Dec. 29 - Preparing for Success Mentally

With the New Year rolling in quickly a lot of people are planning their resolutions. Mine is just to keep up the motivation and to find strategies to get me through the rough spots. Writing this blog is really helping me identify those rough spots and their triggers. The feedback from you all is wonderful and if this helps you just a little bit, it is a twofold happiness for me!

I read lots of journals and sometimes seeing the situation from someone else's perspective helps me view things much more clearly. The biggest downfall I see is that a lot of people simply aren't prepared mentally for success. Here are the things I have learned throughout my short journey. These thoughts took 40 years to pop into my head and root there but now I feel armed to meet my goals!

Eating well is self love. You have to reach a point where you look at yourself and feel like you deserve to be treated well. Sometimes you reach a level of disgust with yourself that causes you not to care about your well being. You just want that weight gone! But overeating is a way of abusing yourself. It is a way of putting yourself down. So is starving yourself or going on some horrible exteme diet. If you begin to eat well as a way to cherish yourself and bring forth your good health, the road is a lot easier. I'm not saying self-hatred can't motivate you, but if you don't deal with your dislike of yourself then you will be hard-pressed to find lasting results.

We all stumble. The difference between success and failure is getting right back up and starting again the very next meal. Being angry with yourself and disappointed with yourself leads to the same feelings that cause you to binge in the first place. The downward spiral I was caught up in was binge, feel bad, binge some more, feel worse, binge yet again. The chemical crap in your binge foods can also have a serious effect on your mental state. I am absolutely convinced that a lot of depression issues I have dealt with were related to a buildup of the nasties that I was putting into my body.

Very few, if any, people eat clean 100% of the time. We all have families with birthdays, the holidays come once a year for every single one of us and we all get stuck without food and eat a meal out now and again. It is what you do on the next meal that counts. It is what you do 90% of the time that makes your body reach its potential, not the 10% of the time you decide to indulge.

Make indulgence a decision. Don't let life just happen to you. Decide that on Saturday, when the in-laws are taking you out to dinner, you are going to enjoy some pasta and even a little bit of dessert. If you have been eating clean, overeating will be difficult, even painful, since you just ate 2 hours previously. Sometimes I plan to have dessert and nothing really looks that great or I take a bite and find it painfully sweet. This way I am controlling the food, the food is not controlling me.

Make the best of things when life happens. Did you forget to turn the crockpot on to make your healthy dinner? Did you work late and now you are dashing around trying to get Sally to piano and Sam to hockey? Well, it's going to happen, if not today, then next week. Life just does that to us. Arm yourself with knowledge and make the best choices you can under the circumstances. Some days the best choices end up being your weekly cheat, sometimes they are squeaky clean. But don't beat yourself up. You are only human and life will give you a little poke now and then just to make sure you're awake!


Since I have started really thinking about why I do the things I do, and writing it all down, I see why I failed before on the approximately 7.1 million diets I have tried. These key factors above were missing.

If you are ready, don't wait until New Year's day - start making your changes at your very next meal. Why put off caring for yourself? Would you not bathe your kid for a week because the holidays were here and you just wanted to have a certain starting date? NO! Would you say, "Well, he's just going to get dirty again on New Year's Eve when he goes out sledding!" NO!!!
Look after yourself the way you would look after any other loved one! Eat well, plan for your party and love yourself! This is it! This is the way to lose it and keep it off! It's all about LOVE!!!