things that would make you gain weight. Fatty foods will become less attractive and doing physical things a lot more enjoyable. Your fat loss will be gradual, but it will be steady and you will know that visualization is working. You will realize that, by getting yourself to where you truly believe you are thin, your subconscious mind makes it impossible for you NOT to lose weight!
Heath Mowath specializes in websites on exercise, weight reduction and internet marketing, but his latest website www.kedswomensshoes.com evaluates and lists the best Keds Women’s Shoes.
categories: weight loss
