The motivation you need to successfully lose weight is like a fire. It will burn hot and long when you provide it with the fuel it needs, but it will die out quickly if you don’t. Disliking how you look and feel might provide decent kindling to get the weight-loss fire started, but it’s not the proper fuel source to keep it going.
When you’re driven by negative thoughts about yourself, you just don’t have the raw materials that are necessary to achieve the results you want. This problem lies in how our minds work.
The first thing you’re likely to do every morning is notice how fat you still are, think about the food you can’t eat, or lie in bed, wishing you didn’t have to get up early to exercise. You might as well throw a big bucket of ice water on that motivational fire of yours because sooner or later, you’re going to get very weary of this constant struggle and give up.
So, what’s the alternative? What do you do if the reason you want to lose weight is because you don’t like the way you look or feel? Where do you find the right fuel for your motivational fire?
Use your imagination.
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1. Imagination: more important than willpower
One thing that it’s crucial to understand is that being overweight isn’t the cause of your unhappiness, and simply weighing less won’t make you feel better about yourself and your life. It’s all the things you think about your body that make you unhappy, and it’s changing those thoughts that will make you feel better and help you lose weight.
Think about it. Imagine you live in a society where people find thinness repulsive and being fat is the marker of beauty, desirability, and good character.
Everywhere you look, there are images of happy fat people wearing the best clothes, driving the best cars, getting the hot dates, and landing the best jobs. Would you still feel bad about yourself? Would you still feel like you have to lose weight in order to get what you want and need in life? Probably not.
Even if you still felt bad about yourself, you wouldn’t be focused on your weight, but rather on something else that your culture didn’t like—the size of your feet, or the slope of your nose, for example.
But we do live in a society that confronts us with very negative messages about being fat. Most of us start absorbing these messages as we are just learning to talk, and they soon become a big part of how we view and evaluate ourselves, explain the things that happen to us, and decide what needs to change if we want to feel and do better.
And sadly, it usually isn’t enough to simply recognize that “fat-loathing” is just a cultural prejudice you can choose to reject. You have to replace it with something equally as powerful, and that’s hard to come by after years of being conditioned to