This is a letter written by Leslie Chen of Rise Lean on how to lose weight and keep it off through shifting patterns. It answers why you’ve struggled to lose weight and keep it off over the years.
How to Lose Weight and Keep it Off
Hi Wonderful,
After all these years of dieting, do you still find yourself waking up in the morning to the following thoughts?
“Why can’t I lose the weight? ”
“Why am I still a victim of food cravings?”
“I can’t find clothes I can wear…screw it, I’ll just wear what hides my body better.”
“Is he still attracted to me?”
I keep hearing many people (myself included in the past) telling me about the everyday struggle with these thoughts. And actually, most of these people are highly successful in what they do. They have great professions, are high achievers in their careers and are fun, loving, understanding, kind, and driven. They are so determined to accomplish the goals they’ve set for themselves. But for some reason, they can’t crack the code on how to lose weight and keep it off no matter how many years and decades they’ve been trying. So every morning, they wake up to the same question — “Am I enough?” — day after day, year after year.
If this sounds like you, please listen carefully …(No one else will tell you this simple fact because they are afraid of telling you the truth or they don’t know better. But I care enough to tell you this very important truth!)
You will continue to repeat this pattern with your body because your mind has decided to repeat it. At least at this moment.
“Leslie, what do you mean that my mind has decided to?” You’d ask. “I want to lose the weight now more than anytime else!”
The truth is: regardless how much TRYING you’ve been doing, you are living and reliving the identity, emotions, and thoughts of a dieter, tryer, and prisoner in a body which you don’t recognize. And TRYING, not becoming, is now a pattern.
Exhaustion. Frustration. Disappointment. Desperation. Fear. Anger….
Here are some big truth bombs for you:
This pattern guarantees that you won’t become a healthy, skinny, and free person because it’s making you feel and live the very opposite. So instead of going north, you are going south, adamantly.
The pattern is becoming your identity which not only runs your body image but also everything about you — including thoughts, emotions, feelings, impulses, actions, outcomes, and relationships, etc.
The pattern won’t easily go away because it has already been deeply rooted in your subconscious mind after years and years of repetition. For most people trying to lose weight — perhaps as you can see from your mom, aunts, or grandma — the process continues for life and sucks you into it deeper and deeper.
This is GREAT news for you because all you need to do is to remove this pattern. Then everything will become different.
Remove this pattern, then the weight, stress, and food-related addiction that you are fighting so hard will surrender themselves, forever, by leaving you.
Not removing it? No diets can help you. This is why whenever people ask me, “What’s the easiest diet to follow?” (I did answer it here), it feels almost like someone asking “Which brand of gas should I get to drive to my destination?”
The real concern is setting the GPS right. That GPS is where your mind is set to go. It’s the pattern.
Self-check Questions
Here are a few examples of self-check questions that reveal the surface of the pattern:
- Are you overwhelmed by making food choices, fearing every extra ounce of sugar or fat you take in since they seem to impact your weight in a big way?
- Are you addicted to thinking about food?
- Are you receiving excessive triggers for eating and food cravings?
- Do you have the subconscious thinking at work that food is your enemy and you can’t get fit without depriving yourself of it?
- Are you addicted to thinking about weight?
- Is your mind making you desperate for extreme diets via food and weight-related anxiety, creating vicious cycles again and again?
- Do you find it hard to believe that you’ll be skinny, healthy, and free, even if you are a positive thinker in general?
- Do you believe you would’ve been a lot healthier, happier, and more at ease in life if you weren’t pushed around by these stresses and voices about dieting all the time?
- How do you feel in your gut when you experience these emotions brought by these thought patterns? (Did you know these daily emotions — such as fear, disappointment, stress, anxiety, and anger — are chemicals that trigger negative reactions within your brain and body, which impact your appetite, digestion, metabolism, immune system, and of course weight?)
- Did you ever realize that excessive chronic food addictions, cravings, and stress hormones are determining that you can’t get enough fitness or happiness because your mind and your body are working against you?
Physical weight makes the body heavy. An overburdening mind produces another kind of weight that makes every part of life heavy. Even a simple, small thing like eating a chocolate makes things feel heavy.
That’s why you shouldn’t neglect fixing the problem at its source first.
How Do I Shift This Mind Pattern?
The roadmap varies from person to person and it’s very difficult to generalize. However, there’s one important commonality in many healing stories:
You don’t recreate mind patterns and beliefs by thinking, reading, or talking to people. You do it by experiencing a kind of life beyond your current horizon. That’s the only way you can recognize and believe that you can live it for real.
That new belief paves the foundation for a whole new set of understandings and thoughts that will re-organize your thought patterns about not only food and your weight loss, but also about you.
Client Cases
Let me share some specifics:
My clients wouldn’t have truly believed that they could eat with total freedom while losing weight until around Week 4 when they see 10-15 pounds naturally melt away. This is while they fully enjoy whatever they want, including carbs. (See what it’s like for one of them. Previously, she didn’t believe she could achieve that result just by allowing herself freedom.)
Also, they would’ve never believed that they could confidently skip counting calories without suffering any consequences (such as not losing weight or bringing weight gain). This is until they realize their mind and bodies are doing the work of leaving the extra calories on plates and in cups without them micromanaging.
At that point, they are certain they can be their best free selves because they are now truly experiencing it. Their old subconscious beliefs about food and their weight limits are naturally fading away because as they are enjoying their pasta or chocolate cakes, they realize that food isn’t the enemy. They realize they don’t need to deprive themselves and that they can just live normally.
Most of the old addictions lose their anchor. Binge eating, if there was any before, is gone. Uncontrolled cravings no longer exist because the mind is no longer sending these triggers. No more feelings of desperation exist for dieting because great results come without it.
In summation, you need to experience real differences first to change the negative thought patterns around food, eating, and yourself. This is because to most people, seeing is believing. And only when you profoundly believe that you can change these old patterns can you actually change them.
This is essentially why when I coach my people, I make sure they start seeing great results early on, usually within the first weeks. The undeniable, satisfying, and liberating experience they find shatters the years of previous beliefs, fears, and doubts into pieces almost instantly. And as soon as the core patterns of the mind start changing, the new self-identities, behaviors, and bodies start forming.
This is how real, life-long transformation happens. If your end goal is to lose the weight and keep it off with ease, this is where you start.
Leslie
P.S. Thank you for reading this far. I hope this has been an inspirational read for you. Meanwhile, I’d like you to think about how amazing your life will be if you become FREE.
And if you are ready to change all of this… book your Breakthrough To Health Session with us now and find out how we can help you, in just a few short weeks, change a lifetime of thinking and behavior. So you can finally have a healthy body that you love!
These calls are totally free but are only for you if you are ready to make yourself a priority. Enough is enough… if everything else in your life is going great and you are ready to finally be as successful in weight loss as you are in everything else, let’s chat.
We just opened more times on our calendar to accommodate the demand for these sessions but they will go quickly so grab your spot now!
I look forward to speaking with you soon!
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