Diet Motivation

By Dave Gannaway

Most things we succeed at in life we do without thinking, yet diet motivation is a glaring exception. Listen to the conversations about those who want to lose weight, “I’ve tried, but I just can’t.” “However hard I try, nothing seems to happen!” Invariably failure is connected with trying to lose weight. So, many have adopted the belief that diet motivation and shedding those extra pounds is going to be difficult, that it becomes what we believe!

When we learned to ride a bicycle, to begin with it was difficult . . . while someone ran behind with a hand on the saddle you were fine, but the moment they let go, Uh oh! But now, however old you are, you know that you could ride a bike. So what happened? You were motivated and desperate to take off and do all those cool things other kids were doing. That desire was greater than the resistance to master balance and technique.

Now with that resistance overcome, you could jump on a bike and ride it with no doubts or questions because you know you can do it! Diet motivation is like that. You need to be in a place where you ‘know without doubt’ you can do it. But how, I hear you say?

Here are some clues. Observe how you feel as you read each of the following, and as you identify the feeling clench it into the fist of your left hand.

• A doctor warns you that if you don’t lose weight in a month you could be dead!

• Your boss called you ‘lardo’ and passed you by with a promotion!

• Your partner tells you they don’t find you attractive anymore and want to leave you!

If you rated these feeling on a scale of one-to-ten they would all be close to ten, right? Diet motivation then takes on even greater importance. Remember the feeling . . . yuck, unacceptable and you have it anchored in your left hand.

Now take a deep breath and begin to remember some beautiful things. This time anchor them to the fist of your right hand.

• How did you feel when you first fell in love?

• You received your degree with your parents watching?

• When you were picked for the football team?

Notice the difference between the two feelings. Focus on your left hand and you feel bad, out of control, yuck. Move the focus to your right hand and suddenly you feel alive and motivated. Now crash your hands together holding the empowered feelings in your focus.

Notice that the good-motivated feelings come out on top. Here lies the secret of diet motivation. If you hold a focus of difficulty and failure, your subconscious will generate all the support possible to establish and maintain that negative motivation. It’s obvious when you think about it.

Hold the high achievement feelings and presto, you hold a positive diet motivation, that is compelling and drawing you toward it. Most importantly once you can maintain these progressive feelings they soon become a habit that you will maintain without thinking. Remember riding the bike? It becomes automatic.

There are dozens of things you do daily without giving them a second thought. Many of them are complex yet they are done without effort and little motivation. Imagine your day is just starting. Like every other day, you are running late, you need to get the kids breakfast, get them dressed and ready for school, you have to get yourself ready, remember the car needs gas, and that you need to go to the Post Office before you go to work. Then you still have to pick up the coffee from Dunkin Donuts and get to work all by nine thirty! Yet, you do it every morning without thinking. It was not a case of ‘trying’ to do it . . . it just had to be done!

You created a mindset — a list of things that needed doing and then went to work on it. You didn’t need to think-out every task individually, you just did it.

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