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4 Tips for Overcoming the Mental Challenge of Weight Loss

Many people tend to not know this but when it comes to losing weight or shifting your life into a healthy lifestyle change, but it’s far more of a mental challenge than a physical challenge. While it’s true you need a sufficient amount of exercise on a daily basis, it really comes down to what you’re facing throughout the day. This includes cravings, decisions to eat, decisions to exercise, and how you’re feeling overall. If you want to succeed in losing weight, then you need to overcome all of these mental obstacles. You’ll have to look at patterns in your life to see where you’re dragging yourself down.

While it’s fine and normal to have excuses every once in a while, if your health is at risk then you need to create a pattern that will allow you to succeed and become healthy. If you’re looking for some tips to gain this positive pattern and to overcome all of these mental obstacles, then continue reading on!

Understand that changes just don’t happen overnight

One of the biggest mental challenges to losing weight and turning for a healthier lifestyle would be the fact that many people believe it just happens overnight. But truthfully, that’s further than true. This isn’t something that you should expect instant gratification on, as it just takes time. Slow and steady wins the race and that’s completely true for weight loss and going healthy as well. 

For many people, if they don’t immediately see results they lose their patience and get bummed out. But weight loss isn’t something that’s a steady decline, you’re most likely going to gain a bit, lose some, gain again, it’s just completely normal. The best results for weight loss and lifestyles would be having slow progress. Slowly incorporating changes will lead to steady changes that can last for life.

Your expectations need to be realistic

While the idea itself of losing no more than one to two pounds a week may sound like a bummer, it seriously is for the best. As stated earlier, slow and steady wins the race. Having this pace for weight loss and being realistic for yourself is going to make the chances of feeling discouraged happen much less. It’s so important to understand what is manageable, what is doable, and overall what is sustainable for you. It’s important to truly know what you can and create goals that realistically reflect your abilities. Overall, when it comes to your health, you also just need to be realistic and understand what you can do, what you can do, and what you can handle. This means all aspects of health such as your mind, eyesight, and hearing, you can learn more about it.

Creating small goals that can form a pattern

Just like your expectations of yourself should be realistic, you should set realistic goals that you can slowly shape into becoming a habit. These small goals should be something that can shape your life for the best and they should be something that you plan to do anyways for your healthy life transformation. Some ideas for small goals that can lead to big changes are:

  • Swapping out unhealthy and high-calorie foods for better alternatives
  • Getting no less than 30 minutes of physical activity a day
  • Taking the stairs instead of the elevator at work
  • Cutting back on alcohol
  • Keeping track of macros

These are only some ideas of what you could do in order to change your lifestyle and stick to something healthy that makes you feel happy. Just starting with small goals that become daily habits will make a massive difference in your overall life. This is also the best way to stick to a diet and to beat cravings.

Reward yourself for completing goals

Whether it’s a small goal for your health transformation or a major goal such as achieving a milestone in terms of your weight, completing goals is a great reminder of how far you’ve gotten! Giving yourself this glorious pat on the back can really help in making you feel good about your accomplishments. This great mood and this high you’ll be getting from achieving your goal and celebrating it will remind you of how far you’re made it in your journey.

Ideally, you’ll want to skip out on any food rewards. While this may be tempting you have to remember that the food you’re using for celebrating is just temporary. It’s best to try and reward yourself with something that’s nonfood related such as treating yourself to a movie, a new outfit you’ve been eying, or even something that could help you out in your health journey such as exercise equipment.

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About Us

Hi friend!

I’m Marian Mitchell, Health Coach, Chronic Illness Warrior, Mom, and Food Lover. I help you navigate the food and lifestyle side of Chronic Disease Management with coaching, meal plans, recipes, podcast, and this blog. You can thrive without eating the same 4 things every day. I’m here to show you how.

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